Vlogging

Keyword Research For Uploading Videos To Youtube

Just like Google, when uploading a video to YouTube, you need to consider what keywords you are going to target for that video. It doesn’t make sense to simply post a video to your YouTube channel and expect visitors to flock to watch it in their thousands, no matter how good you think the quality of your video is. Sure, many videos do go viral, but they are few and far between, so please don’t rely on this method, unless you are in a highly unusual niche, or with one hell of a brilliant set of videos! For the rest of us, we need to think about what our potential audience will type into the search engines to find our videos, rather than simply relying on word of mouth! And as clever as it is, Google isn’t able to determine the exact content of our videos without keywords to guide it, so we need to give it a little something to help it out.

When you use keywords, make them valuable keywords, phrases that people are actually typing into search engines! More on this in the next section.

Tip: Don’t treat Google and YouTube the same!

Unlike Google, the rules are much more relaxed with YouTube and they should be treated as quite different animals. I compare YouTube to how Google was 10- 15 years ago; it’s like the hot tub time machine of internet marketing! Many of the strict algorithms that Google imposes on their own search engine are simply not applied to YouTube; you have a free rein. To YouTube, pandas and penguins (and hummingbirds) are just cute animal videos! People make the mistake of confusing Google and YouTube and will often tread very carefully when adding keywords to their titles, tags, and descriptions for fear of being penalized.

Yes, there are things you shouldn’t do, (like simply repeating the same keywords over and over again, and remember to keep them all closely relevant to your topic) but equally there are plenty of things you can do to keep yourself ahead of the competition. You simply can’t use too many keywords and, believe it or not, the more keywords the merrier! This is all because search engines need as many clues as they can as to what your content is about, unlike traditional websites where Google and other search engines can determine what your site is about by crawling your text and links. So you need to exploit this Achilles’ heel; very few people do! This is one of the big secrets to getting a ton of free traffic on YouTube. And choosing the right keywords is the major difference between putting you higher or lower in the rankings on both Google and YouTube.

Start by looking at your video filename

Your video file name is, well, probably not the most important element, but we should start as we mean it. Although only a small factor in the whole scheme of things, it’s thought that YouTube still uses your video file name as an indicator of your actual video content. And it’s all about the aggregation of marginal gains! Not only that, but it keeps your video library organized, if later on down the line, when your videos start to number in the hundreds, you have no clue as to the content of each one! Use hyphens if possible to keep all files readable by both you and search engines. So let’s say your video is about aggressive hamsters, you could name your file: “when hamstersattack.mov”. To further stay organized, it’s also good practice to keep each separate video series in a separate folder on your PC. It makes it much easier when referring back to them later, rather than bundling everything into a single folder. OK, now on to the more important matter – your video title.

Your title

Your title is absolutely the first thing you need to think about after posting your video and so many people don’t exploit it to its fullest. When a potential viewer is going through a list of thumbnails, the title can be the clincher that can make or break the deal. If their curiosity is piqued by a compelling title, your video has a much higher chance of being picked out from the masses.

Tip: Use as close to 60 words as you can in your title

The title is also important from a search point of view for relaying the content of the video to the user, so it needs to serve a dual purpose. As well as being a high-ranking keyword, ideally it needs to emotionally draw the viewer in to watch the video. The easiest way to get the best keywords for your title is to go to: https://adwords.google.com/ko/keyword

Tip: If you haven’t already (and I’m sure you have), create a Google AdWords account before doing this. If you use the Keyword Tool with a logged on Google AdWords account, you’ll get lots of additional keyword ideas to use. Especially useful in the next two sections! Okay, let’s say I was going to post a video on the topic of ranking in YouTube. My first most obvious choice might be: “How to rank in YouTube”.

Tip: Put the phrase you want to rank for at the beginning of the title. Let’s look at the AdWords Keyword Planner results for this: Okay not great, as you can see, there are only 20 users searching for this phrase every month. But according to Google, YouTube reads the first 55-60 characters of the title and I only used 22 characters. And as I said earlier, YouTube really wants you to use this perk. Remember, it wants as many clues as it can get its hands on as to the exact content of your video. Plus I now need to appeal to the emotions of the viewer. Let’s improve on this title. Going back to your keyword results, I just see the point:

So my headline title is now “How to Get More Views on YouTube: How to Rank in YouTube”. Much better. Hmm, suspiciously similar to my Amazon book title! I’ve pretty much used all of my allowance and fit two really good key phrases into the mix. I’ve helped YouTube identify the content of my video as well as thrown in a bit of emotion into the mix – amazing what you can squeeze into a single YouTube title! We’ll refer to this as your headline key phrase, but as you can see we’ve sneaked in 2 key phrases here, so now I have two headline key phrases for the price of one! You’ll be using these in the next sections as well. Also try to think of the title in the same way as a newspaper editor would and treat it: like an attention-getting headline. Remember, this will be seen by your potential audience as well as search engines and they decide whether or not to click based on your title, so make it compelling.

Tip: Get 2 headline key phrases in your title and make it an ’emotional’ title. Remember to keep the headline closely relevant to the content – if you can’t get that your bounce rate will increase i.e. viewers will click out of your video very quickly, because the content simply won’t be what the viewers are looking for. Google has a few key indicators it looks at when ranking your video and bounce rate is one of them. But we’ve just started! Ok, now lets move on to the description.

Your description

Your description, just like your title, is read by your potential visitors, often while watching your video, so it also needs to serve a dual purpose: 1. It needs to have lots of good valuable keyphrases for YouTube and other search engines, 2. It needs to be interesting and emotionally engaging for your audience.

Tip: Use your full description allowance. Do you know how many words you’re allowed to use in your description? Well, very few people do. In fact, you’re allowed 5,000 characters! That’s an awesome amount of content and probably equates to around 700-800 words, similar to a typical WordPress post. In fact, YouTube actually states in its search guidelines that it actually rewards longer descriptions, so please don’t hold back! It may seem like a chore to write such a long description, but I believe it will be worth it. After all, this video could earn you a lot of income for many years to come with no extra work required, so doesn’t it pay to spend the time crafting a good one? So in my case I’ll compile a full list of keywords using the AdWords Keyword Planner tool, including the headline keyphrases from my title and work them all into the description.

However, it’s also important to make the description look natural and only use phrases where it feels right to do so. This shouldn’t detract from the readability of the article. The article should make sense! It’s also important that the same keywords aren’t repeated over and over again as this will more than likely be penalised, so mix them up. In my case, I’ll try to work in phrases like “how to get more views in YouTube”, or “increase YouTube views”. You can also afford to choose more ‘low-hanging fruit’ keywords in the description. i.e. those with fewer search results, as opposed to the title, where you want a nice big, juicy, valuable key phrase or two. These are known as a ‘long-tail keyword’ and the great thing about these is that they have relatively little competition compared to your headline key phrases. So whilst they might not have many people searching for them, you have a pretty good chance of ranking highly for them!

Tip: Try to get one of your headline keyphrases into the first and last sentence of your description too, make sure you choose relevant keyphrases; they must stay on topic or else you may be penalized by YouTube. In fact, a long, well-crafted, interesting and emotionally engaging description has one of those ‘double-whammy’ effects I talked about earlier: not only does it rank you higher in search results, it also keeps users on your channel longer while they read it, which is the way YouTube will notice too (a decreased bounce rate)! But the main reason to use your full allowance is to increase the odds of a visitor finding you using one of the keyphrases you work into your article. And by writing more, you’re able to snatch these out more easily, without it coming across as spammy or inaccurate to either the reader or the search engine. So remember, use all 5,000 characters. Yes, every last one! And finally and this is a very important thing that people miss:

Tip: Put a link to the video itself at the end of the description. This is very important. Why? Well, think about it – if someone shares your video on a social bookmarking site, there’s a direct link to their own video right inside the description. Google will crawl this and it will add a lot of weight to your video. Not to mention the countless viewers who click back to your YouTube channel from these links!

Using Tags

Here we get into probably the most overused and perhaps least understood area, tags. Tip: Use at least 10 tags, and include your headline keyphrase in them. Although your visitors don’t actually see them, YouTube does and it wraps them up because it provides another big clue as to how they should categorize and rank your video. However, so few people take full advantage of them. They just randomly throw in a couple of related words, usually suggested by YouTube and they are done! If you do this, there is a whole load of traffic since YouTube places a lot of importance on tags after the title and description. You already have your keywords from the title and description so you just need to put them here as well, maybe with minor variations. Make sure you put quotation marks around your most important phrases. For example, I might have: “How to rank in YouTube” “How to get more views on YouTube” “How to increase subscribers on YouTube” “How to get more views on your YouTube channel” and so on. Remember to put your best keyphrases first. You can have as many tags as you think are appropriate, but I would say you need to use at least 10.

By having some phrases without quotes, you are increasing your chances of being found where users are changing the order of the words in the phrase. And by having quotes around something, you also ensure that you rank high for that exact keyphrase too. So mix and match as appropriate. Just choose single words like “YouTube” or “views” (which YouTube will often suggest unprompted!) as these are fairly meaningless and far from generic and don’t really bring in any more significant traffic, and even if it did, it’s unlikely that it would be very targeted traffic, which is what we’re after. We don’t want views for the hell of it, or people who will turn off immediately, we want visitors who are actually going to watch our video and convert into subscribers, don’t we? And again, as with titles and descriptions, just don’t repeat the keyphrase too often and remember to keep them all firmly on topic. The Google Adwords keyword tool will give you plenty of suggestions to use when you log into your Adwords account.

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