The Only YouTube SEO Guidelines you Need to Follow

TODAY'S EPISODE:

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Hello, and welcome to episode number eight of marketing interruption. I'm your host Andrew Maff stone and today I'm going to go over SEO guidelines for YouTube. So obviously this week's theme I'm sticking to social media and Monday and Tuesday I did Facebook and Instagram organic on Monday and then on Tuesday I talked about paid advertising. So today I'm going to talk about the basically organic side of YouTube, which obviously means tomorrow, probably going to dive into ads. So essentially, what I'd like to talk to you today about is the things that you need to do when you upload your YouTube video, I'm not going to give you any insight into the content you're creating at this moment, mainly because if your content sucks, I don't care how good your SEO is on YouTube is not gonna get anywhere. So let's talk about the guidelines that I follow. So every time I upload a video, I basically have this big old checklist that I'm stupid enough to not put in front of me as I started making this so I'm just gonna have to go off top my head, but I'm pretty sure I remember. So upload a video, every title title needs to be similar to how you would write a blog post where it's eye catching. It's interesting, but it's not giving away too much but it's giving you enough that you understand what the video is. So, you know X amount of ways that I made this podcast like

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that kind of thing,

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or how I grew that podcasts from zero to a million subscribers in under two weeks.

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Sorry, um, it would be great.

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Okay, so the title, that one's kind of obvious that one's you know, doesn't need to be too Don't overdo it. Don't make it way long. don't shove keywords in there, hey, keyword stuffing, it doesn't work that well. So just make the title what the video is, think. Don't overthink it. So that's the easy part. thumbnails pretty obvious as well. So you'll see a lot of videos, most videos, they all have a custom thumbnail on YouTube, you want this to be eye catching, you want this to probably have part of the title in it, maybe not the whole title, text heavy, is never really good. No one loves reading.

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And so you wanna,

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you want to make it branded. So you want to have make sure the colors that you're using, you probably want to have some kind of picture or maybe make the background a little more opaque or something that they can kind of see the video itself. Tell them on what it is is a true representation of what that video is. So More on the SEO side though, outside of the just kind of a static of everything. So definitely your descriptions a big thing. So one of the things you can do that is my preference is you always want to have a call to action, one of the first things that I put is, if you liked this video, please subscribe. I will have to put this in the show notes because I can't remember 100% of what it is. But if you do a URL that is youtube.com slash, what does it channel slash your actual channel name, I think is how YouTube does theirs. And then you do. And again, I'll put this in the show notes. But I think it's question mark sub equals confirmation. One, maybe not one, I don't know something, something else in there. I'll put in the shownotes. I'll figure it out. But essentially, if you take that extra part of the URL, and you put it at the end of your channel, and then you create that URL as let's say a bitly link, so you shortened link. When someone clicks that it will take them directly to your channel and that will immediately open Going up the subscribe button, it will not start playing a video it will not just show their channel, it will immediately show them a subscribe to this channel button. I've had so much success with that. It's amazing. I can't believe that YouTube still lets people to it. So it's usually one of the first things I put in the description. Next couple things will be a list of here's all the things I mentioned in the video. So most of the times, I'm favoring the things that I mentioned and the calls to action to the top of the description, mainly because I find if I add a lot of copy in there with the description explaining about what the video is, after a paragraph or two, you kind of start to lose people. So I want to get to the point of chances are you've watched most of this video at this point. And now you're going to read the description. Usually no one reads the description before they watch the video. It's not always true, but sometimes it is. So always put those call to action to the top so if I reference something in the video, or if there's a new piece of gaming content I wanted to put out I will always throw that into the top of the description

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and then depending on your your

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Your audience who you're targeting, you can obviously put some kind of emojis or something next to it to kind of make it stand out a little bit more, then you want to add in your description. So now we're doing a little bit of an intro to what the video is, if it's a series, if it's something like that, you obviously want to talk about that I try to keep it to no more than two or three sentences per paragraph and no more than two or three paragraphs. You obviously want to make sure you're using as many keywords as you can without overdoing it. You don't want to keyword stuff, YouTube's algorithm will eventually just if you're getting a lot of people who are interested based on what you're they're searching and they're watching your video, your keywords will slowly become less than less relevant. And YouTube's just going to keep showing you anyway because they know what people are watching based on what they're searching. So, two or three paragraphs to three sentences, each paragraph. Obviously you want to add your keywords and fill out everything you can there. Then you have your tags. So I use I believe it's a Google Chrome extension. I believe it's called tags for YouTube. We're youtuber No, it's got to be tags for YouTube, I think. And if you use this so you it's always on. So just download the Chrome extension that you never really have to anything you go to any YouTube paid channel video that you are interested in like, Okay, this video is great. It has the same content that I basically just shared, what tags are they using, this will show you so you open up the show more for the description or show description. Whatever it says it'll open it up, it will actually show you the tags that they use. Go to several videos that are relevant to your video and see what tags they use and use as many tags as you possibly can fill up the whole thing. That's where you want to do your keyword stuffing. Make sure you use your channel name Make sure you use obviously the main keywords you're going after. You might even want to use some more broad ones. use whichever ones those other videos were consistently using. But this is where you can do your research your competitive research into what tags people are using on the other channels. The tags for YouTube is also, by the way, the feature tool I was going to go over for today because it's been, it's been great for us of my ability to be able to just go see what it is other people are utilizing. And it's makes life a lot easier. It's kind of like hashtag research.

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So now

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we did title thumbnail tags. So back ends. So you're launching and where am I at here? Oh, so the cards. So the cards if you if you've ever seen these before, the option in YouTube is to add cards where essentially you're, it's a little thing that pops up at the top right and it's basically plugging another video, another playlist, another channel. In some cases, a website or something like that. It's a great place to add a call to action. On the SEO side, it's not going to do much for you. This is an indexed, it's not another place for you to shove more content into or shove more keywords into, but it's a great place to keep people interested, it's also a great place to keep people going to your content. So, a lot of times, I know last week I referenced doing like a 10 to 15 minute video. So basically every like two or three minutes, you want one of these tags to show up, you can only do five of them. And you want that first line that you do to be kind of eye catching. And a little bit more information. You don't want to take them away from the video if they're enjoying the video. But if they're not enjoying the video, then you do want to take them away and have them go somewhere else before they just complete or have them go to another video of yours before they go to a completely different channel and you lose that viewer. So I always suggest do all five as long as your videos longer than probably like two minutes just so that it's not showing up every

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five seconds or whatever it is.

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And you're going to want to send another video but based on where it is in the video you're creating. So in this 10 to 15 minute video you've made. Let's say after the first five minutes you talked about a specific topic. You had made a similar video to, at that point, you would want to show a card be like, I want to hear more about this and then then click on it, take them there, the next five minutes on a different category and click on that and take them there, like give them the opportunity to get more information from you don't give them the opportunity to go to a competitor. So the cards are great. There's a bunch of stuff in the backend of YouTube that is kind of relevant. I always fill it out, it's always done. I've never had an issue with it. And I always want to make sure that I'm providing YouTube with as much information about the video as possible. One of those things, obviously, you want to have the video transcribed, you want to upload the transcription. Having a transcription for YouTube will definitely keep your viewer for longer. Because as many of us know, at this point, a lot of people are watching videos when they aren't supposed to be so their sound is off. So they're actually listening or they're not listening to anything they're actually reading the whole time. So you want to upload the transcription. And that can definitely help from everything that YouTube has said that is not indexed. It is not information that they take But those types of keywords are obviously going to be in your tags and under scription. Anyway, so you're fine there. Then there's a bunch of other crap back there, like where'd you film it? What day did you film it?

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Has this ever been on TV and things like that

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fill all that out. It might help it might not. But YouTube likes it when you use when you provide as much information about the video as possible, and you follow as much of their best practices as possible. So you always want to fill out as many of those attributes as you possibly can. And then the last thing I want to mention was the end screen. So the end screen is something that pops up at the very end of your video, I believe you can have it start as soon as 15 seconds before the video ends. I don't think it's longer than that. I might be wrong. But this is your opportunity to add basically, at the end of every video you make. I usually always make sure that there's about a 15 minute gap of just like I let music go and there's a cool background or whatever because I know the end screen is going to be there. And that end screen is going to showcase A couple videos of other videos that you may have, it's going to showcase a subscribe button for someone else to subscribe to your video. It's basically your opportunity to make sure you're doing what you can to keep that that viewer and send them to other videos of so you're looking at basically a conversion. So YouTube can actually with their with within their, their algorithm, they will actually know if a reader has gone from one of your videos to another video into another into another. And if they're consistently watching more and more of your videos, they're actually going to continue to give that original key word that they use more credit because it kept you on it kept that reader sorry, keep that viewer on your channel longer. So it's something you want to make sure you do where you're doing as much as possible to keep that that viewer on your channel on your videos. So the cards, the end screens, all that stuff can help a lot. And then of course there's also the little logo at the bottom right? If you're a business and or even if you're a brand and like your own personal brand or something like that, create something and make sure that that's Always down there too. So that obviously you're having, you know, your own brand awareness, but you're also making sure that you Wow, why did I lose Oh, make sure that obviously, they can click over and go back to your video really long day. So that's all I have for today's SEO, YouTube guidelines and the feature tools I had mentioned was tax for YouTube. So, for usual Thank you. Make sure you rate review, subscribe and I will see you all tomorrow.