Organic growth on any channel is not always easy. However, on YouTube it is much simpler than doing SEO for your website. Below are some tips on how to effectively optimize your YouTube channel for growth.
Much like Facebook years ago, YouTube is seeing a surge of interest from marketing professionals. The opportunity for growing your business on the platform is tremendous, and with video being the preferred medium of advertising online, it is important for all companies to use YouTube to help them market their goods and services.
But what if you don’t have a lot of money to spend on ads? While YouTube remains the cheapest way to promote your business, you might still be hesitant to spend money on the platform. If you do want to run paid ads, you can read more about it here. Luckily, YouTube is also a great platform to promote your business organically. What are some ways to optimize your channel for growth? Let’s take a look at some!
How Should I Optimize My Content?
Optimizing your YouTube content is a combination of producing high quality content, but also understanding the nuts and bolts of optimizing elements that are not within the video. For example, titles and descriptions.
Much like SEO for your website, titles and descriptions on YouTube do a lot to communicate to viewers and search engines what your video is about. With the search engines focused so much on intent since 2019, making sure your video matches the intent of a searcher is key to getting it ranked highly in search results, both on YouTube and on search engine results pages.
YouTube Video Title Tips
Your first step when it comes to titling your YouTube video is determining your focus keyword. What do you want the video to be about, and who should be watching it? For this example, we are going to focus on YouTube videos for life insurance lead generation.
Figuring out who would be interested in purchasing life insurance is essential. Most looking to buy life insurance are parents, over a certain age, with a certain amount of assets and income. Your next step is determining what would catch their interest. Protecting their children’s future should anything happen to them is probably paramount on their list. So a good title might be “Protect Your Child’s Future With Life Insurance”. It is simple, contains the keyword we want to focus on, and definitely addresses their interests.
A title, however, is not enough. A great video description and choosing appropriate tags is key to providing context to the user and also more information to search engines. Let’s talk about tagging first, and then address your description.
How To Tag My YouTube Video
When publishing your YouTube video, you can select various tags to add to your video. Much like ‘categories’ on blogs, these tags will help you group your content with other similar content.
For example, when someone is searching YouTube for information about life insurance, your content will appear in the search results among other content tagged as ‘life insurance.’ It would be good to understand a bit about how users search for your product or service. Selecting tags that have nothing to do with your business is not advised.
You can localize your tags, such as “life insurance in New York City” or even add other modifiers, like “best life insurance agent”. Add several tags so you can appear in different searches.
A great description is also beneficial for appearing in different searches. You can provide context and give users a better idea of what your video is about.
How to Write a Great Description for YouTube
The first step is to think about the title and your video content. Be sure that your description gives more details about the video to the user. Be sure to make the description as keyword rich as possible without going overboard.
In the example above, a good description might look something like this: ‘One of the best ways to secure your child’s future is with a life insurance policy. By purchasing a whole life policy, you are creating stability for your family in an unsure world. Watch to learn the process of buying a life insurance policy through us.’
Simple and effective, with a focus on purchasing life insurance. That is a good video description. This will instruct search engines to index your video for life insurance, and also explain to your viewers what they can expect if they watch your video.
Optimized content on your website improves your SEO, and so does optimizing the content on your YouTube channel. However, much like a website, a YouTube channel should also have great design and layout.
How Can I Optimize My YouTube Channel?
Much like a website, improving the user experience (UX) of your YouTube channel is a great way to optimize. But how do you do that? We’ll discuss various ways to make your YouTube channel more user friendly.
Create Playlists on Your YouTube Channel
Optimizing your content is extremely helpful to improving your UX on YouTube. However, organizing your content is also important. It is best to look at your YouTube channel as a website. You are essentially performing all the tasks you would perform when optimizing your website, just on YouTube.
Setting up playlists is a useful way to group content into various buckets. Sticking with our life insurance example, you can have a playlist for general life insurance information, a playlist about whole life policies, a playlist for term life insurance policies, and even a playlist about final expense policies.
By organizing your content into descriptive, topical playlists you can help users easily find information. Reducing friction is key to a great UX on YouTube.
Customizing Your Channel Further
Other customization options for your YouTube channel are available, and can improve the overall quality of your channel.
You can record a special video for subscribers that will play when they return to your channel. This personalizes their experience and gives you the chance to connect with them on a different level. You can do the same for new users, giving them an idea of what to expect when they do subscribe and what they can find on your channel.
Giving your channel a look that matches your brand is also important. Brand continuity is helpful, and in the current state of digital marketing, it is essential. Creating a customized banner and graphics for your channel isn’t hard to do with programs like Canva.