YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine, trailing only its parent firm, Google. YouTube videos account for eight out of ten video search results, and the site is constantly expanding, with over 500 hours of video posted to YouTube every minute. How can you keep from becoming lost in a sea of videos? Your best bet is to use video SEO best practices to optimize amazing videos for search. With these suggestions, you may develop an effective YouTube SEO plan. 

What exactly is a YouTube SEO strategy?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the constantly evolving discipline of designing web content to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs). Because search is frequently the gatekeeper to your content, optimizing it for search is essential for attracting traffic and growing a following.

Unlike Google, which evaluates rank based on backlinks and other factors, YouTube SEO entails optimizing your channel, playlists, metadata, descriptions, and videos. Your films can be optimized for search both within and outside of YouTube.

Here are some pointers for increasing views and improving your YouTube SEO.

1. Choose an excellent keyword

Before you can improve your YouTube SEO, you must first choose the correct keyword or phrase for your video. Keywords appear frequently in video titles and metadata, and when uttered in audio, they appear in captions and transcripts. That's a win-win situation for SEO.

Keywords and keyword phrases should correspond to a) whatever accurately characterizes your video and b) the words and phrases that visitors enter into search engines to find similar content to yours.

2. Include proper closed captioning.

YouTube transcribes your videos automatically to generate automatic captioning. However, YouTube's auto-subtitles are barely 70% accurate, resulting in captions that are incoherent and often embarrassing.

Google rewards useful search results while penalizing spam. The term 'spam' includes the phrase 'automatically generated gibberish,' which accurately describes most auto-captions. You risk being classified as spam and losing search rank for your YouTube channel if you use incorrect captions.

To counteract the negative effects of auto-captions for YouTube SEO strategy, you should add appropriate closed captions to your YouTube videos using an SRT file.

3. Include a transcript in the video description.

For posting your transcript on YouTube, the video description is the best option. The description field can hold 5,000 characters, which is usually adequate for a transcript of a 10-minute video with a lot of dialogue. If your transcript is too long or you want to include other critical information in the description, such as a call to action, you can offer a shortened version with a link to the full version on a separate web page.

Although Backlinko's research found no correlation between keyword-optimized descriptions and rankings for that phrase, keyword-rich descriptions are still a best practice because they can help your video rank for related topics and appear as a 'suggested video.'

4. Provide subtitles in a variety of languages

Just as English captions make your videos more accessible to more viewers, translations broaden your audience and improve your YouTube SEO. YouTube has a vast worldwide reach. Only 16.4% of YouTube's site traffic comes from the United States, and over 2 billion logged-in people watch YouTube every month worldwide.

International and non-native English-speaking viewers can watch your videos with foreign language subtitles. Search engines will index your translated caption files as well, and your video will appear in search results in those languages. This can be quite beneficial for a YouTube SEO plan because it increases your chances of ranking higher for non-English keywords owing to decreased competition.

5. Create a keyword-rich title, description, and tags.

Once you've chosen an excellent keyword, you must ensure that the text connected with your video is keyword-optimized.

For example, if you post makeup tutorial videos, make sure the title, descriptions, and tags include the phrase 'makeup tutorial.'

Keep in mind that search engines have become wise to keyword-stuffing, which is the practice of overusing keywords and permutations of keywords in an attempt to cheat the system. Don't even think about it. Write for humans, not robots, or you risk being penalized.

Conclusion

Monitoring these numbers over time will allow you to see which films have the greatest engagement as well as the reasons that contribute to their success. Take note of what distinguishes these films from those that don't—you may discover patterns in the topic, type of video, duration, or posting schedule.