Optimizing Your Videos for YouTube
Many organizations use YouTube as a convenient place to store their video content. The platform makes it easy to create links that can be shared and embedded elsewhere. For informational videos, reaching the right audience at the right time is the goal, not simply racking up as many views on YouTube as possible. But your organization may be able to find surprising reach with your content beyond the specific audience for which you created it, and YouTube is a great place to discover that audience. Since YouTube is such a powerful search engine, it’s worth spending time optimizing your content for the platform.
Imagine you’re a conservation group in Vermont and you’ve created a video about how to recruit and manage volunteers. You’ve created content to appeal to people within your organization and your region, and you’re planning to upload it to your YouTube account to make it easy to share. At first you might consider making it a private link, but what if someone in New Mexico is looking for that same information? What if potential volunteers could easily find the video and benefit from learning more about how your organization works? Making your video available to the public and optimizing it for search could help these different audiences find your content and through it, your organization.
YouTube processes over three billion searches per month and has its own search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. Making it easy for others to find your content simply increases the reach of your organization and helps build your credibility. It can also help you build community and even attract job candidates. This article from Wordstream provides some basic tips for improving your YouTube SEO. I’ll elaborate on some of the points below.
Research Your Keywords
Start by searching YouTube to see what kind of content is out there on your topic already. Take note of the most watched videos, what keywords they contain, what hashtags they use and how the videos are categorized. There are also a number of free tools (this article from ahrefs covers a few) that will allow you research what keywords are popular for your topic in general.
Incorporating Keywords
Once you’ve identified your keywords, it’s time to plan how you’ll incorporate them when you upload your video. First, be sure to use them in your video title. For instance, you might title your video “How to Recruit and Manage Volunteers for Conservation.” Then, be sure to name your video file the same way. During production, I typically name video files using a convention that makes it easy for me to identify the latest version at a glance (“VTConserve_V9.mp4,” for instance), but if I were to use that naming convention when I uploaded the video to YouTube, I’d be missing an opportunity to improve my YouTube SEO. A file name like “How-to-recruit-manage-volunteers-conservation.mp4” would be much better.
Optimize Your Video Description
Include your keywords early in the description of your video and don’t let your description stretch beyond approximately 200 words. Resist the temptation to stuff a bunch of keywords into the description in an unnatural way. YouTube also allows you to add hashtags to your videos that might help it be discovered. You’ll need to assign your video to a category and upload a custom thumbnail image too.
Accessibility
Don’t forget to upload captions or subtitles for your video. Not only does this help a wider audience consume your content, but search engines will be able to “see” what you say in your video, making it rise in the search results.
Cards and End Screens
Cards are notifications that pop up during YouTube videos that you can use to promote your brand, your website or other videos on your YouTube channel. End screens are simply cards that appear at the end of a video. When putting your content on YouTube, think of what you might want your audience to do after watching a specific video. Do you want them to subscribe to your channel or donate to your organization? Do you want them to visit your website or watch related videos? Would you like to poll them to find out whether they found your content valuable? You can prompt viewers to take these actions using cards and end screens. There is analytical value to using these tools as well. This recent article from Neal Schaffer provides a great run-down on cards and end screens.
Don’t Miss Out on a “Hidden” Audience
While you’re doing your research, you may discover a wider audience for your content than you expected. I was speaking with a company about turning a training webinar they offered their employees into a video series. While researching their subject matter, I discovered a large audience on YouTube for exactly the kind of content they were planning to produce. From the YouTube comments, it was clear that many of the people consuming that content were students eager to start careers with companies like the one with which I was speaking. By making a few small tweaks to the video content they were already planning to create, they could repurpose that content to find a much larger audience on YouTube. They might even be able to use the video on LinkedIn for their recruiting efforts. The optimization process takes a bit of time, but it can yield great information that can inform your video strategy in general.
Create a Checklist
The optimization process gets a bit easier each time you do it. I created a checklist that helps me make sure I have everything ready when it’s time to upload a video. This can be particularly helpful if someone else physically uploads videos to YouTube on your behalf. You can provide your checklist along with your video to make sure it’s optimized when added to your channel.
Filename
Description
Tags
Category
Custom Thumbnail Image
SRT file
Card(s)
End screens
When thinking about the audience that might find your content, think narrowly then broadly. For a video about recruiting and managing volunteers for a conservation organization, you might first consider other conservation organizations that could be looking for this information. More broadly, any organization that relies on volunteers might find your content helpful. Thinking about YouTube SEO when posting video content can help new people discover your organization while allowing a wider audience to benefit from the content you have already spent time and money to create.
