How to optimise SEO on your beginner’s YouTube channel
Key concepts:
2 tips for YouTube SEO
SEO optimization of videos for beginners
A lot of YouTubers tend to create content specifically for their already gained audience, which is good on the one hand, that you address topics that interest them, yet on the other hand, these videos could be helpful for others too. It is important therefore to position your videos in such a way to reach “outsiders” as well.
How is this possible and achievable? By using proper keywords that you identify useful and searched by others, yet that are not so used by your competitors.
Long tail keywords
Let’s talk about the long tail keywords. These are phrases with 3-5 words such as “how to …” and are very useful to be used even in the titles of your videos.
The process of finding the suitable long tail keywords to use for your video is actually quite easy as YouTube can provide you with the answer.
Go to the Search bar and write the topic you are interested in, for example, guitar. The Search will already give you a list of words or phrases containing the word of guitar. These suggestions are words that people use when searching a similar topic, ordered from the most searched (first option) to less searched (last option). Make a list with these words as we will mix and combine them in order to find our title.
Add just another word to the search and see what new lists of searched items it gives you, for example, acoustic guitar. Likewise, note these down.
Once more, we add something to our search, and the easiest way is to add “how to”, “what” (any question-pronoun), for example “how acoustic guitar”. YouTube will already give you various “actions” and suggestions (how to play, how it sounds, how to make etc.). The longest search results there are, the better for you to give you ideas on how to name your videos.
Choose the one that is similar to your video’s content and click on the search. Now you have the list of videos (number of videos) as well as the best positioned ones in their order. Look at the titles they have and you may notice that there is no specific video having the exact title as what you searched (for example, how to play acoustic guitar like an electronic one).
These lists can give you not only names for your videos, but also ideas of what you can shoot about, since these are what people are looking for.
Connected keywords
The second tip is using the * (Asterix) in the search bar, right before the word which you want to have more information about what people are using. For example, how to play guitar, would be how to play *guitar, and the results would be different songs with guitar, types of guitars etc.
If you choose any of those results, same with the previous tip, you’ll notice that the first result is very unlikely to actually have those particular searched words, and so you can use that title to position your video higher.
These tips are very good for the beginning of your channel, when you don’t have many subscribers and you want people to find out about you and start following what you post. It is important to be found by external people, more than your friends and colleagues, and these tips are helping you to appear higher in the search results, if not even the first one, even if there are other videos with more views around. If your title matches the searched long tail keyword, you have very high chances to appear even the first one on the list of results.