YouTube also uses specific criteria to measure your video’s overall quality so it can effectively rank your content.
We’ve mentioned some of these points earlier in the report, but this will provide you with a simple checklist as well as additional optimization tips.
Video Retention: how much of your video do people watch before they switch to something else? The longer they watch your video, the better, so do your best to always focus on highly-engaging content that’s exciting and with a steady pace.
Pro Tip: The average attention span is only 8.5 seconds! This means that you must bring your story to life within the first few seconds of your video. The best way to do this is by creating a hook.
A hook is basically a preview of what’s to come. It highlights what the video is about, and gets people excited so they stick around and watch the video from start to finish.
Comments: if your video generates a lot of comments and feedback, chances are it’s striking a chord with people and delivering value. In fact, comments are a clear indication of overall engagement.
In turn, YouTube will reward videos with a high number of comments by making your content appear more frequently in search.
Subscription Rates: one of the best signals that indicates that you have created a high-quality video is by the number of people that subscribe to your channel immediately after watching.
Adding to “Watch Later:” this is also a good sign of how much interest your video is attracting.
You can review these metrics on your YouTube Analytics page.
There are also a few other things to keep in mind when optimizing your YouTube videos:
File Name: whenever you upload an image onto your site, you should include your focus keyword in the image tag. Similarly, when you upload your video onto YouTube, use that keyword in the file name of the video.
Video Title: According to Backlinko, the title of your video should be at 4-5 words long so that you can include your target keyword within a longer phrase.
Descriptions: A good video description is one of the most important parts of increasing your YouTube SEO.
When you write a killer blog post, Google can crawl through the article to gauge the content’s overall quality. But search engines can’t watch videos, so they depend on the description to get a feel for the video’s topic and how in-depth it may be.
The more YouTube knows about your video and its keywords, the better it can rank you for those search terms. And ultimately, your video descriptions should be at least 200 words long.
Place a link to your site at or near the very top of the description, which will maximize the number of clicks back to your site, helping you get more visitors and grow your website SEO.
Tags: Including the right tags can help your video rise in the rankings.
When it comes to tagging, you should include a few keywords on what the video is about.
Tags can help your video get discovered in YouTube’s side bar in the “related videos” section.
Thats all for this resource, I hope you have gained some new and useful insights.
To your success,
