As a new or small YouTube channel, YouTube SEO is a really important part of driving views and subscribers to your channel. After your 100th video or 10K+ subscribers - content and the algorithm are more important. Most new channels have no idea what is important for SEO within YouTube.
Today we are going to talk about the 3 most important YouTube SEO metrics. It's the top 3 of our list of 10+ SEO metrics (to know them all, join our online course YouTube SEO & the basics of the algorithm here).
Keyword and long tail keyword in your YouTube video
First of all, any keyword you choose has to fit with the content of that video and your niche. A keyword is a specific word or combination of words you primarily want to hit in YouTube search results.
Important metrics:
How many searches per month on keyword.
How many results within your search pool (the more competition, the harder it will be).
Long tail keyword is your key word (one or a combination of words like sailing or boat life) added with a specific words with will make your search pool competition smaller. For example 'Sailing mediterranean sea of boat life adventures'.
These keywords and long tail keywords will determine where your video will pop up in YouTube (and Google) search.
Especially when you have a new channel this is very important as the algorithm doesn't know what your channel is about and where she can push your videos.
Insider tip: you can choose to hit more than one keyword - with our clients that have a small or new YouTube channel we use between 3 to 5 keyword strategies per video.
PS: we are giving already more than 3 things to think about with SEO:
Keyword & long tail keyword.
Your niche.
Content of your video, search results per month, and search pool ;)
Niche & search pools within YouTube SEO
We already mentioned that your keywords need to fit within your niche and search pool. This is extremely important and the smaller your niche is (we talk about a super niche with our clients) the chances increase of growing your channel rapidly.
For example 'sailing the world' is a niche but 'refitting a sailboat for sailing around the world' is a super niche.
Search pools are SEO search terms within YouTube where videos are being put together. For example sailing or sailing family. As you can guess, competition in Sailing is extremely high and the competition in sailing family will be a lot lower.
These are metrics and insights you need to know and understand to make the right decisions with targeting your video within YouTube search. This needs some time and insights, and you need a tool: Tube Buddy.
Where to use your keywords
Well we use our keywords with our clients in a few spaces, which we share also in our online course. But the most important places are: title, description and tags. If you got these covered you are already over 70% of the impact you can realise with SEO.
And tags, only use relevant tags to the content of your video, and your keywords. We always use as much as possible.
We hope you liked this post, if you have any more questions, feel free to contact us.
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