Most people know what SEO is on their website and connected to Google. What most people don't know is the connection between SEO and YouTube. Time to change that and give a little bit more insights into the basics of SEO on YouTube and why this is important for you as a YouTube creator.
Here's what we'll cover:
What are Search Engines?
A search engine is a software program that helps people find the information they are looking for online using keywords or phrases. Search engines can return results quickly—even with millions of websites online—by scanning the Internet continuously and indexing every page they find.
Is YouTube a search engine like Google?
Yes and no.
It is important to understand it because the difference between the two also defines the difference in how SEO works on both platforms.
YouTube is not simply a social media platform; it is a search engine. YouTube's user-friendliness, combined with the soaring popularity of video content, has made it the second largest search engine behind Google. With 3 billion searches per month, YouTube's search volume is larger than that of Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com combined.
YouTube's user-friendliness, combined with the soaring popularity of video content, has made it the second largest search engine behind Google.
But being a social media platform & a search engine makes SEO work a little bit different.
How do Search Engines work?
Search engines, and YouTube, in general use robots that crawl webpages and videos across the internet to determine what content they contain and, in turn, what the pages are about. These bots scan the code, picking up the written text, images, videos and more that appear on webpages to gather all information possible. Once they’ve gathered enough intel about the type of information available on each page and determined that this content will be useful to their searchers, they add these pages to their index. The index is essentially all possible web results that a search engine stores to provide to a potential searcher.
Search engines assess what the best result is based on what searchers are looking for, as well as what other information already exists online. When someone searches, their algorithm matches the user’s search query to the relevant information in their index, providing searchers with an accurate answer to their query. The platforms then use hundreds of signals to determine the order in which the content will appear for each searcher.
There are minimum guidelines you need to follow which will help the algorithm to understand your content better.
These signals are what we are looking at and adjust our strategies on. But there are these overall minimum guidelines, you need to follow which will help the algorithm to understand your content better. To understand these basics - we suggest to read this blog post and for mastering this you can follow our SEO course.
It’s important to note that search engines like Google and YouTube do not release specifics about their algorithm or process, so it’s impossible to know exactly what factors impact indexing and rankings.
SEO, therefore, isn’t a perfect science and even when it seems that all optimizations have been implemented, it often requires patience and continual tweaking to see results.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing content so that they rank well on search engines (Google & YouTube) through organic (non paid) searches. This is one of the most crucial marketing strategies for any business or YouTube channel.
Because search engines like Google and YouTube aim to provide a positive user experience for its searchers, it wants to present the best possible information available. Therefore the focus of SEO efforts should be the process of making sure search engines recognize your content as the leading information on the web for a particular search query.
How can you use SEO for your YouTube Channel?
Anyone can use SEO tactics to help their videos perform better. But the biggest difference between the algorithm of YouTube and Google is that YouTube also takes into account the viewers experience.
How long does a viewer stay to watch your video
What kind of profile has the viewer that watches your video
How many viewers like your video
Who dislikes your video
Do your Subscribers increase or decrease with this video
And this is the social influence that YouTube has and Google doesn't. Where SEO makes sure your videos gets seen, the quality of your content decides how long and if YouTube will actively give it a push to other viewers with similar profiles that like your videos.
For practical tips on how and where to use SEO on YouTube we recommend reading this YouTube SEO blog article.
How we can help you and your YouTube channel?
First it would be a great start to take a look at our free downloads here and make sure you subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of our homepage. We share in-depth knowledge weekly in our e-mails and on our blog, but we als organise free masterclasses. Which we announce via our e-mails.
To become more experienced yourself, we have some great online courses that teaches you all the ins and outs how to run a successful YouTube channel. If you only want to focus on content creation we have our special services which we customise to your preferences and our specialities and skills.