Why SEO should be your main focus in your first year on YouTube?
This article is about SEO in general and more explicit about how it can boost small and new channels on YouTube. SEO is something you think about with your website and Google, but most forget to think about this on YouTube.
In this article:
Search Engine YouTube
First of all, it is important to understand that YouTube is the second largest search engine and comes behind Google. With 3 billion searches per month, YouTube's search volume is larger than that of Bing, Yahoo, AOL and Ask.com combined. Most people use YouTube as a tool to find answers to their questions. For example, research shows that 2 out of 3 people use YouTube to decide where to go on their holiday. YouTube has become far more than an entertainment vehicle, it has become a DIY encyclopedia.
Anything you can think of to create, you can probably find a video on YouTube that will show you how to do it.
This is why YouTube is also a search engine, a tool for her viewers to find answers to their questions. The first and most important reason why you should understand SEO (search engine optimization) and how SEO works on YouTube.
YouTube SEO first year on YouTube
YouTube is smart. To be more precise, the algorithm is very smart. This means that not only the algorithm uses SEO to give allocated results when searching on YouTube, but it also follows the viewers and their profiles. It pushes videos that are being enjoyed by certain profiled viewers to others.
But YouTube can only do that when it knows what your channel and your videos are about. And in the first year, YouTube doesn't know that. You don't have enough viewers, subscribers and content. The algorithm needs data to perform. The more data it has, the better it can perform.
So that means that your biggest and most important tool in your first year on YouTube is SEO.
What does YouTube SEO
YouTube SEO determines where and how high your videos will be shown in search results. The more related your video is to a search result, the higher it will rank. The bigger the competition is within a search results, the harder it will be to rank high. But there are actually ways to even rank very high on a very competitive keyword if you use YouTube SEO in the right way.
So keep on reading to know more.
And to be clear, if YouTube doesn't know where to put your video, it will not show it anywhere. And if it has little to no data on your profiled viewers.....it will be extremely hard to let your channel grow.
So in your first year, it is extremely important and a must to use SEO. Rianne has done it with her family channel. At that moment in time, there was no online course or book about YouTube SEO that actually made any sense. So she figured it out by herself. When she cracked this code, their channel blew up from 600 subscribers to 10K subscribers within 6 months.
How to use YouTube SEO
SEO is quite a speciality, just like it is with SEO for Google. There is a reason why there are experts. So it isn't something you can learn by just reading a few blog articles and googling around. But there are a few things you can already do!
Step 1 - Niche & Youtube SEO
Choose your niche wisely and make sure that key search words from your niche are coming back into your general channels settings:
channel name (if you know you will be sticking with one niche)
channel banner
about page
suggested channels form the same niche
playlists of subcategories of your super niche
Step 2 - YouTube SEO and related video
Before you record any video, be aware of what keywords you want to be targeting. This way you will always make sure that your video is indeed fully related to the search words - your YouTube SEO.
Step 3 - YouTube SEO targeting of videos
Make sure that you target the right search pools (categories whereby YouTube selects and divides videos) and keywords. You do this with long-tail keywords - creating sub-pools in a bigger pool. So you have less competition. It is extremely hard to rank high in a very big search pool like travel or sailing. Especially if you do not have any authority. The competition is just too high. But if you rank very high in a sub search pool - a smaller and with a lot less competition - you will rank higher in the big search pool as well. For example, if you rank very high in the search pool 'sailing Croatian coast'. You will rank higher in the search pool 'sailing' as well. We explain how this works in great detail in our YouTube SEO & Basics of the Algorithm
Step 4 - insert YouTube SEO keywords in the right places
It is important that after you selected your keywords that fit with a search pool within your niche, you put those keywords in the right places:
title
thumbnail
content of the video
meta data upload
file name
tags
description
first comment
playlist
Step 5 - build authority within your niche with YouTube SEO
Be consistent, don't change your niche. Build authority in 4-7 subcategories of your niche so that you will rank higher in search results on youtube.
Step 6 - check your YouTube SEO results and optimize
After you published a video, you need to check the performance. Change or alter your SEO where necessary. Key moments of evaluation: the first couple of hours, the first 7 days and after 4-6 weeks.
We explain this and a lot more in our YouTube SEO & Basics of the Algorithm course. We only touched the surface of YouTube SEO in this article.
So we have something special for you! You can join this course for a very special price and we even have a great offer on our academy (all the courses that we will be launching in the coming months - read more here).
Exception on the rule of YouTube SEO
There is one exception to this rule of the must of YouTube SEO in your first year. If you are able to attract a lot of viewers from the same profile, in the beginning, YouTube will be able to push your videos to similar profiled viewers and this will work better for you than any SEO.
But how to do that? Take a look at this blog article about super niches and especially the channel of Martijn Dolaard. He managed with a super niche and a highlight in a very big YouTube channel with the same niche and target audience to reach one 100k subscribers within one month.