The most important question you need to ask yourself at the beginning is: What are my potential visitors even looking for?

With an extensive research of the relevant keywords, this question can be answered. This involves identifying search terms that match the content and relate to a specific intention of the user, e.g., to obtain information, to learn something, or to be entertained. The goal should always be to drive traffic to your channel and videos by using meaningful and unique keywords.

To filter out the appropriate keywords, there are dozens of tools on the Internet that serve their purpose for keyword research. One of the most popular tools and also used by us is KeywordTool.io, which is particularly suitable for research, because you have the possibility to select keywords and search volume from YouTube.

The title of the video is the most important feature of YouTube SEO optimization and the first thing the user sees. Therefore, the appropriate keywords should definitely be used here. Like a website page title, the point is to let the user know at first glance that the video will take them to the destination of their search. The YouTube algorithm prefers an exact name in the title when thematically classifying the video.

The title should encourage the visitor to click, but “Click Bait” should still be avoided, because YouTube also evaluates user interactions for each video, and those where users bounce after a short time are penalized. A well-chosen title is therefore of utmost importance, as it not only highlights what the video is about, but also has an impact on whether the video shows up in the top search results and gets clicked on.

When browsing YouTube videos, viewers usually see
first
a preview image of the individual videos. YouTube automatically generates three random thumbnails, one of which can be selected as the preview image. Nevertheless, it is recommended to invest some time in creating a suitable and meaningful thumbnail.

The thumbnail is a thumbnail image that visually represents the content of the video and is intended to arouse the user’s interest to click on the video. It should be explicit about the video content and not create any misconceptions.

You should pay attention to the following points when creating a thumbnail:

• Accurately visualize the content of the video through text and images
• Align preview image with target audience
• Encourage users to click
• Create desired atmosphere

Meta tags are another relevant point to perform successful YouTube SEO. By using meta tags appropriately and accurately, you can help YouTube display related videos and it is additionally an important criterion for ranking in search results.

Being displayed on the right side in the related videos is a factor that can extremely influence the click-through rate of your video. And since YouTube has introduced the autoplay function, you may thus find yourself with your videos automatically in a playlist. However, it is still important to note not to simply assign a plethora of irrelevant meta tags, as this can also potentially have a negative impact on the ranking of the corresponding video.

Directly below the video and the title is the video description. This mostly underestimated feature is limited to a maximum of 5000 characters, provides users with more detailed information about the video and usually additionally contains links to the creator’s website or affiliate products. As with the title, keywords appropriate to the content should be used, as the YouTube search algorithm analyzes the video description to determine the relevance of the video to the particular user. In this way, an optimized description can greatly contribute to improving the click-through rate.

The video description should include the following aspects:

• Short summary of the content of the video
• Links to own website or other services and contact details as well as social media profiles
• Links to other videos of the own YouTube channel

It should also be noted that the complete description is not directly visible, but must be partially unfolded. Therefore, it is a good idea to place the most important information and links further up in the video description so that they are directly visible to the user.

YouTube has been offering interactive speech recognition for a few years now, which automatically generates subtitles for your videos. On the one hand, this is a necessary feature for people with auditory impairments, and on the other hand, manually created or edited subtitles are used by YouTube as a ranking factor, because they can help the YouTube algorithm understand the content of the video.

The automatic subtitles feature already works surprisingly well in English, but the German version is still a bit buggy and often content is not transcribed correctly. Thus, it naturally makes sense to have the subtitles created automatically first and to correct them manually afterwards. This is easy: create subtitles automatically in the editor and then download the subtitle file. You can easily open them with a conventional text editor, revise them and then upload them again.

The last item in our list, are the interactions with the visitors of the video. Always thank users at the end of the video and ask them to comment or share the video. Even a call to subscribe to the channel or rate the video with a “like” can work wonders.

Another important factor at the end of the video is the insertion of a so-called End Card. This can attract the viewer’s attention and prompt them to interact, such as subscribe to the channel or watch the next video. The number of video suggestions is limited to a maximum of three, but it is usually worthwhile anyway to offer the visitor only one or two more videos, so as not to overwhelm him and to direct his attention thematically.