Hello hustlers, I hope you all are doing great. In this blog, we will gonna cover 7 easy steps to rank YouTube videos on top of search and essential YouTube SEO tips. Hence follow with me till the end of this article and after doing so, I assure you will gonna see a bump in your video views through YouTube searches.
I had created a video on the same topic, just have a look at this video to easily swallow this whole topic.
Also read, Best Passive Income Streams To Make Money While You Sleep
So without further ado, let directly jump to the actionable steps.
7 Easy Steps To Rank YouTube Videos
Step 1: Topic and Keyword Research
First thing first, firstly you have to find a topic on which you can make a video. If you are a small YouTuber then it becomes essential for you to do topic research and then only make a video out of it, so that your video be able to attract some traction in the starting.
It is very necessary to make your videos on a topic which are currently in trends or got a good no of searches.
And this doesn’t stop at just topic research, after getting the topic for your video, you have to do the keyword research, which you will utilize in your title, description, tags, etc.
Now comes, how we will get the topic for our video? As per my experience, Google Trends is one of the best tools which you can utilize to find out trending and good topics for your videos.
But for that also you must have a ‘Seed Keyword’. Simply said seed keyword is the two-word keyword related to your niche. Hence just type the seed keyword related to your niche in google trends.
Like here I had typed out my seed keyword ‘Search Engine Optimization’. Now for this keyword, we can see the trends going on, and below we can see the related trending topics.
Here all the keywords that you will get, will be either trending or their search volume is exponentially increasing. Just look for the keywords that interest you.
Now it’s time to look for more keywords and related topics. For this, We will use some more tools (Chrome Extensions) like VidIQ, Keyword Everywhere, Tubebuddy, etc. Just dropped the term which you got from Google Trends into the YouTube search and through the chrome extensions of the above tools, you will get to see much more related topics and keywords.
Through VidIQ you will also see the SEO score for that topic, you will score for search volume and competition, just go for a score overall above 50.
Just go through those keywords and topics as well and prepare a Google Docx and copy-paste those keywords in it.
So this is all about topic and keyword research.
Step 2: Create Engaging & Long Videos
For your video to rank on top of YouTube searches it is essential for your video to have a good retention time and for having a good retention time it is essential that you make an eye-catching and engaging video.
Stuff your video with lots of engaging elements like sound effects, memes, quotes, transitions, or anything else which breaks out the monotonous behavior of a video. And if you are in the entertainment niche, it’s pretty easy for you to retain your audience because of your content type.
The second thing which we should remember is that your video should be long and form long I mean more than 5 minutes. YouTube is a platform that prefers longer videos. YouTube wants its audience to spend as much time as possible on their platforms, so they can earn more from advertisers. From this, it is obvious that if your videos are longer, it will be preferred over the others.
The above article-cutout from a renowned source also mentions the same concept.
Step 3: Optimize Title & Description
So you have your video and now it’s time to upload it and with that, now you have to give a name to your video (Title) and a Description. For your video to rank on YouTube, it is very necessary to optimize your title and description as per the keywords we had selected in our keyword research step.
As mentioned in the first step, we have our Google Docx which consists of our keywords. Just look for the keywords which you can utilize in your title. Try to provide two keywords in your title by dividing your title into two parts, ‘Title 1’ and ‘Title 2’, spacing them out with ‘|’. It’s a pretty standard way of preparing your title. Just look for how I had prepared my title using the keywords list that I had prepared.
Similarly, you add the keywords term in your description. The first paragraph of your description should be about the explanation of your video, what’s the video is all about.
Second, you can tell about yourself and your team if you have one, also it is necessary to add some outbound links to your social media accounts and your website if you have one (If you want to make your own website without coding then watch this video How to install WordPress in Cpanel?)
Further, you can checkout the VidIQ checklist to increase your SEO score and thus increase your chance of getting a top video rank. Just try to complete the checklist as much as possible.
Step 4: Add Relevant Tags
Tags play a very vital role in getting your video ranked for several different terms. Hence it is very important to add a variety of keywords in your YouTube tags sections so that your video can be shown for all those keyword variations.
Firstly we can add the keywords in the tags which we already have in our Docx, and to get more keywords we can use tools like:
Keyword Tool
Just go to these tools and search for your terms and look for relevant terms to your topic.
Just pick good terms and put them in your YT tags section. Also through VidIQ you will get some recommended tags, just add those too.
It is to be noted that from time to time keep experimenting and changing your tags if you do not get the desired results in the first place.
Step 5: Optimize Thumbnail
People say ‘Never judge a book by its cover’ but people do judge a book by its cover and so do video viewers. If your thumbnail is poorly made, probably the chances are that viewers will not gonna click on your video and this will lead to low CTR (Click Through Rate). If the CTR of your video goes down, the YouTube will stop ranking your videos and it’s opposit if your thumbnail is good, your CTR will increase, which in turn trigger YouTube that the video is much better than any other video for the similar topic and thus rank your video higher.
Hence try to make your thumbnail as good as possible. If you are not a good graphic designer, I recommend you hire a professional for this job. I recommend you checkout Genrk Business Solutions to get professional graphics designing services.
Another thing which I want to mention is that, try to show your face in your thumbnail, having some interesting facial expressions. It is seen that viewers love such thumbnails and it also builds trust for your viewer and not only this, it will also boost your personal branding.
Step 6: Social Media Sharing & Embedding Videos
Sharing your video on social media not only brings some additional viewers but also triggers the YouTube algorithm that the video is sharable and it is getting backlinks and traction from social media too. You can also do social media bookmarking submissions similar to that we do for website SEO off-page submissions. (Check out our Learn SEO section to know more about it).
Even the VidIQ tool adds social media sharing in the checklist.
Another thing, if you have your own website, just embed your videos into your website. It’s best to embed your videos in blogs post as I had done in this blog post.
Just copy the embed code from YouTube and paste it into your HTML code and if you have a WordPress website, it is pretty easy to do. (11 Free Must Have Plugins For WordPress | Best WordPress Plugins For Blogs)
Step 7: Ask For Comments & Like on your video
It is seen that if the video is having a good engagement, whether in terms of likes, comments or shares, YouTube starts pushing such video. And It is very important to have such engagement in the first 48hr of video upload.
Hence if you are a small YouTuber, I recommend you to ask your friends, family, and known one and ask them to engage with your video and in your video also ask the viewers to like and comment and share your video. You had already seen a lot of YouTubers even the good one begging for all this.
Wrapping it up…
So in this blog, we had covered step by step, how we can rank our YouTube video in the top of YouTube search results. I am going to repeat these steps once more:
- Topic and keyword research
- Creating engaging and long videos.
- Optimizing title & description
- Add relevant tags
- Optimizing thumbnail
- Social Media sharing & embedding videos on the website
- Asking for comments & like on your video
That’s all about 7 easy steps to rank YouTube videos and YouTube SEO tips. I hope you learned a lot from this article.
Let me know your feedback in the comment box below also do check out my YouTube channel, Suraj Mishra
Until then, keep learning…
Suraj Mishra is a Digital Marketer, Brand Consultant, Blogger, founder of Genrk, and owner of this website. He always has a motive for sharing what he knows. Through these blogs he tries to help entrepreneurs, letting them know all the things that are needed to grow business online in this digital era.