Mad Genius
Blog

How to Optimize Your YouTube Page

Digital

On April 23, 2005, a man went to the San Diego Zoo on an overcast day and recorded himself standing in front of some elephants. He uploaded the video to a little website called YouTube.com making it YouTube’s first video. From those humble beginnings, YouTube has become a behemoth, spawning new genres of video, creating careers for the best and brightest Paul brothers, and becoming the second largest search engine in the world. That’s right: a search engine. There are billions of daily searches on YouTube, and given the inherently longer engagement times for videos than any other form of content, optimizing for YouTube is arguably more important than optimizing for Google. Here’s how to do just that.

Include Target Keywords in Video Titles & Descriptions

Similarly to how there are tools like SEMRush and Moz to help you see the search volume of keywords on traditional search engines, they have tools to help you see search volume for YouTube search queries. There are also several free tools you can find online. The exact volumes may vary from one tool to the other, but it should give you a good enough idea to see what’s attainable. 

Choosing Target Keywords

As regular readers of this blog will recall (and that is presumably all of you) we recently blogged about the difference between organic and paid search strategies and how to select target keywords for each. Since we’re treating YouTube as a search engine, there are plenty of strategies we can take from that blog to apply here.

It is still true that you should weigh a keyword’s search volume versus difficulty. All else being equal, you want to target the keywords that users search for the most often and are the easiest to rank for. Given that YouTube isn’t a traditional search engine, you’re going to have to use some different tools than with your typical organic search. SEMRush’s organic research tools wouldn’t have data for YouTube, but they do have an app for analyzing YouTube keywords that provides many of the same data points. It even provides the top video results for each keyword, similar to how it provides a SERP analysis for traditional search engines. A feature like that would be more accurate than typing a keyword into YouTube on your personal computer because your algorithm is influenced by your watch history which is no doubt filled with Ted Talks and documentaries narrated by David Attenborough, and certainly not filled with clips from TLC shows.

There are several other paid YouTube keyword tools that offer free trials so you can figure out which one you like best, such as VidIQ and Keywords Everywhere. There are also free tools like TubeRanker and Google Trends. What’s great about Google trends is you can filter by platform and you’re getting the information straight from the horse’s mouth rather than a third party. What’s frustrating about it is that it only shows how popular a given keyword is relative to how popular it has been at other times. It doesn’t have traditional metrics like search volume or keyword difficulty, but it does provide related searches which could help with researching video ideas. Again, Google’s related keyword tool is likely to be more accurate than one from a third party because they’re going off of their own data.

YouTube’s analytics suite shows data on what keywords people are using to find your videos. And we’re going to tell you how to actually find it by navigating YouTube’s user interface because it’s really annoying whenever a blog is like “do this” and it’s like, but how? Y’know? Anyway, when in the YouTube studio, click on “Channel Analytics” on the left side. From there, click on “Content” and scroll down to “How Viewers Find Your Videos.” Click on “YouTube Search.” This will show you your top five keywords over the last 28 days. Click “See More” and you’ll be shown a pop-up window where you’ll be able to explore these keywords more in depth. If you find that a significant portion of your traffic is coming from a specific keyword (or group of similar keywords), tailor your content strategy more to that topic.

Make Sure Your YouTube Page Has Brand Continuity

If we’re being honest, this is less important for being discovered through search, and more important for making sure users who are already familiar with your brand can identify you. These are the key elements of your YouTube page that function as brand identifiers:

  • Profile Picture: Use the same profile picture that you do on other social media channels, which will likely also be your primary logo.
  • Channel Name: Give your YouTube channel the same name as your company, or at least the name that’s used colloquially (omit any “LLCs”). If your luck is bad enough that the name is taken, add a simple modifier that indicates your industry or product (i.e., Mad Genius Advertising).
  • Banner Image: People will only see this if they click onto your profile, but you still want it to be on-brand. And make sure the image works with both desktop and mobile layouts. You can’t choose unique images for each, but you can see how much of the image will be shown on each when you’re selecting it.
  • Channel Description: Make sure it sounds like your brand, for people who already know you, and give an apt but brief description of your company for those who don’t. Include a URL for your company’s website so they can find you easily.

But Literally, How Does One Change These Things

Oh right, sorry. We almost did that thing where a blog tells you to do something but doesn’t explain how.

  1. After logging into your YouTube account, go to your YouTube studio.
  2. Click on the "Customization" tab in the sidebar on the left side. 

Here, there are fields where you can change your profile picture, channel name, banner image, channel description, handle, and contact info.

Create a Unique but Consistent Thumbnail Style

Thumbnails, or the Yes, the main goal of a thumbnail is to get peoples’ attention, but it should still look like you. Utilize your brand colors and type, and keep thumbnail formats consistent across your channel. To make the process a little easier, come up with a system by which you know what image and text you’re going to use in the thumbnails. Is the image a frame selected from the video? Is the text in the thumbnail just a copy and paste of the video title? Whatever you decide, the actual decision is less important than being consistent.

Thumbnails are heavily dependent on trends, so update them periodically trends evolve–every couple of years or so. While thumbnails that featured people with shocked faces, pointing at something circled in red probably would’ve done well not too long ago, but users have learned to identify those sorts of things as clickbait, so you have to adapt.

A/B Test Your Thumbnails

A/B testing is a fancy industry term for trying two things and seeing which one works better. These can be applied to pretty much any aspect of web content, but testing YouTube thumbnails can give you better and more immediate feedback than most.

Again, How Do You Actually Do That?

We were getting to that if you’d just let us finish. YouTube has a built-in feature that allows you to test up to three thumbnails at a time.

  1. Go to YouTube studio.
  2. Click on “Content” in the sidebar on the left side.
  3. Select a video.
  4. Hover on the thumbnail field and then click on the icon of the three dots (or vertical ellipsis if you like).
  5. Select “Test and Compare,” and you’ll be shown an interface where you can add up to three thumbnails at a time.

Different thumbnails will show up in suggested video feeds for different users, and YouTube will collect watch time data for all three.

While you can only test three at a time, you could always go back to this feature after a predetermined amount of time and test three more. It’s a common practice for large channels and full-time YouTubers to create well over three thumbnails per video–even as many as 20–and test them all to find which is the best. 

While this may work for a YouTube channel like Mr. Beast, for most corporate YouTube channels, it’s probably overkilling. It’s likely not even worth the opportunity cost of having a graphic designer make 20 thumbnails for every video, but A/B testing is still a valuable tool for determining which thumbnail style works best for your channel. 

We recommend making a few different thumbnail styles and A/B testing them over the course of a few videos to find out which is the most effective, and then sticking with that for brand consistency.

Include Some Formatting Tricks in Your Titles to Increase Click-Through Rates

Include numbers or special characters like colons and dashes to make them stand out among all the other video titles. It’s a weird thing, but people are more likely to click on titles that are more visually interesting, not just the ones most relevant to their search.

Be All You(Tube) Can Be

These simple steps will improve your YouTube channel’s search visibility whether it’s full of let’s plays, grainy videos of town hall meetings, or promotional materials for your brand. As with any other kind of search engine optimization (SEO) it will take time to get to where you want to be. Audiences aren’t built in a day, but now you have some tangible steps that you can take right now. Even if you don’t have any new videos ready to go, you can retroactively improve the thumbnails, titles. As with all SEO, every bit helps.

Think you want to dig a little deeper into your YouTube channel and how we can get it seen by more people? Fill out the form below so we can have a chat about it. Or we could talk about why the death of vlogging was long overdue.