Precision & Performance: Gamer’s Equipment Showcase

YouTube Equipment for Gaming Channels - Best Gaming Gears

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

You love gaming, you have a lot of know-how to pass on, and you have a magnetic personality: you are ready to become a great YouTube gaming commentator. All you need is gaming gear. We have already listed some of the best YouTube video shooting equipment lists for starting recording videos, here we will run through some of the best YouTube equipment for gaming channels, sorted into categories for game recording, audio, and video (facecam).

YouTube Equipment You Should Have for Gaming Channels [Gaming Gears]

1. Game Recording [Capture Card & Game Recording Software]

Game recording software, or hardware, is what you will use to capture your in-game footage. The worst thing you can do is try to point a camera at the screen of your computer or television; recording your screen directly is a must. What kind of game capture gear you need will depend on what kind of game you are playing.

For recording games on your computer screen, you may only need software, and there are a few quality game recording software out there for free. One popular option among YouTube gamers is called OBS , or ‘Open Broadcaster Software’. OBS is free to download from Obsproject.com. The thing that makes it great for gamers is it can be used for live streaming to YouTube, or other sharing sites like Twitch.tv (which has a focus on gaming videos).

For those who want to record the gameplay with ease and edit the recorded gameplay footage with the same tool, we recommend you to try Filmora , which is a 2-in-1 gameplay recording software and video editor on both Windows and Mac.

The advantages of using Filmora to record YouTube Gameplay video:

• Record 4K gameplay and high-space game
• Record gameplay and webcam at the same time
• Mark the important moment with the Marker feature when playing the game
• Basic video editing tools provide trimming, cutting, and merging features as well as annotation effects

If you are going to be making videos more related to consol games then you may need to invest in a Capture device. One of the best is the Elgato Game Capture HD60 featured above. It captures video directly onto either your Mac or PC, while a lot of the other top capture devices only work with a PC. It can record in 1080p with 60fps, and you can even live stream. The Elgato HD60 is compatible with PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the Wii U.

2. Audio Recording Devices

Your audio recording is extremely important. The thing that will set you apart from other people posting gaming commentary is your personality, and that will only come across if your videos have clear audio. It does not do you much good to be hilarious in a fuzzy commentary track.

A lot of YouTube gamers, especially gamers who are just starting to make videos, go with the Zalman ZM-Mic1 which can be used in combination with headphones. The Zalman might pick up background sounds, like mouse clicks, which is not ideal. However, it will give you significantly better audio than recording directly from your computer, and at under $10 it will not be a purchase you regret. The Zalman is a great starter-mic, especially if you download the free audio editing program Audacity and use it to clean up the little imperfections in your recording. Audacity can be downloaded at Audacityteam.org.

If you are looking for more control over your recording then you should consider the Blue Yeti Mic, which is featured above. This standalone mic is also used by a lot of vloggers and YouTube gamers. It has volume control and even a mute button. It plugs right into the USB drive of your computer using a ten-foot cable, which means you can take it pretty far from your computer. The Blue Yeti USB mic costs about $130.

Check our best list of audio recording devices: Best Microphones for YouTubers

3. Video Recording Devices

If you are going to add a facecam into your videos then it should be high quality, but it does not need to be a top-of-the-line 4K recording. Rather than buying a $1000 DSLR for reaction shots, you should go with a reliable webcam. Before you make a decision about what kind of webcam to get consider how often you will be using your facecam. Not all gaming videos need one. If you play a lot of survival horror games then your reactions will be a key element in your videos, but if you are not playing games that will cause you to have amusing reactions then a facecam will not really add anything to a viewer’s experience.

You may also like: how to use DSLR as a webcam

If your facecam is going to be an important element in your channel then you should expect to spend around $100 on your webcam. The above image is the Logitech C920, which is one of the best at this price point. It performs well in low light, has a good auto-focus feature, and the quality of its video recordings is quite high.

If you are only going to use a facecam occasionally then consider the Genius WideCam F100, which can be found online for around $30. Its 1080p HD recordings are not as smooth as they should be, but it performs very well at 720p and that is all you should need.

Check more options for the Best webcams for YouTuber

Conclusion

Once you have these gaming recording devices, you can now go to record a gameplay and upload it to YouTube. Before you move on, do check these 10 tips for shooting professional YouTube videos . In case you need to trim and edit the recorded gameplay video and present the most exciting moments, you can use some of the best video editing software for YouTube . Here, we recommend you try the Filmora video editor to achieve your goal.

Why choose Filmora to edit recorded YouTube gameplay videos?

• Intuitive interface for saving time
• Trim Video and Audio Quickly
• Record commentary and voiceover with ease or add royalty-free music sound from the Music Library
• 300+ stylish video effects built-in and more in Filmora Effect Store
• Upload to YouTube directly

In case you didn’t know Filmora before, here is a video tutorial for beginners about Filmora video editor, check and download it to edit your YouTube today.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

You love gaming, you have a lot of know-how to pass on, and you have a magnetic personality: you are ready to become a great YouTube gaming commentator. All you need is gaming gear. We have already listed some of the best YouTube video shooting equipment lists for starting recording videos, here we will run through some of the best YouTube equipment for gaming channels, sorted into categories for game recording, audio, and video (facecam).

YouTube Equipment You Should Have for Gaming Channels [Gaming Gears]

1. Game Recording [Capture Card & Game Recording Software]

Game recording software, or hardware, is what you will use to capture your in-game footage. The worst thing you can do is try to point a camera at the screen of your computer or television; recording your screen directly is a must. What kind of game capture gear you need will depend on what kind of game you are playing.

For recording games on your computer screen, you may only need software, and there are a few quality game recording software out there for free. One popular option among YouTube gamers is called OBS , or ‘Open Broadcaster Software’. OBS is free to download from Obsproject.com. The thing that makes it great for gamers is it can be used for live streaming to YouTube, or other sharing sites like Twitch.tv (which has a focus on gaming videos).

For those who want to record the gameplay with ease and edit the recorded gameplay footage with the same tool, we recommend you to try Filmora , which is a 2-in-1 gameplay recording software and video editor on both Windows and Mac.

The advantages of using Filmora to record YouTube Gameplay video:

• Record 4K gameplay and high-space game
• Record gameplay and webcam at the same time
• Mark the important moment with the Marker feature when playing the game
• Basic video editing tools provide trimming, cutting, and merging features as well as annotation effects

If you are going to be making videos more related to consol games then you may need to invest in a Capture device. One of the best is the Elgato Game Capture HD60 featured above. It captures video directly onto either your Mac or PC, while a lot of the other top capture devices only work with a PC. It can record in 1080p with 60fps, and you can even live stream. The Elgato HD60 is compatible with PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the Wii U.

2. Audio Recording Devices

Your audio recording is extremely important. The thing that will set you apart from other people posting gaming commentary is your personality, and that will only come across if your videos have clear audio. It does not do you much good to be hilarious in a fuzzy commentary track.

A lot of YouTube gamers, especially gamers who are just starting to make videos, go with the Zalman ZM-Mic1 which can be used in combination with headphones. The Zalman might pick up background sounds, like mouse clicks, which is not ideal. However, it will give you significantly better audio than recording directly from your computer, and at under $10 it will not be a purchase you regret. The Zalman is a great starter-mic, especially if you download the free audio editing program Audacity and use it to clean up the little imperfections in your recording. Audacity can be downloaded at Audacityteam.org.

If you are looking for more control over your recording then you should consider the Blue Yeti Mic, which is featured above. This standalone mic is also used by a lot of vloggers and YouTube gamers. It has volume control and even a mute button. It plugs right into the USB drive of your computer using a ten-foot cable, which means you can take it pretty far from your computer. The Blue Yeti USB mic costs about $130.

Check our best list of audio recording devices: Best Microphones for YouTubers

3. Video Recording Devices

If you are going to add a facecam into your videos then it should be high quality, but it does not need to be a top-of-the-line 4K recording. Rather than buying a $1000 DSLR for reaction shots, you should go with a reliable webcam. Before you make a decision about what kind of webcam to get consider how often you will be using your facecam. Not all gaming videos need one. If you play a lot of survival horror games then your reactions will be a key element in your videos, but if you are not playing games that will cause you to have amusing reactions then a facecam will not really add anything to a viewer’s experience.

You may also like: how to use DSLR as a webcam

If your facecam is going to be an important element in your channel then you should expect to spend around $100 on your webcam. The above image is the Logitech C920, which is one of the best at this price point. It performs well in low light, has a good auto-focus feature, and the quality of its video recordings is quite high.

If you are only going to use a facecam occasionally then consider the Genius WideCam F100, which can be found online for around $30. Its 1080p HD recordings are not as smooth as they should be, but it performs very well at 720p and that is all you should need.

Check more options for the Best webcams for YouTuber

Conclusion

Once you have these gaming recording devices, you can now go to record a gameplay and upload it to YouTube. Before you move on, do check these 10 tips for shooting professional YouTube videos . In case you need to trim and edit the recorded gameplay video and present the most exciting moments, you can use some of the best video editing software for YouTube . Here, we recommend you try the Filmora video editor to achieve your goal.

Why choose Filmora to edit recorded YouTube gameplay videos?

• Intuitive interface for saving time
• Trim Video and Audio Quickly
• Record commentary and voiceover with ease or add royalty-free music sound from the Music Library
• 300+ stylish video effects built-in and more in Filmora Effect Store
• Upload to YouTube directly

In case you didn’t know Filmora before, here is a video tutorial for beginners about Filmora video editor, check and download it to edit your YouTube today.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

You love gaming, you have a lot of know-how to pass on, and you have a magnetic personality: you are ready to become a great YouTube gaming commentator. All you need is gaming gear. We have already listed some of the best YouTube video shooting equipment lists for starting recording videos, here we will run through some of the best YouTube equipment for gaming channels, sorted into categories for game recording, audio, and video (facecam).

YouTube Equipment You Should Have for Gaming Channels [Gaming Gears]

1. Game Recording [Capture Card & Game Recording Software]

Game recording software, or hardware, is what you will use to capture your in-game footage. The worst thing you can do is try to point a camera at the screen of your computer or television; recording your screen directly is a must. What kind of game capture gear you need will depend on what kind of game you are playing.

For recording games on your computer screen, you may only need software, and there are a few quality game recording software out there for free. One popular option among YouTube gamers is called OBS , or ‘Open Broadcaster Software’. OBS is free to download from Obsproject.com. The thing that makes it great for gamers is it can be used for live streaming to YouTube, or other sharing sites like Twitch.tv (which has a focus on gaming videos).

For those who want to record the gameplay with ease and edit the recorded gameplay footage with the same tool, we recommend you to try Filmora , which is a 2-in-1 gameplay recording software and video editor on both Windows and Mac.

The advantages of using Filmora to record YouTube Gameplay video:

• Record 4K gameplay and high-space game
• Record gameplay and webcam at the same time
• Mark the important moment with the Marker feature when playing the game
• Basic video editing tools provide trimming, cutting, and merging features as well as annotation effects

If you are going to be making videos more related to consol games then you may need to invest in a Capture device. One of the best is the Elgato Game Capture HD60 featured above. It captures video directly onto either your Mac or PC, while a lot of the other top capture devices only work with a PC. It can record in 1080p with 60fps, and you can even live stream. The Elgato HD60 is compatible with PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the Wii U.

2. Audio Recording Devices

Your audio recording is extremely important. The thing that will set you apart from other people posting gaming commentary is your personality, and that will only come across if your videos have clear audio. It does not do you much good to be hilarious in a fuzzy commentary track.

A lot of YouTube gamers, especially gamers who are just starting to make videos, go with the Zalman ZM-Mic1 which can be used in combination with headphones. The Zalman might pick up background sounds, like mouse clicks, which is not ideal. However, it will give you significantly better audio than recording directly from your computer, and at under $10 it will not be a purchase you regret. The Zalman is a great starter-mic, especially if you download the free audio editing program Audacity and use it to clean up the little imperfections in your recording. Audacity can be downloaded at Audacityteam.org.

If you are looking for more control over your recording then you should consider the Blue Yeti Mic, which is featured above. This standalone mic is also used by a lot of vloggers and YouTube gamers. It has volume control and even a mute button. It plugs right into the USB drive of your computer using a ten-foot cable, which means you can take it pretty far from your computer. The Blue Yeti USB mic costs about $130.

Check our best list of audio recording devices: Best Microphones for YouTubers

3. Video Recording Devices

If you are going to add a facecam into your videos then it should be high quality, but it does not need to be a top-of-the-line 4K recording. Rather than buying a $1000 DSLR for reaction shots, you should go with a reliable webcam. Before you make a decision about what kind of webcam to get consider how often you will be using your facecam. Not all gaming videos need one. If you play a lot of survival horror games then your reactions will be a key element in your videos, but if you are not playing games that will cause you to have amusing reactions then a facecam will not really add anything to a viewer’s experience.

You may also like: how to use DSLR as a webcam

If your facecam is going to be an important element in your channel then you should expect to spend around $100 on your webcam. The above image is the Logitech C920, which is one of the best at this price point. It performs well in low light, has a good auto-focus feature, and the quality of its video recordings is quite high.

If you are only going to use a facecam occasionally then consider the Genius WideCam F100, which can be found online for around $30. Its 1080p HD recordings are not as smooth as they should be, but it performs very well at 720p and that is all you should need.

Check more options for the Best webcams for YouTuber

Conclusion

Once you have these gaming recording devices, you can now go to record a gameplay and upload it to YouTube. Before you move on, do check these 10 tips for shooting professional YouTube videos . In case you need to trim and edit the recorded gameplay video and present the most exciting moments, you can use some of the best video editing software for YouTube . Here, we recommend you try the Filmora video editor to achieve your goal.

Why choose Filmora to edit recorded YouTube gameplay videos?

• Intuitive interface for saving time
• Trim Video and Audio Quickly
• Record commentary and voiceover with ease or add royalty-free music sound from the Music Library
• 300+ stylish video effects built-in and more in Filmora Effect Store
• Upload to YouTube directly

In case you didn’t know Filmora before, here is a video tutorial for beginners about Filmora video editor, check and download it to edit your YouTube today.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

You love gaming, you have a lot of know-how to pass on, and you have a magnetic personality: you are ready to become a great YouTube gaming commentator. All you need is gaming gear. We have already listed some of the best YouTube video shooting equipment lists for starting recording videos, here we will run through some of the best YouTube equipment for gaming channels, sorted into categories for game recording, audio, and video (facecam).

YouTube Equipment You Should Have for Gaming Channels [Gaming Gears]

1. Game Recording [Capture Card & Game Recording Software]

Game recording software, or hardware, is what you will use to capture your in-game footage. The worst thing you can do is try to point a camera at the screen of your computer or television; recording your screen directly is a must. What kind of game capture gear you need will depend on what kind of game you are playing.

For recording games on your computer screen, you may only need software, and there are a few quality game recording software out there for free. One popular option among YouTube gamers is called OBS , or ‘Open Broadcaster Software’. OBS is free to download from Obsproject.com. The thing that makes it great for gamers is it can be used for live streaming to YouTube, or other sharing sites like Twitch.tv (which has a focus on gaming videos).

For those who want to record the gameplay with ease and edit the recorded gameplay footage with the same tool, we recommend you to try Filmora , which is a 2-in-1 gameplay recording software and video editor on both Windows and Mac.

The advantages of using Filmora to record YouTube Gameplay video:

• Record 4K gameplay and high-space game
• Record gameplay and webcam at the same time
• Mark the important moment with the Marker feature when playing the game
• Basic video editing tools provide trimming, cutting, and merging features as well as annotation effects

If you are going to be making videos more related to consol games then you may need to invest in a Capture device. One of the best is the Elgato Game Capture HD60 featured above. It captures video directly onto either your Mac or PC, while a lot of the other top capture devices only work with a PC. It can record in 1080p with 60fps, and you can even live stream. The Elgato HD60 is compatible with PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the Wii U.

2. Audio Recording Devices

Your audio recording is extremely important. The thing that will set you apart from other people posting gaming commentary is your personality, and that will only come across if your videos have clear audio. It does not do you much good to be hilarious in a fuzzy commentary track.

A lot of YouTube gamers, especially gamers who are just starting to make videos, go with the Zalman ZM-Mic1 which can be used in combination with headphones. The Zalman might pick up background sounds, like mouse clicks, which is not ideal. However, it will give you significantly better audio than recording directly from your computer, and at under $10 it will not be a purchase you regret. The Zalman is a great starter-mic, especially if you download the free audio editing program Audacity and use it to clean up the little imperfections in your recording. Audacity can be downloaded at Audacityteam.org.

If you are looking for more control over your recording then you should consider the Blue Yeti Mic, which is featured above. This standalone mic is also used by a lot of vloggers and YouTube gamers. It has volume control and even a mute button. It plugs right into the USB drive of your computer using a ten-foot cable, which means you can take it pretty far from your computer. The Blue Yeti USB mic costs about $130.

Check our best list of audio recording devices: Best Microphones for YouTubers

3. Video Recording Devices

If you are going to add a facecam into your videos then it should be high quality, but it does not need to be a top-of-the-line 4K recording. Rather than buying a $1000 DSLR for reaction shots, you should go with a reliable webcam. Before you make a decision about what kind of webcam to get consider how often you will be using your facecam. Not all gaming videos need one. If you play a lot of survival horror games then your reactions will be a key element in your videos, but if you are not playing games that will cause you to have amusing reactions then a facecam will not really add anything to a viewer’s experience.

You may also like: how to use DSLR as a webcam

If your facecam is going to be an important element in your channel then you should expect to spend around $100 on your webcam. The above image is the Logitech C920, which is one of the best at this price point. It performs well in low light, has a good auto-focus feature, and the quality of its video recordings is quite high.

If you are only going to use a facecam occasionally then consider the Genius WideCam F100, which can be found online for around $30. Its 1080p HD recordings are not as smooth as they should be, but it performs very well at 720p and that is all you should need.

Check more options for the Best webcams for YouTuber

Conclusion

Once you have these gaming recording devices, you can now go to record a gameplay and upload it to YouTube. Before you move on, do check these 10 tips for shooting professional YouTube videos . In case you need to trim and edit the recorded gameplay video and present the most exciting moments, you can use some of the best video editing software for YouTube . Here, we recommend you try the Filmora video editor to achieve your goal.

Why choose Filmora to edit recorded YouTube gameplay videos?

• Intuitive interface for saving time
• Trim Video and Audio Quickly
• Record commentary and voiceover with ease or add royalty-free music sound from the Music Library
• 300+ stylish video effects built-in and more in Filmora Effect Store
• Upload to YouTube directly

In case you didn’t know Filmora before, here is a video tutorial for beginners about Filmora video editor, check and download it to edit your YouTube today.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Expert Tips for Enhancing YouTube Videos Through SEO Mastery

YouTube SEO Guide: How to Improve Search Rankings For Your YouTube Videos

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

• The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
• How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
• The Metadata Process
• Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
• How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

Suggested Videos

The platform offers video suggestions that cover topics similar to those of the videos you already watched. Once more, the title and the description you provided will play a crucial role in driving more traffic to your videos, so make sure that each video you post on YouTube has an effective title that will spark interest in a potential viewer to take action and actually watch the video.

Suggested videos that appear next to the video

Suggested videos that appear after the video

Suggested videos that appear from links in a video description.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

• On Video (Metadata)
• Recommendations
• Channel
• User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

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