Recent YouTube statistics indicate that people around the world are spending more time consuming videos on YouTube than watching TV. The platform has grown to become the leading source of video content on the planet as viewers increasingly use it to discover content.

As a marketer or business owner, this presents a great opportunity for you to gain authority in your industry and grow your reach. You obviously won’t just publish videos and sit back and wait for results.

“You have to get ahead of the curb, and one way to do this is to optimize your channel,” says EWR Digital Marketing Company, who specializes in web design, SEO, and videography. “That’s no easy task for anyone who’s just getting started on the platform. But that also shouldn’t be an excuse to remain stuck with your video SEO.”  With that in mind, here are three tactics you can implement and see great results.

Optimize content with keywords

Ask anyone who runs a business site about content creation and they’ll tell you keywords are a crucial part of digital marketing. In fact, search engines can’t match internet users with the most useful and valuable content available without keywords. Well, the same applies to your YouTube video content. Here’s the thing — you can’t just wake up and start creating content around some random subject that comes to mind.

• Who is your audience?
• And what subjects, topics, or themes are they interested in?

The only way to find answers to these questions is by keeping your ears on the ground and staying in touch with your audience. And here’s how to go about it:

1. Open the YouTube website
2. Find the website’s search field and enter your topic of interest or a niche-specific keyword
3. You’ll quickly see a long list of potential related searches and suggestions even before you finish typing your phrase. List them down.
4. Incorporate as many variations of the keyword phrases as possible and list down all the relevant/related terms.

The goal is to gather as much information as possible about your audience before you can narrow your focus to the most relevant keywords.

Use the following tips to optimize your videos:

Add captions and transcripts

As a content creator, you should do everything possible to communicate with viewers in a clear and interesting manner. And adding accurate captions and transcripts will help you do exactly that.

Remember there’s millions of videos and playlists on YouTube. Including transcripts and captions is a great way to not only be more engaging but also stand out. Plus, it makes it possible for search algorithms to crawl the text and index your content accordingly. This will eventually improve your organic search rankings.

Target specific keywords in your video

Transcripts allow your audience to closely follow your message, giving them an opportunity to quickly pick what they think is more valuable or resonates with their needs.

As mentioned, search engines can only index text and, as such, incorporating video transcripts make it possible for them to ingest your spoken content and index it accordingly. Therefore, it’s crucial that you try to find enough opportunities to target specific keywords when creating your content.

By incorporating these keyword phrases in your videos — and taking time to create transcripts for each video — you allow search engines to index your content. As a result, your videos will rank highly, becoming more discoverable.

Add keyword to your video titles and descriptions

Think about the last time you visited YouTube. You most likely searched for whatever you were looking for and had to select a video from a long list of videos. You ignored anything with a long, vague title and only clicked on videos with short and clear titles.  This is exactly what happens with every other YouTube user.

Incorporate the most gripping details about your video right away in the title. Make it short and compelling. You can do this by simply including your primary keyword phrases naturally in the title (and file name).

Here’s a format you should consider using: 1^st target keyword, 2^nd keyword | your brand name.

The reason you’re including a video description is to provide viewers with more information about the video or your business. Such information may include links to your site, other videos, or business promos. You could also provide a brief summary of the video.

Take advantage of Keyword Tags

Without tags, search engines wouldn’t know what your video is about. It’s important that you include the most relevant phrases to maximize your video SEO. But you don’t want to go overboard with your keyword tags. Also, be careful not to include dozens of irrelevant terms as this can be confusing to the algorithm and could hurt your video SEO.

Five to ten relevant tags in each video are just enough. It’s recommended that you have your primary keyword as the first tag, followed by any other specific, relevant phrases. You can then add a few variations after that. Consider drawing inspiration from other videos that are already ranking highly on a similar theme or topic. YouTube’s auto-suggest feature can be useful as well.

You really shouldn’t focus all your efforts on writing video tags for viewers. This is because they are a subtle aspect of video SEO and it’s unlikely they’ll be discovered or seen by viewers. Simply focus on using relevant keyword phrases in your tags.

Analyze Your Metrics

You probably already know that it’s important to track YouTube analytics. In fact, you wouldn’t know the impact of your marketing efforts on the platform without taking the time to analyze your video performance. And it’s by analyzing YouTube metrics that you can measure success and grow your channel.

Whether your goal is to grow your reach or increase revenue, you can only achieve your objectives by looking at the raw data available and drawing insights from it. Engagement and audience retention are two very important metrics that every content creator should track and analyze.

• Engagement. To evaluate your videos’ overall performance, you’ll need to review your channel’s engagement reports.
• Audience retention. In the audience retention report, you’ll see how engaged both your subscribers and users have been as a whole. You’ll also see how much of your video content your viewers watch.