Youtube SEO Checklist

Why is Youtube SEO important?

Let me know if this sounds familiar – you’ve got a good grasp of how to operate your company’s social media channels. You know what you’re doing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram…but what about Youtube?

The video platform is a bit different than other social media companies. Even if you know how to make a great video and curate playlists, getting your videos in front of eyeballs can be tough. Just like Google, Youtube has its own search engine with its own algorithm and optimization for this search engine can be tricky to get just right. When you’re just getting familiar with it, you have a lot of concerns:

• How do I make great videos that subscribers will like?
• Should my company’s channel be monetized?
• How do I know if something is a ranking factor in a Youtube search?
• Does my thumbnail image affect SEO?
• How do I get even more subscribers?

So what do you do? You look at everybody’s “Super Ultra Fantastic Guide to Youtube Search Engine Optimization” and you’re just as lost as when you began. If you want something actionable and helpful instead, try our Youtube SEO checklist.

What’s in this checklist?

This checklist is not just a long list of SEO tips, it’s a step by step guide to take you from nothing to full optimization on your Youtube channel. We’ll help you to do this by:

• Making sure you are using the right tools
• Figuring out when and how to monetize your videos (and when not to)
• Optimizing your video title, description, tags, thumbnails
• Everything else to get your videos ranking and increase subscribers

How should you use this checklist?

This checklist is best for when you are just starting your Youtube channel for a business, whether it’s yours, your employer’s, or a client’s. If you already have an existing Youtube channel, no problem. This will still be super helpful, you can just skip over part of the first of the following steps:

1. Setup your Youtube channel in a search engine friendly way (even if your channel is set up, you might want to take a look at this to see if you missed anything)
2. Do your keyword research! This is a very important step that is easy to forget, but it won’t matter how good your videos are if the search volume for your keyword is too low. We recommend you use YT Cockpit or Keyword Tool to do your keyword research for Youtube, instead of a tool like KWFinder.
3. Use this checklist to make sure you are producing great video content that subscribers will like.
4. Follow the rest of the steps to fine tune your channel and each video you produce (uploading the right thumbnail, writing a good Youtube video description)
5. Come back to this checklist whenever you are creating a new video or starting a channel from scratch

More about Youtube marketing…

Writing a good video title is just one part of maximizing the platform for your business. There are a variety of other things you can do on Youtube like organizing groups of videos into playlists. Playlists are useful for grouping videos or for videos that should go in a particular order.

Regardless of whether something is specifically a ranking factor in the Youtube serps, there are a variety of other things to consider here, like watch time, a video’s CTR or click through rate, and retention of subscribers, which are all important for effectively marketing on Youtube. To really increase views on your videos, you can increase the chances of your video becoming a “suggested video” on the side panel by using certain chrome extensions or tools like vidiq.