Understanding The Youtube Ecosystem that comprises creators, viewers, and advertisers is of utmost importance to yield benefits. The three together run YouTube, and the success of your YouTube channel highly depends on how you optimize your video content around the three elements of the YouTube ecosystem.

To help you design a proper optimization plan for your YouTube channel and videos, we have curated this guide to take you through ten such SEO strategies for YouTube to increase viewership, traffic, and subscribers on your channel and make you successful.

10 YouTube SEO practices To Make You A Successful YouTuber

1) Pay attention to behavior metrics:

YouTube algorithm leans heavily on user behavior metrics compared to search traffic. For instance, the YouTube recommendation engine accounts for roughly 70% of all the traffic generated on the platform.

The behavior metrics that you should focus on are:

Percentage Watched: Create such an interesting video that the viewers watch at least 50-60% of it.
Watch Time: You should play around with story arcs because traditional story arcs have gone down in popularity as people want shorter arcs than those made for a film or TV.
Click-Through Rate: Optimizing your video title and thumbnail images.

2) Keyword Research:

When searching for YouTube keyword research ideas, it is advantageous to use the YouTube auto-suggest option. For that, you need to enter a keyword in the search bar of the YouTube platform, and it will come up with related keyword suggestions, which will somewhat be similar when typing a query into Google.

3) You should add links to your YouTube channel banner:

To add links to your YouTube channel, you need to open your channel and choose the option “Customize Channel.” From there, click on the “About” tab, and from the resultant drop-down menu, select “Links.” Now, choose the pencil icon that will let you add links. The links that you add to your channel will appear on the right corner of your channel art’s bottom part.

4) It would be best if you used target keywords for your video filename:

Before uploading your video on your YouTube channel, you must smartly place your targeted keyword in the filename of your video. Then, YouTube can read and understand your filename that helps it perceive the type of video content you provide more accurately.

5) Go for closed captions:

Adding closed captions to your YouTube videos can be helpful from an SEO point of view because search engines can crawl through closed captions. Moreover, YouTube monitors the number of statements very closely and closed captions influence viewer numbers greatly. Please do not make a mistake while adding the caption because it needs to be accurate to be effective.

6) Your YouTube channel structure must be outstanding:

All love proper structure and organization. Therefore, once you have uploaded a sufficient number of videos, you can now organize your channel and structure it to provide the best user experience. For example, YouTube allows its creators to have up to10 sections for each channel.

7) Insert channel keywords:

Channel keywords are helpful as it makes it easy for the viewers to discover you and increase your content’s visibility. To set up a channel keyword on YouTube, you have to select the profile icon on your YouTube channel, available on the top-right corner, and select “Creator Studio” from the menu. Now, select the option “Channel > Advanced” and then the “Channel Keywords” section to add keywords that connect with your video content.

8) Optimizing video tags and descriptions is also important:

Optimizing your YouTube video tags and descriptions means adding your target keywords in your video descriptions and tags. This addition helps your viewers search your videos based on the keywords they are using. In addition, the optimized description would help your viewers to understand what your video is about.

9) Enable embedding option for videos:

Enabling the embed option for your YouTube video will increase viewers’ exposure and engagement on your YouTube videos. In addition, with this function switched on, you will encourage your viewers to publish your video on their digital platforms, such as blogs, websites, etc. To allow the embedding function to work on your channel, click on YouTube’s “Video Manager” option and select “Edit” available for the video you want to switch on the embedding tool. After that, go to “Advanced Settings” and tick on the “Allow Embedding” tab.

10) Look for the optimal video length:

The best video length for a YouTube video does not fit into a one-size-fits-all approach because the length relies on the type of content you are producing. The ideal YouTube video length should be between 15 to 17 minutes, six seconds for bumper video ads, and between 15 to 20 seconds for pre-roll video ads. The best way to confirm the best video length for your YouTube video is by experimenting with different video lengths and then analyzing the metrics.

Winding-Up

To grow your YouTube channel and become a successful YouTuber, your channel and videos require proper management and optimization to attract more viewership. Therefore, besides creating a compelling content video, you should also follow the above 10 SEO practices and see wonders that would follow.