How Do You Rank Number 1 on YouTube? YouTube SEO Explained in Five Minutes

How do videos help SEO?

Video is absolutely the future of SEO, and anyone who disagrees with me is frankly an idiot. I will stand by that all day long.

Most SEO agencies are not recommending video, just because the barrier to entry is making the video. The challenge is that we will say to somebody, we need videos for this topic, and they do not want to go on camera necessarily. Or it gets very expensive, because you have to get actors and production quality. Then if there is a marketing team and a management team it all has to go through them, and suddenly, oh, we are not doing video. That is the challenge.

But it is also the advantage. There is a massive opportunity for people to use video in SEO, and it is hands down the single best SEO tactic you can use this year. It has never been easier to make video anyway. Make it cheap, on a phone, with a decent bit of lighting. It does not have to be in a studio. The bottom line is, as we have talked about in previous videos, subtitles, keywords, audience engagement.

How do you check your YouTube SEO?

Download a tool such as VidIQ. Then go into your YouTube Studio, open the dashboard, go into the particular piece of content, and scroll right down to the bottom.

You will see all of the tags you have put into your video, which are effectively the keywords you are trying to rank for. You will see little numbers against each one, and that tells you where each video is ranking.

Which on-page element carries the most weight?

On YouTube it is the title. In traditional SEO it would be the H1 tag, the heading of the page, the title of the page. Obviously it also matters that the SEO flows, from paragraph to header to paragraph, and the content within that H2 tag.

You do not have any of that sort of thing on YouTube yet. Maybe it will come. So effectively it is the title. Make sure the title is right, because that is the first thing YouTube is reading.

Is it worth making backlinks from videos on YouTube?

Yes, a link from the video absolutely helps. We have already seen in some client campaigns that launched this week, which were sponsored posts, so a video on a topic with the product placement in the description. On a video that has had 90,000 to 100,000 views, the sponsor of the video has had a couple of hundred click-throughs to their site and is getting enquiries from that. So that link will help with SEO.

The other thing you want to do is make sure that within the link you use anchor text. In good old SEO, the anchor text is the clickable words, the words that are actually linked, and what they say. In the example we have used before, best barbecues. As long as you have got those words in that text and people can click it, Google then gets a signal from the anchor text.

It is not as important nowadays as it used to be, but within the text that is clickable in the video description, try and use your keywords if you can. I always use the Dave Brailsford analogy: as long as you can make a one per cent improvement in something, you are going to get hundreds of per cent improvement in the long term. So do not be lazy. Use your keywords correctly, use them in the links, and links from within the video descriptions work really well.

What else is working on YouTube right now?

The community tab. It is designed for discussion, for creators to release previews of videos, and it is sort of trying to be YouTube's version of Twitter. Nobody started using it, it was literally a complete flop, but it is still there, and putting links into those community posts can actually make a big difference as well.