It’s not surprising that most of the people forget about the fact that you can do SEO on this video platform. If you don’t know where to start, Republic Network offers you good advices and some steps to follow thus you can start to optimize SEO on YouTube.
What is SEO on YouTube?
If you don’t know where the acronym of SEO comes from, it comes from “Search Engine Optimization”. This is how you call all the strategies and tools that you use to make your content appear higher in the search engines.
So, in order to make your videos appear higher in YouTube, you will need to improve your SEO. Maybe you don’t know how to improve SEO on YouTube, but YouTube itself explained that it pays attention to the keywords and the engagement of your videos.
Therefore, to get started, you have two concepts that you can’t ignore:
- Choose the keywords you want to be identified with
- Create a captivating strategy to engage the viewers
In addition, when we talk about music videos it doesn’t change how SEO works but maybe you want to know how music works on YouTube because it will give you a lot of advantages and tips about this type of video content.
How to improve SEO on YouTube
- Update your profile
Before starting with your SEO, the first thing you have to do is to update your profile and complete it to the end. This is because YouTube takes your profile as a way to know more about you and what you do in YouTube therefore they can recommend your channel to different users.
Talking about music YouTube channels again, you can search information about how to get an official artist channel on YouTube because, as we explained to you before, it will give you advantages related to uploading music to this platform.
- Choose keywords wisely
Choose carefully the keywords you want your content to be identified with and your audience search purpose This is like making a research of what people write in the Search Engines when they are looking for something specifically. This is known as keyword research.
Now there are a lot of websites such as Semrush or KeywordTool that have tools to do keyword research. Within five minutes you will know what keywords can help you optimize your YouTube channel.
- Organize your videos
With an eye toward improving your SEO on YouTube, you can plan your release with these 4 tips in order to have in mind the keywords you want to use in the moment you are preparing your video.
Also, we recommend you start your videos with something that catches the attention of your subscribers. YouTube takes into account how long the users stay watching your video. In consequence, you need to think about your audience and how to make them stay until the end of the video.
Prepare your SEO on YouTube before the release of the video
- Engagement: make your subscribers love you
On YouTube, the engagement works as it does in other Social Media. In this sense, your goal is that the content of your video is attractive and eye-catching. It’s important that your subscribers leave likes, comments and share your videos, so you will have to think how you can do this.
Tips for SEO on YouTube for music videos
You already know the first steps to YouTube SEO but we want to share some good tips for music videos because they work a little bit differently than other content. Accordingly, for music videos, you have to pay special attention to the things you can control the most: title, description and tags.
Best titles for YouTube music videos
If you are thinking about how to write the best titles for YouTube music videos, there is an easy way to do it step by step and your channel will look more professional.
Give a twist to your title
First, you have to remember the keywords that you have chosen for your video and have them in mind all the time. The problem is that, in music videos, it is more difficult to introduce them in the title thus you have to be tricky.
For example, imagine that you have planned to upload a series of videos all along the month and they’re all acoustic live versions of your songs. In this case, it could be interesting to use keywords such as “acoustic version” or “live” in the title.
By doing this, if a person wants to listen to acoustic live music while having dinner with friends at home, there are more possibilities that your song will show up although they didn’t know your music. Do you see how SEO works?
Apart from this little tip, you just have to remember to always write your stage name and the title of the song. If the song appears in an album, you could write it too in the title.
Title, description, and tags are key to SEO on YouTube
Don’t forget about the file name!
Something that works for a better SEO in YouTube is to take care of the file name of the video you are going to upload.
Our tip is that you should try to avoid that the video name is “GjhD687JG.mov” and, instead of something like that, type your stage name and the song title.
Descriptions that works on YouTube
One tip that will help you write the descriptions of your videos is to remember that the first 250 characters are the key part. This happens because the part of the description that is left will be hidden behind the “Read more” button and, consequently, it is more complicated that users read it.
Also, we recommend that you use your keywords two or three times within this 250 characters. However, you have to be careful and don’t type them much more times, because Google and YouTube can penalize your channel thinking that your video is spam.
Show your Social Media
While writing your description, you shouldn’t forget your Social Media and your website in case you have one. In order to promote your new music, the best you can do is to announce it on different Social Media.
If you think that your video may need some help to get more audience you can always learn more about Google Ads and how it works, because it is the best way to promote something on Google and Social Media.
Be careful with the subtitles of your video
Last but not least, a good practice to optimize your videos that YouTube loves is to write the subtitles manually and not let the automatic translator do it for you. When YouTube sees that you dedicated time to write the right subtitles it will recommend your videos more often.
Most searched tags on YouTube
Talking about tags, they are a useful tool to optimize the position of your videos on the platform as they help YouTube to understand the content of your video and can organize them in the “Related videos” space when a user is watching similar videos.
Tags and hashtags are not the same
Before you start looking for tags, you have to remember that YouTube tags are not hashtags. Used to other Social Media, a lot of people write tags as if they were hashtags so, for example, their tags on YouTube looks like this: #CalifornianCountryMusic.
Tags are a different tool thus they let you write them with spaces. All that you have to do is to write a comma between the tags. Therefore, if you write “Californian Country Music, Colombian Artist” your tags will look like “Californian Country Music” and “Colombian Artist”.
Organize the tags of your videos
Like you have done with the keywords, you have to think about the tags you want before uploading the video. We recommend you to write general and specific information. In other words, you should add your stage name, your album name, your music genre and even your city if that helps to engage a specific audience.
After that, you can make a list of the words that you think the users write when searching for your music in order to create a clear image of your musical content on the Internet.
For example, if your videos consist of acoustic piano versions with a relaxing rhythm, maybe you are interested in using tags such as “relaxing music” or “background music”. By doing this, you ensure that more people end up on your videos.
Another tip that a lot of music channels do is to consciously select some tags and write them in all their videos. Accordingly, it is more probable that your videos appear in the “suggested” section when someone clicks on your video.
YouTube Tag Finders
As it happens with keywords, you can do a YouTube tag research too. If you want to, you can use the same tools that we told you before such as KeywordTool, for example.
On the other hand, you can use more specific websites such as RapidTags or YouTube TagsGenerator because their goal is to measure and position the best tags for the videos on this social media.
Once you have the chosen tags and keywords for your videos, add them in the different sections without forgetting our tips and you will probably see in a few weeks how your videos are more optimized on YouTube.
Always take care of your content and your audience
A common problem among the music channels is that a lot of people re-upload some music videos without the consent of the artist.
Although YouTube tries to prevent this to happen with different methods of penalization, there are technologies such as Content ID that allows Google to have your videos on their database as yours.
From Republic Network we encourage you to read this article if you want to know what Content ID is and how to make money with it because it has many advantages that can help you out with your content.
Many content creators, especially music content creators are concerned about all their videos being registered through Content ID since it tracks your content and notifies you if someone is using it without your permission.
Take care of your subscribers to keep a good engagement
Be original and surprise your subscribers
As a last tip in order to improve the engagement of your music channel, we suggest that you always encourage your subscribers to “like”, comment, share and save your videos on their playlists.
The different YouTube’s content creators make up some activities or “games” with their viewers to encourage them to write comments on the videos. For example, you can say to your subscribers that if they write a comment telling what part of the lyrics is their favorite, you will answer them explaining how you got inspired to write it.
In conclusion, you have to do a strategic research to optimize your videos before you upload them to YouTube. Take care of the titles, the descriptions and the tags but, especially, take care of your viewers with original ideas and eye-catching promotion.
By following these tips, in not much time you will see how your videos appear higher on those precious first places on the YouTube Search Engine.
