With YouTube as one of the most popular social media platforms, companies have a great opportunity to be discovered by customers. If you want to do YouTube marketing, you need a YouTube channel, which of course you have to maintain, add suitable content to and optimize. Part of the strategic marketing includes the optimization of videos for organic findability via the Google video carousel. In this post we want to discover how this works.
What is the YouTube video carousel?
The video carousels are interactive fields with videos that appear when users are looking for something specific. In the best case scenario, your YouTube video will be organically visible in the ad upon request. In mobile search, the video carousels take up almost the entire screen.
Why is the YouTube video carousel so important?
Videos have a high conversion rate. YouTube has around 1.9 billion users. Around 77% of Germans watch YouTube videos at least rarely 1 . In a survey, a full 12% said they often watch YouTube videos in order to use the explanations of products, tests or descriptions before deciding to buy a product 2 . This makes it clear why video marketing should be part of every marketing strategy today. The most important thing is to be found by your customers. The placement in the YouTube video carousel creates the best conditions to attract attention and make your brand better known.
The good news is that SEO optimization on YouTube takes less time than you know from other SEO measures. With the right optimization, the YouTube video will be placed in the YouTube video carousel within a few weeks and you will have the opportunity to improve your channel views directly. But what does it take when you want to jump on the carousel?
The video title for your YouTube video
Enter the title of your video in the “Title” field when you upload it. This is an important element from an SEO perspective. Therefore, you should choose the title carefully.
The video title should be a good mix of a creative message and the most important keywords. The characters are limited to 100, which really leaves little room for maneuver.
Our tips for a title of your video:
- It should always contain the relevant keyword.
- If there are brands such as names, brands or products in your video, add them to the title.
- Add numbers. These attract more attention.
- Questions always cut a good figure to arouse curiosity.
- Use how-to titles for instructions and instructions.
Tip: How to find a suitable keyword
If you don’t have ideas for the keyword for your video title, go back to your keyword pool and use keywords that you know will be searched for frequently. The search heroes will be happy to help you find the right keyword.
The longer description for your YouTube video
You can let off steam in the video description field. Up to 5,000 characters are available here and you should use them. So enter as detailed a description of your video as possible here. Why? Search engines always crawl the content on the page and evaluate it based on the ranking factors.
Our tips for your video description:
- Creating a script
If your video is an interview or webinar, you can create a detailed description based on the spoken text. - Use semantic analysis
With the semantic analysis, you have the option of having Google analyze search details and compare them with other content that is relevant to your target topic. The Text Optimizer tool is suitable for this. - Use timestamps
You can add clickable timestamps on YouTube. This creates links in which the video is opened at a predefined time. This gives users the opportunity to only share or discuss certain scenes or passages.
How to create a YouTube timestamp:
- Play the video until you want the scene to open.
- At this point, stop the video.
- Enter the time in the video description as it can be seen in the video player.
With the timestamp you give your users the opportunity to interact with the video and the content and thus increase the click rate.
Include tags and hashtags
Use tags to categorize your video. They help the search engines to better classify what your video is about. You have space for up to 500 characters and you can use it to the full.
You should also set hashtags. These can be incorporated anywhere in the video description. A maximum of 15 hashtags are allowed.
The tags are mainly used for YouTube search ranking. Hashtags, on the other hand, are displayed as a visible part of the page and send relevance signals to the search engines.
Create eye-catching video thumbnails
The video thumbnails are displayed directly in the carousel on Google, making them an important element for your video.
The picture should of course fit your company and your target group. We would be happy to help you develop your own style in order to increase the recognition value and thus place good videos in the long term.
Conclusion
When optimizing YouTube videos, you should be strategic and optimize your content so that the right characters are sent to the search engines. Title, keywords, video description, tags and hashtags, and the thumbnail are important elements. Do you have any questions or would you like to chat about your video marketing over coffee and cake? Do not hesitate to contact us ! We like to ride a carousel.
