SEO your YouTube videos – How to use AdWords Keyword Planner

The reason why you need to SEO your videos

There are two ways for your YouTube videos to become viral. Number one, you have to be lucky enough that people get to like at least one of your videos very much and it gets high watch time. A video with high watch time is considered to be having quality content and thus will be suggested to even more YouTube users. And once one of your videos becomes popular, it will make your whole channel popular as well with just course of time, that’s for sure. The second way your YouTube videos could become viral is through proper SEO.

Although in most of the cases this actually is ‘semi viral’, which means that your ‘Search Engine Optimized’ videos will be presented before the right (interested) audience to watch them. If they find the content to be relevant and valuable or entertaining, they will give positive feedback. In that case, these videos will be presented to even more YouTube users. If 80%-90% of them give positive feedback again, then chances are that your SEO videos are finally going to be all viral. If not ‘fully viral’ compared to the videos of the most successful channels on YouTube, then they will at least fetch you handsome earnings, rest assured about that.

Similarities between SEO a YouTube video and SEO a blog

Many people think that SEOing YouTube videos is a lot different than SEOing a blog article. Well, there are some differences indeed. But they have 80%-90% features in common. Let’s discuss the common things first.

In order to SEO an article or a YouTube video, you have to choose a focus keyword. For example for this particular article, the focus keyword I have chosen is SEO itself. I surely could have chosen another word or phrase for focus keyword like ‘keyword planner’ in this case. I actually had done a little bit of keyword research to choose the optimum keyword. And I did that using Google AdWords. I’m going to teach you guys how to do that in a latter part of this article.

Now once you have chosen your focus keyword, you should start writing the article or the video description. You have to maintain a proper keyword density throughout your writing copy. A keyword density of 0.7%-2% is good, in my view. A keyword density less than 0.5% is not effective, whereas a density over 2.5% can actually damage the SEO status of your article or video description.

Other points to remember while doing SEO

You have to use the focus keyword in the title of your article or video: preferably in the beginning. Another thing is that you have to divide the copy in several paragraphs. The first paragraph must contain the focus keyword. Try to insert headings and subheadings in your copy. In case of an article it’s a must and in case of YouTube video, this is kind of optional. If subheadings are used, then try to put the focus keyword in them.

Also keyword should vary from video to video or article from article. You must not use the same keyword in multiple videos on your YouTube channel or multiple articles of your blog. A good length of your article or video description is must for good SEO score. A minimum length of 300 words is good here. Also outbound links play an important role when it comes to SEO. In your video description you can put links to your social media pages and your websites, if any. In case of a blog, you can provide outbound links to your YouTube videos (like I do); also the ads shown here probably serve the same purpose.

Differences between YouTube videos and blog articles in the context of SEO

The number one difference is that the length of your video description should vary from 250 to 300 words. It shouldn’t be more than 300 words, whereas you can have an article length of as many words as you like. In fact, the lengthier your article is, the better; provided that it doesn’t contain any unnecessary ‘gibberish’.

You should provide one or more images on your blog article and they should contain title attribute too. But there is no way you can insert an image in a YouTube video description. I believe the thumbnail used on a video serves the purpose of it’s SEO.

In case of a blog article, you should provide a meta description which has to contain the focus keyword. But there is no such option on a YouTube video (the metadata of a YouTube video is a lot different scenario. Below is the link to an article which describes what metadata is for a YouTube video and also how it can be misleading).

Metadata: When it becomes misleading and leads your YouTube account to termination

The focus keyword should be present in the url of the blog article, which doesn’t apply for a YouTube video. Again, in case of a blog article you should provide internal links, like those to other articles on your blog. Whereas, you shouldn’t possibly put links to other videos of your channel in the video description. This should be done by using cards.

Use AdWords to find suitable keywords and tags

Although there are other tools and web services to find suitable keywords and tags for your YouTube videos and blog articles, but I would strongly suggest you to use ‘Google AdWords’ instead. It is the best keyword finding tool not only in my view, but also to most other SEO experts. Let us now learn how to use it.

First you have to sign in to your AdWords account. Recently they have made changes in the dashboard interface. You should go to the portion with three vertical dots and click on it. A menu will open where you’ll be clicking on ‘Keyword planner’, then a page will open in a new tab.

Now you need to click on the link saying ‘Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category’. You’ll be provided with a few blank spaces, where you need to type your options. In most cases, typing the title of your YouTube video or blog article is just enough. And you have to do it in the box that says ‘Your product or service’.

After that you have to hit the blue ‘Get ideas’ button below, and you will have some search results. You could be using some of the results as tags in your YouTube video or blog article (I’m going to do the same for this article). Also when I’ll be preparing a YouTube video with the same title and content, I’ll be using some of these tags – the most popular ones.

Choose the best and the most popular keywords to serve SEO

Now that you know how to find keywords related to your particular YouTube video or blog article, you have to choose the best and the popular related keywords. Out of these, choose one as your SEO keyword (aka focus keyword) which you are going to focus in video description or article copy. The rest popular keywords could be used as tags.

For your information, I previously ran a search on AdWords using keywords like SEO and keyword planner. I had some results out of which I chose SEO as the focus keyword. Now after selecting my article title and running a search with that, I’m going to use a few results as tags on this article. If you’re a YouTuber, you could use such keywords as tags on your video, as I previously mentioned.

The keywords with most search numbers like 10K-100K or 1K-10K are supposed to be the most popular ones. Nevertheless, keywords which have low search frequency but are very close to your particular theme, could be selected as well. Besides the search frequency, there is another option which shows competition: low, medium or high. In ideal situation, you should be selecting keywords with low or medium competition, for reasons I’ll be describing may be in a future article. (FYI, I prefer to cover the first three pages of search results)

SEO keywords you shouldn’t choose

In my opinion, you shouldn’t choose more than 15 tags for a YouTube video and 20/25 keywords to use as tags for a blog article. Also once you have the search results on AdWords, you might see some mouth watering and frequently searched keywords which are remotely related with your copy (article or video description). You shouldn’t choose these as tags for your copy, because choosing so may harm the SEO status of your article and lead your YouTube channel to termination.

For example, upon running  an AdWords search on the title of this article, I too found some mouth watering keywords as ‘youtube hot videos 2016’ with search frequency of 10k-100k. But I didn’t select this as a tag, because this search keyword is no way related with my current article. Also I found another keyword name ‘youtube generator’ with a good search frequency. But I didn’t accept this as a tag either, because I was not sure whether this one was relevant to my article or not. You should keep these points in your head while selecting keywords/tags for your YouTube channel/blog article.

That’s all for this article. If you have properly gone through this, then I believe you should be able to learn to SEO both your YouTube videos and blog articles correctly.

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