Gaining Traction: Effective SEO Techniques for YouTube Videos

YouTube SEO Guide: How to Improve Search Rankings For Your YouTube Videos

Richard Bennett

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

If there exists searches, there exists SEO. YouTube now is the second largest search engine which processes more than 3 billion searches in a single month. Besides making sure that each video you upload to YouTube offers thought-provoking content, you can also optimize the video in accordance with the rules of SEO to stand out from the 500 hours of videos uploaded per minutes.

If you are trying to learn more about the SEO optimization of YouTube videos, you’ve landed on the right page, because in this guide we are going to take you through the process of improving the search rankings for each video you upload to YouTube.

YouTube SEO Guide

Quick Jump Menu:

The guide covers these five aspects of YouTube SEO optimization:

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources
How to Come Up With SEO Topics?
The Metadata Process
Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing
How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

The Basics - Five Main Traffic Sources

Producing a video and posting it on your YouTube channel is simply not enough to guarantee its success. You have to know where the video’s traffic will come from, because over 500 hours of video content are being uploaded each minute, and there are over 50 million content creators on the platform.

That’s the reason why you have to develop a strategy that will attract the traffic to your videos and place them high in the YouTube’s search rankings. Let’s have a look at five traffic sources that will boost the number of views and comments videos are getting.

YouTube Search

A great deal of traffic for your videos can come from the search results, which makes the title of a video one of the most important aspects of SEO optimization on YouTube.

Don’t use long titles, strive to use short and catchy titles that also contain keywords which accurately describe the contents of the video in order to appear higher in the YouTube’s search results.

YouTube Advertising

Investing in the promotion of the content you’re posting on your channel can help you to generate more views, but different types of YouTube ads produce different results. Non-skippable ads never count as a view, while a skippable ad that lasts more than ten seconds must be viewed for at least thirty seconds in order to qualify as a view. All other types of YouTube ads require the viewer to click on them and play them so the YouTube Analytics can recognize the action as a view.

Channel Pages, Browse Features, Playlists

Channel Pages - This method of generating traffic includes views created by other channel owners as well as Topic Channels that are automatically created using the platform’s video discovery system. In either case, your videos are discovered through search results or video suggestions.

Browse Features - The homepage of your YouTube channel as well as the subscription feed and all other browse features can be a potential source of views for your videos. The YouTube users who watch a video on your channel can be either signed-in or signed-out, but the YouTube Analytics tool will still recognize their action as a view.

Playlists - Producing content other YouTubers will want to include in their playlists is one of the best ways to attract more traffic and increase the amount of views videos you upload to your YouTube channel are getting.

External Traffic Sources

Even though YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, sharing a link to a video on social media such as Twitter or Facebook or embedding it on your website can significantly increase the number of views the video is getting.

Sources of traffic mentioned above are not equally effective, because the intent to actually watch the video varies greatly for each source. That’s why you’ll be able to achieve the best results if you combine several, if not all sources of traffic described in this guide.

How to Come Up With SEO Topics

Videos are a form of communication, and like with all forms of communication, you must know who you are addressing in order to know what to say. Defining the target audience before you start creating a video will make the SEO optimization process much simpler and much faster.

Let’s say that you want to become a successful beauty vlogger and your aim is to produce makeup tutorials. Your first step should be to determine which market is the most relevant for you. Assuming you’d like to target the Asian market, it becomes obvious that the audience you’ll be addressing will consist of women in need of practical makeup advice and your colleagues who offer similar types of tutorials.

Now that you’ve defined your target audience you can proceed to develop the content strategy. People search videos for many different reasons, but their motivation can be approximately divided into four micro-moments. These are:

I want to know, I want to go, I want to do and I want to buy moments and some or all can be applied to all types of YouTube videos.

I want to know moments refer to YouTube users who want to learn more about a certain topic and often ask how to perform a certain action. In the beauty niche, the search terms may include questions like ‘Is makeup bad for your skin?’ or ‘What is contouring?’.

I want to do moments reflect a certain need the potential viewer of your videos has, and your video should provide a straightforward answer. Most common I want to do search patterns for beauty vloggers are ‘How to apply mascara, eyeliner, etc..’

If you know quite a bit about beauty products, then producing videos that rely on I want to buy moments is a sure way to attract a lot of traffic to your videos. These include product reviews, top ten videos or comparison videos that offer the reasons for and against buying a certain product.

Furthermore, you should try to think of a way to create a makeup video that makes the viewer feel involved, so even if you are just explaining the basic terms or tools in the video, viewers should have the feeling that they are learning something.

After defining your target audience and determining what you have to offer, you can choose the topic based on keywords. Here’s how you can easily come up with keyword ideas for your YouTube videos.

How to find the right keywords ideas?

YouTube Search Suggestions:

This is by far the easiest and fastest way to come up with an SEO friendly topic for a video. The best part is that the keywords you come up with will work without a doubt since all suggestions are based on search terms actual people have already used.

Copy the Keywords From a Video in Your Niche that Already Has a Lot of Views:

Study the competition and find a few channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers that cover the same topics as you. These channels probably have a significant number of videos so just sort them out using the ‘Most Popular’ option.

Click on a video that has the most views and that also has a topic that isn’t far removed from what you want to do. When the video is open, look for the keyword around which it is centered, in the title, description or tags and just find a creative way to incorporate it into your video.

Use YouTube’s Traffic Sources and Search Report:

If you would like to find out which keywords YouTubers have used to find your videos this is your best option. Even though the chances are you’ll know most keywords in the report since you already used them for SEO optimization of your videos, you might come up with a few unexpected entries that might be useful.

Look for low-competition keywords, because frequently used keywords are already used by videos featured on channels that have a lot of followers. Low-competition keywords can be particularly helpful if you are trying to grow your channel since they might attract more viewers than the most obvious keyword choices.

YouTube keyword tools:

https://filmora.wondershare.com/vlogger/youtube-keyword-tools.html

The Metadata Process

Now that you’ve found the best keywords for a video you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel, you should do everything in your power to maximize its SEO value. The following YouTube Ranking factors all play a part in the success your video will enjoy:

On Video (Metadata)
Recommendations
Channel
User Action

As you can see, metadata is directly related to the search rankings performance of your videos. So what is metadata exactly?

Video file name: The SEO optimization of a YouTube video starts even before you upload the file to your channel. When naming a video file, make sure that the name contains a keyword, because the platform’s algorithm will analyze it and use it to determine how high it should be ranked in the search results.

Video title: The title of a YouTube video is added after the upload is complete. So, in order to increase the video’s chances of appearing high in the search results, you should place the keyword at its begging and avoid using titles longer than 70 characters as much as you can.

Description: The more words you use to describe a video, the better. YouTube descriptions can have up to 5000 characters, which gives you quite a lot of room to use the keywords you’ve selected.

Tags: You can hardly use too many tags, as a matter of fact, you should use as many tags as you can think of. Channel name, brand name, related keywords are all great choices for tags, just keep in mind that they can’t be longer than 127 characters.

YouTube tag generator:

http://www.betterwaytoweb.com/tag-generator-for-youtube

Transcript: Chances are that the keyword around which your video is based appears quite a lot in the narration and dialogue. YouTube lets you create transcripts of all your videos in just a few simple clicks, which enables you to take the SEO optimization a step further.

Promoting Videos Using Off-Channel Marketing

One of the greatest advantages YouTube offers is how easy it is to share the links to your videos on social media or anywhere else on the Internet. These off-channel marketing methods can help you drive more traffic to the videos you upload to YouTube:

Embedding the Link: Articles covering topics similar to the topic your video is covering are a perfect place to embed a link to the video featured on your channel. What’s more, you can embed a link in your blog posts, on your website, or on a website of a partner company.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link from some other website to the particular web resource, in this case, your video. You can insert links that offer additional information about the topic and by doing so increase the traffic.

Third-party Website Promotion: Share links to videos you upload to YouTube on websites like Quora or forums such as Filmora.io.

Team up with Other YouTube Creators: Looking for cooperation on Fiverr, or just send them private messages to ask for recommendation/follow. Add your video in their playlist, or in Related Channel, End-screen card, etc.

How to Monitor a Video’s Data?

YouTube Analytics is a tool that will enable you to find out more about the people who are watching your videos. How many of your subscribers have watched a video you added to your channel? How many viewers found a video you uploaded through search results? The answer to these questions can be easily found with this tool.

YouTube Analytics also provides insight into subscriber conversion rates, so you can know exactly which videos attracted the most subscribers. This feature is particularly important if you are still developing your channel since it can help you understand which type of videos inspired a viewer to take action and hit the Subscribe button

Combining the information supplied by the YouTube Analytics with the data Google Analytics can offer will allow you to get to know the viewers of your videos better, which can be useful when planning the topics of the videos you’d like to upload to your YouTube channel in the future. If you’d like to gain access to more advanced statistics, there are a lot of free and paid YouTube analytics tools that enable you to keep track of the number of video comments, rankings, dislikes, likes, video replies or favorites.

Each of these metrics serves as a building block of a successful YouTube channel because uploading a video during a weekend or during the working days may not produce the same results. The YouTube analytics tools can assist you in staying one step ahead of your competition and increasing the number of subscribers to your YouTube channel.

A Few Final Thoughts

Just keep these fundamental things into your mind when you’re doing YouTube SEO:

YouTube will do anything they can to keep viewer watch longer

So what’s relevant to the content? YouTube

Always suggest videos from the same creator (so you should use brand, channel name tags)

Evaluated what people watch next and which video they ignore.

Displays video with the similar titles and keywords/tags

So what’s relevant to the viewers? YouTube

Learns your preferences, style, tasted

Considers what content might be interesting to an individual viewer: analyze viewing history, channel subscriptions, search history, viewing choices.

Richard Bennett

Richard Bennett is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Richard Bennett

Visionary Composer: Dual Elements Conjoined

People capture loads of photos of the places they visit and the events they attend for social media and future memories. If you check the online trend, users are shifting from static photos to short videos for a better visual experience. That is why you can consider creating videos out of the photos you have captured and adding suitable music in the background to make your memories visually pleasing.

All you need is a video maker with music and pictures. There is no dearth of video makers, but not all live up to the expectation. There are online video markers as well as video maker software applications available. In this article, we have picked the best video maker with photos and music and illustrated how to make a video with music and photos. We have also listed the popular video makers for your consideration.

Part 1. Best Video maker with music and pictures

We recommend Wondershare Filmora as the best video maker with photos and music. Filmora is considered one of the best video makers and editors in the world. Filmora allows you to import photos of different file formats so that you can make slideshow-like video. There are loads of transitions as well as effects available that you can place in between the photos so that the transition becomes eye-pleasing.

Similarly, you can import any audio or music file. Besides, there are stock music files available that you can apply to your slideshow video. You can even add colourful titles and graphical elements to enhance the video content. Here are the steps on how to make a video with your photos and music.

Try It Free

For Win 7 or later (64-bit)

Try It Free

For macOS 10.12 or later

Step 1: Install Filmora and Start Your Project

Download and install Wondershare Filmora as per your operating system. Filmora is available for Windows and Mac. Launch Filmora and click on New Project. Drag and drop your photos on Project Media folder.

Step 2: Import Photos and Arrange Them in Order

Drag and drop the photos on the timeline as per your sequence you want in your slideshow video. You can change the order of the photos as well as stretch durations of photos in the video from the timeline. You have to arrange the photos side by side without any gap so that there is no black screen in between the transition.

Step 3: Add Transition Effects

After arranging the photos side by side, you have to apply transition effects so that the change from one photo to another is eye-soothing. There are loads of transitions available and you can get them from Transition option located at the top bar.

Go through the different categories of transitions. Drag and drop the transition you want on to the photo after which you want the transition effect to play. Do the same for all photos except the last one. You can apply different transitions effects for different photos as per your preference.

Step 4: Add Background Music

Now it is time to add a background music to the entire video. You can drag and drop any music file from your hard drive to Filmora Project Media. Thereafter, you can drag and drop the audio file on the audio timeline below the photo timeline. You can also add audio effects from the top bar if required.

Step 5: Export Your Video

Once you are done adding photos, transitions, and music, you should play the video on Filmora and make adjustments wherever required. Thereafter, click on Export button and save the video file on your hard drive in your desired file format.

Part 2. Popular video makers with photos and music

Here is the list of the popular premium and free video maker with music and pictures that you can consider for making slideshow videos.

1. Invideo

Invideo is a popular online video maker with music and pictures along with 5000 customizable templates. These templates help users to transform photos into videos with background music in a few minutes. Besides, the platform offers a wide range of stock media files. You can create videos in more than 70 languages, and the editor is user-friendly for users of all ages.

All you need to do is select a template and customize it if required. Thereafter, you need to import the photos, add text effects, and finally add music. There are options for trimming, cropping, and adding stickers, texts and transitions. The free version lets you export 60 videos per month but with a watermark. Here are the top features of Invideo.

5000+ customizable templates for all video types.
9+ million stocks videos, photos, and audio files.
Add transitions, stickers, animations, and texts to videos.
Trim and crop videos and audio files.
Add voiceover as well as fade-in and fade-out effects.
Work in collaboration with team members.

2. Icecream slideshow maker

Icecream slideshow maker is a free video maker with music and pictures for Windows users only. The software is compatible with Windows 10, 8, 7 and XP. You can create a high-quality video from your photos with music instantly. There is no need for any prior experience to use the video maker. There are beautiful transitions available that will enhance the video quality and make your presentation stand out. The free version allows up to 10 slides per video and saving the video in Webm file format. You can upgrade to Pro version to get rid of the limitations.

You can change photo and transition duration as per requirements. The software supports various audio file formats that you can import for your video. You can also add animations to texts so that they can shine in your video. The software allows sharing the video directly to YouTube. Besides, you can save it on Google Drive and Dropbox. Here are all the features of Icecream slideshow maker that you should be aware of.

Super intuitive user interface for all users.
Add colourful text, transitions, and animations.
Save and resume project work as per time availability.
Pro version allows saving video in 4K resolution.
Video output in MP4, AVI, MOV and WEBM formats.
Suitable for low-end computers.

3. PhotoStage Slideshow

PhotoStage Slideshow by NCH Software is another video maker software for Windows users. The software comes with an easy and automated wizard for users to transform photos with a video instantly. There is also an image editor available to adjust different parameters of your photos before making a video out of them.

Besides, there are various transitions available to apply and you can add captions and narration as per your requirements. In fact, along with photos, you can add video clips to create the ultimate video. Moreover, there are tools available to edit your audio and music file and add different effects. Here are the top features of PhotoStage Slideshow Software.

Supports Full HD and 4K video resolution.
Edit and fine-tune photos and add captions.
Wide range of eye-catching and popular transitions.
Edit audio and music file and add different effects.
Save video file in MOV, MP4, GIF, AVI, 3GP and more.
Directly share on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, HTML5.

4. Clideo video maker

Clideo Video Maker is a free online video maker with song. All you need to do is upload photos from your hard drive and choose a preset depending on the online platform where you want to upload the video. Thereafter, add audio and trim it as per video length. Then add smooth transitions and the video will be ready to export on your hard drive or cloud storage.

The online video maker supports different video and audio file format for importing and exporting. You can use the editor on any device starting from Windows and Mac to Android and iPhone. The user interface is very simple to use and it does not store video files for more than a day. Here are all the features of Clideo video maker.

Upload photos from hard drive, and cloud storage.
Presets for Instagram, Stories, YouTube, and Facebook videos.
Add different photos, audio, and video clips to make videos.
Zoom & crop option along with image duration elongation.
Suitable for computer and mobile phone users.

5. Movavi Slideshow Maker

Movavi Slideshow Maker is available for both Windows and Mac users. The software comes with a wizard to allow users to create video from photos. However, advanced users can create video from photos manually as well. You get to add photos, audio files and video clips of different file formats. Most importantly, there are various templates available to create professional-quality videos.

There are loads of effects, filters, titles, and stickers available to apply on your video. The free version is limited to seven days usage. The output video will have watermark on it and you can purchase the premium version to avoid all limitations. Here are the top features of Movavi Slideshow Maker.

Slideshow wizard for fast and easy video creation.
Manual mode for advanced users to create customized video.
Supports different types of media file formats.
Different types of templates for instant video making.
Wide ranges of transitions, filters, titles, and stickers.

Conclusion

If you are making a video from your photos, you can use an online video maker with photos and music free. If you are someone who wants to make professional-quality videos from photos, a premium video maker is best for you. If you are going to upload your slideshow videos on social media and video streaming platforms, we recommend Wondershare Filmora as the best video maker with music and pictures.

Try It Free

For macOS 10.12 or later

Step 1: Install Filmora and Start Your Project

Step 2: Import Photos and Arrange Them in Order

Step 3: Add Transition Effects

Step 4: Add Background Music

Step 5: Export Your Video