YouTube Video SEO Tips – Dentists & Service-Based Businesses

Transcript:

If you have a youtube channel for your business, you might find yourself wondering why your videos aren’t getting that many views or why your subscriber count isn’t growing.

You might be putting all of this effort into planning out your content properly and making sure your production is of high quality but yet you are not yielding the results you believe you should.

Well, this all might come down to your YouTube video SEO, and just like Google, YouTube has an algorithm that they run all of their content through to determine what the best videos would be to recommend to somebody.

Essentially YouTube wants to find videos out there in which people will watch in its entirety, the longer the video the better because this allows them to put up more ads which can bring in more money for them. At the end of the day, YouTube wants to make money, and if they can piggyback off your video to do so, they will.

So in this video, I am going to share some simple tips you can begin incorporating to help you out with the algorithm so your videos can begin appearing higher up on YouTube’s search results.

Make sure you have a pen and paper handy so you can take some quick notes as the video plays on.

So the first key ingredient to this is keywords! This should come to no surprise to you guys, as  anything in relation to SEO comes down to keywords . The placement of the key phrase you’re trying to rank for, research, it’s variations, and so forth. Before you even begin writing the script for your video, you need to determine what keywords you want to rank for. This is where your keyword research will come into play.

Now there are a couple of ways that you can do this research. I’ll share a basic way and then a more in-depth way.

Your basic way would be to do it on the actual YouTube platform, you  go to the search bar, start typing the keyword phrase you want to rank for, and then a dropdown menu will appear with other relevant keyword phrases  that people are actually searching for as well.

Now if you want to get more in-depth and advanced, I would highly recommend you get VidIQ, which is a free extension you can add to your browser. I have it on my laptop and I absolutely love it, it was definitely a game-changer for us. The great thing about this is  when you complete a search for a keyword phrase you want to rank for, it will show you information about this phrase such as keyword difficulty or “score”, the search volume for this phrase, the competition volume  as well, so the number of people searching for this and the number of results for it.

So once you have the list of keywords you want to tackle you’re going to want to move into the second video SEO tip which is completing your video information. This specifically includes your video title, description, and tags. As you’re writing out your script you’re going to want to make sure you incorporate your keywords throughout the video. And once you’re ready to upload your file you’re going to want to make sure you add the main keyword phrase that you’re trying to rank for in your video title as well in your description.

When it comes to your title, make sure you  put that main keyword at the very beginning  because YouTube puts more weight on words that appear at the beginning of your title rather than the end.

When it comes to your description we usually like to write out at least two paragraphs that outline what the video is about and what to expect without completely giving out the full details. This way you give just enough to keep your audience interested and to stick around through the entirety of the video.

Within the description, we also like to add our social media links, links to other related videos, and links to pages on our website that relate to the topic at hand.

Now your keyword tags are very very important and we are constantly finding users who seem to ignore this step because they like to think otherwise. They like to believe that having a good video title and description is enough, as well as being included within the contents of the video, but personally, I believe it’s still worthwhile to put effort into this.

Your tags are where you are allowed the special opportunity to tell YouTube, “Hey! These are the keywords I want to rank for! These are the keywords that are related to my video here! Please check these out and help me appear in your search results so I can get more views.”

And remember when I introduced VidIQ to you earlier?

Well, you can use it for this feature as well! Now you’ll need to upgrade to get full access to it but they offer suggestions of related keyword tags you can add to your video to signal to YouTube, “Hey guys my content relates to this variation too!”. Sometimes we draw blanks and we can’t think of other variations so as you start typing out a keyword phrase into your tag section, VidIQ will begin to offer suggestions in a drop-down that you can easily click and add – it’s really awesome.

But beyond just offering you tag suggestions, this software will actually show you where you are ranking for a keyword once your video has been uploaded! Not only that, but you can go to a competitor’s video and see what tags they have included and how they are ranking for those tags too. This is powerful information to have to help you stay on top of your competitors and see what new tags you want to start ranking higher for as well.

YouTube gives you up to 500 characters to use in this section so definitely use it all up if possible because I truly believe this tag section is highly relevant to your youtube video SEO success. Remember though, keep them relevant to the topic at hand, or else you will confuse Google and YouTube on what your video is truly about and you will end up hurting your video instead of helping.

SEO tip number 3 is to boost video engagement signals. What do we mean by this? Engagement signals are things like shares, likes, comments, and subscribes, and there is a big correlation between these signals and the success of a video ranking higher on YouTube. Basically what these signals do is tell YouTube that people are LOVING your video.  And if you want to focus on one to gain more of, go with comments, this is the most common factor between all high ranking videos. 

Now the questions might be, how do I get more comments on my video? This is something that we are going to start doing ourselves in this video and that is to give them something specific to comment on. So instead of just saying “leave a comment below”, engage them further. For example, a dentist making a video about flossing can ask something along the lines of “Do you prefer a water pick or traditional wax floss for your teeth? Write your answer in the comments below”.

Getting into tip number four, which is to have an attention-grabbing thumbnail for your video! This means using bold colors, bolded letters, and high-quality images.

Thumbnails with text on them get more clicks than those without, so make sure what you write on your image is short and easily stands out for someone to read. When it comes to your colors,  we advise that you stay away from red, black, and white color combinations. Why? Because these are YouTube’s colors, so you will blend and get washed out. 

If you need help in creating a thumbnail, visit Canva, they have the dimensions ready for your image, a ton of free images relating to different topics that you can use or you can upload your own. And they also offer a large variety of fonts that you can use on your image as well, but we suggest using those that relate to your brand’s style.