YouTube is a go-to platform for brands to connect with consumers. Leveraged along each step of the consumer journey, it is the most popular resource for product discovery, reviews, and researching “how to” videos post-purchase. To fully take advantage of YouTube’s power, brands need to actively maintain their YouTube channels and avoid letting it become a wasteland of old videos. 

Transform your channel into a marketing machine by following these best practices:

  1. Prioritize Video SEO

The #1 opportunity that brands overlook is video SEO. On YouTube this means the video title, description, and tags. These areas are what the YouTube Algorithm scrapes to understand the video and help it know who to show your video to. The best practice is to use important keywords throughout those areas. Important keywords would include branded terms like product names, broad terms like the general category or industry, and specific keywords would be about the video you are talking about. 

Pro Tip: Use these keywords throughout the video title, description, and tags to help YT recommend your content to people in search as well as when they are browsing the platform. 

And Don’t forget to create captions yourself by placing a transcript on the video. This will help your video SEO in a few ways: 

  • Adding transcripts to videos gives the YouTube algorithm another area to scrape for keywords like the video title or description. This helps provide more context to the video for the algorithm to better understand your content and target audience. 
  • Captions make videos more accessible so your videos can reach a wider audience
  • Creating your own transcripts/captions is much better than relying on the YouTube auto-generated captions as that is almost always not 100% accurate to the video
  1. Don’t overlook playlist SEO

Just like a video has SEO, playlists also have SEO that should be optimized. The playlist titles and descriptions are two areas where we often see brands miss optimizing their content. 

Pro Tip: Playlists can be found in search just like a video can, so be sure to optimize the playlist title and description to help your content be found.

  1. Pay attention to channel SEO

Just like videos and playlists can be searched for, the channel can come up when searching on YouTube. The channel description and keywords can be optimized much like a video’s can. The channel description is a great place to welcome viewers to your channel, talk about your brand, and tell viewers what type of content to expect on your channel. 

Pro Tip: As part of your strategy, weave keywords throughout the channel description and tags

Want more insights? Let’s chat! Our team of Channel Management experts are here to help you maximize the power of your YouTube channel