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Category: YouTube Tips
Tags: EngagementKeywordsOptimizationSEOYouTube
Entities: Sean CannellSEOThink MediavidIQYouTube
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YouTube has changed if you're still relying on outdated tips and keyword hacks then you're leaving views and subscribers on the table this year YouTube's algorithm is smarter than ever so what actually works now to get views and grow your channel in this video
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we're going to be covering the newest SEO strategies to help your videos rank higher get discovered faster and grow your channel without wasting time on things that no longer matter we're going to be covering the number one ranking factor that YouTube cares about the difference between keywords and tags on
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YouTube and what really matters the biggest SEO mistakes that might be killing your channel and a step-by-step strategy for helping you get more views and subscribers fast you know I've been studying YouTube for over a decade I've got three silver play buttons a gold play button and I've helped thousands of
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creators rank videos through our program video ranking Academy so you can be confident that what you're about to learn is not a waste of your time this is an indepth Master Class and your complete guide to getting results let's begin you got to just press record now before we cover the five YouTube SEO and
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keyword strategies that are working this year and the list of outdated tactics that you want to avoid let's get on the same page by defining what is YouTube SEO and what is the difference between keywords and tags SEO stands for search engine optimization so YouTube SEO has
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the goal of getting your videos discovered by the right people on YouTube and Beyond through smart optimization of your videos this includes picking the right keywords so that YouTube knows what your video is about optimizing titles descriptions and
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tags so that viewers click and stay creating engaging thumbnails to boost click-through rates encouraging watchtime and engagement so that YouTube keeps recommending your content and leveraging captions chapters and
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metadata for accessibility and discoverability and then you also want to study your analytics so that you can tweak and improve your future videos because data will tell you what's working in your content and what's not working so at its core YouTube SEO is
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about helping the YouTube algorithm help you by making your content easy to find engaging to watch and irresistible to recommend now the next question that we must answer is what is the difference between keywords on YouTube and YouTube
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tags while there are some similarities they're actually kind of two different things so YouTube keywords are the words and phrases that let YouTube know what your video is about these are primarily going to show up in your titles in your descriptions and in your actual video
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script meaning the things you're saying in your video and these words and phrases are very important because they are going to help with search and recommendations so for example on this channel think media we talk a lot about the best cameras for Content creators and we'll make a video that could be
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titled best budget cameras for YouTube that's a phrase that people would naturally search for and could be placed in the title in the description and I would be verbally saying it in the video as well YouTube tags on the other hand are more about the backend metadata they
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are extra keywords that you add in the tags section of your video and they have minimal impact today as far as SEO goes they don't carry very much weight but YouTube has said they can help with misspellings or alternative spellings
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and so you still want to use them properly so some of the tags I would use for a video on the best budget camera for YouTube could be tags like cheap cameras comma YouTube cameras comma best camera for YouTube comma and variations
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reinforcing the big idea of the video I'm creating so now that we understand what YouTube SEO is and the difference between keywords and tags let's dive into the five YouTube SEO and keyword strategies that are working right now number one research before you press
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record one of the biggest myths on YouTube is that keyword research is dead but it's actually still very important but maybe for a different reason than many people think the reason why you want to do keyword research and really topic and video idea research before you
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film your video is so that you can actually find out what people are searching for so that your video has a higher likelihood of getting discovered this also helps you craft your videos intentionally and purposefully so your content is relevant and not random
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another reason is you want to use the right phrases and words in your titles and in your description so that YouTube knows exactly who to show your videos to and keyword research can also help you stay ahead of Trends so you're making videos that people actually want to
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watch well how exactly do you do keyword research effectively well in this video we're going to cover a couple different ways you can use YouTube search Google search Google Trends and also cool YouTube software tools like vid IQ and the key thing that you're looking for in
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this research phase is you're verifying that people are actually interested in this topic so you don't waste your time filming a video that nobody wants to watch you're actually studying to see demand because a great video that nobody is searching for won't get views so
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number one is research before you press record number two is use YouTube autocomplete for free keyword ideas here's how it works you want to start typing a topic into YouTube search bar then YouTube autocomplete will suggest real searches that people are typing and
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the cool thing is these predictions are based on actual demand so let's say you wanted to make a video about a walking pad that you just purchased for your home office that's something I just got and I actually love the one that I'm using and so when we type in Walking pad we could see see that this does show up
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which this is the test you want there to actually be predictions here which is telling you okay people around the world are looking for these things and the terms that are towards the top have the most interest so people are searching for a walking pad treadmill or a walking
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pad review or a walking pad workout but we can go all the way down to a walking pad versus a treadmill before and after and so there's a lot of key word phrases here that can influence our video ideas
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and our video titles and a pro tip is to try different variations and see what pops up we might put best walking pad in front of it we could have videos pop up with the year after 2024 2025 2026 you might have best walking pad treadmill on
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Amazon and so the Nuance of the different angles of these video topics is where the opportunity is and all this information can be used in your titles in your tags and in your description and here's some cool tricks you could do with the YouTube search bar that not a
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lot of people know about one of the things you can do in front of your topic is you could put a letter and an underscore space and this will actually then put words in front of your key term in our case walking pad and oiling a walking pad using a walking pad while
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working and again it's giving us some more nuances and you could go through the entire alphabet bet with that and then what you also can try is experimenting with words after your core topic so if we're talking about walking pads we might type in for and so now we're getting more ideas walking pad for
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heavy person for weight loss desk for tall person and so you can get very specific with the insights that are coming from the YouTube search bar and so this is the power of researching before you press record and using YouTube autocomplete to inspire video
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ideas and content for your title description and your tags and if you're already finding some value out of this video it would mean the world to me if you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel for more videos that will help you grow your YouTube channel but let's dive into number three number
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three is use software like vid IQ to analyze keyword competition keyword opportunities and Trends and get additional creative ideas so here we are in the back end of vid IQ and the cool thing about this software is it connects to your YouTube channel and so you can
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get powerful insights and we're going to be clicking on the keyword tool and what we find here is the ability to Search keywords kind of like we just did on YouTube but now we can do it with some additional data so if we type in Walking pad like we were doing in the previous
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tip we can now see a score on this topic we can see how much search volume there is for walking pads 63,000 people plus search for it on any given month and the competition is relatively low and so vid
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IQ assigns this topic with an overall score if it's closer to green and closer to 100 this particular score is 74 then that's great it tells you that there's less competition around this topic if
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it's in yellow or red then it might be harder to break through and rank and get views for this topic because of how much saturation there is now we also have the ability to see some search data so people looking for a walking pad review around 13,000 a month the best walking
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pad 10,000 a month and then we can go down to much lower numbers like walking pad treadmill results at 944 a month but still great however it would say that this is a not great search volume with
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quite a bit of competition of people sharing their walking pad results so in our researching before we press record that might not be the next video that we want to make now there's some really cool things that vid IQ does that I want to show you but if you've never tried it before you can actually get 30 days for
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just $1 if you want to check that out there's a link in the description down below or just go to vid iq.com slink I am an affiliate for vid IQ which simply means that I may get a commission if you use my link but I really think you're going to love the software in
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fact let's dive in and check out more of what it does and so on the left side of the page here you can see there's a lot of different tools that are included with fit IQ but we're just focusing on keywords for this video and so if you type in number one a keyword into the Search tool it's going to give you the
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score the related keywords it's going to give you matching keywords and some questions and it's going to give you top trending videos for walking pad which is really cool because you can look what other people are doing a lot of shorts content and what we can study here is
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how many views are these videos getting is there any angles or content ideas that might Inspire our content you can also organize the data in different ways you could look at related keywords and you could organize them by their related
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score the amount of search volume how much competition there is the overall score or even the number of words because the big idea with words could be long tail keywords are easier to rank for so how walking makes you shed fat or
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the revvo 2in1 under desk treadmill a very specific product that might not get a ton of views but the intent of the viewer looking for that information can be much higher when again there are more
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words in the topic or in the title you could look at matching terms but one of my favorites is questions which brings us to our fourth tip which is answer specific questions that meet viewer needs many people turn to YouTube to solve problems and learn new skills in
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fact in 2020 77% of respondents reported using YouTube to learn a new skill and so one of our favorite strategies here at think media is what we call asq or answering specific questions and you could use a tool like YouTube autocomplete or vid IQ to search out and
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identify the questions people are asking and then create YouTube videos based off those questions and so that's what I love about this section of the vid IQ tool when you click on questions you're now looking at specific questions that people want answers to how good is the
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walking pad treadmill spur ax versus the walking pad that's two different brands and maybe you can get your hands on each one to review those do I need to lubricate a walking pad treadmill it's actually a question that I have I've had mine for a couple of weeks and I'm
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wondering that same question actually now that I think about it and so here's a few thoughts for implementing this strategy and identifying common questions first use tools like vid IQ to discover related keywords and top questions in your Niche second create
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content that provides clear answers what you want to do is develop videos that directly address these questions offering concise and actionable solutions and in some cases you might be thinking like these are very specific questions these aren't going to be viral videos and you'd be right but a lot of
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creators when you're trying to get your first 100 subscribers your first a th000 subscribers you're under estimating the power of getting one view you're underestimating the power of getting 10 views of people looking for very specific things and what you'll notice is there's a lot of golden opportunities
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because a lot of people haven't seen a video like this like this information applied can really help you grow your YouTube channel but then thirdly you want to make sure your video is optimized correctly I mean that's the power of YouTube SEO how exactly are you going to title your video what are you
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going to write in your YouTube description and actually in a bit I'm going to share with you a complete checklist of how to optimize your video when you upload it on YouTube so you don't miss anything now in just a second we're going to be covering the outdated tactics that do not work and are a total
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waste of your time but we still need to hit point number five number five is Niche down with longtail keywords for better results now we touched on this a little bit earlier but let's get clear on our definition so a longtail keyword is a specific phrase that people search
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for usually three plus words long and if you really want the opportunities it might be 5 6 7 8 nine words long and the reason why this works is less competition so they're easier to rank more targeted audience you're attracting
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a very specific audience but essentially getting the right viewers which means ultimately you'll get higher conversion rates now that's a conversation for another day but essentially means that you can make more money with things like affiliate marketing or even your own products and services because you have a much more specialized higher intent
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viewer that are finding this type of video so what is the difference between a keyword and a longtail keyword well an example would be a video titled podcast kind of ridiculous but if you think about it that would be too broad there's like way too much competition also doesn't even really make sense but if
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you made a video titled how to start a podcast for beginners and you could even include the year as well well it's much more specific and therefore easier to rank so how exactly do you find longtail keyword ideas I've got a really sneaky
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tactic to share with you in just a second but if we recap using YouTube autocomplete you're building out typing in things before your core term or building out the words after looking for very specific ideas and you can use that for free you can also check vid IQ
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looking for phrases with good search volume and also low competition and again if you want to try out vid IQ hit the link in the show notes and the description but but another cool place is to look at the people also asked
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section on Google so most people don't know about this cool way to come up with smart YouTube video ideas so if you just go to Google Search and type in walkingpad you then can look at the results you're going to get some sponsored results you're going to get
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some ranked web pages but then you're going to get the people also asked section now let's see what we can find here can you lose weight by walking 30 minutes a day on a treadmill are walking pads any good is a walking PAD as good
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as a treadmill what is the best walking pad on the market remember our previous tip we want to answer specific questions and what we're seeing in this section of Google is very specific questions that the world wants to know but let's take this thing even deeper if you scroll to
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the bottom of a Google page you can also find the section people also searched for and this is going to give you some keyword phrases not in a question in this case but you're going to see walking pad UK walking Pad de cathlon
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what is that walking pad with incline and now you're getting more insights during your research phase so we've covered five specific YouTube SEO tips you can apply for finding keywords and applying them to your videos at the end
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of this video I'm going to be breaking down the 10 ranking factors that matter but as promised we got to talk about the outdated SEO things that do not work anymore and you should absolutely avoid because they will waste your time so
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I've got six outdated YouTube tactics to share with you but one of the things I want you to see is when we head over to YouTube and type in Walking pad again I've got vid IQ installed here you have a really cool feature on the right side of the page called the search panel and it gives us a score of that keyword
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right on the page it gives us some data about it it some top channels for the search term and some top related opportunities all of that stuff is good but one of the outdated features which vid IQ still offers you but you can pretty much ignore it is enable inline
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keywords when we click that what it's actually going to do is show us other people's tags on their videos and you actually can copy them if you want but here's the thing this is one of the outdated tactics and so our philosophy here at think media is that if YouTube
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gives us a place to put information like the area called tags on your YouTube video optimization page you might as well use it but you don't want to take too much time there which brings us to our first outdated tactic which is over
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Reliance on tags and researching competitor's tags here's the facts tags have minimal impact on YouTube SEO today back in the day people would copy competitor tags in an attempt to rank higher but now YouTube prioritizes
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audience Behavior over tags so the bottom line is tags are nearly irrelevant what actually matters is the content quality the retention of the video and smart keyword use in your title and your description and so while it's a waste of time to copy your
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competitor's tags it's not a waste of time to study your competitor's content what titles are they using what topics are they covering in their videos which videos are performing best on their Channel and how are they structuring their videos what kind of Engagement are
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they getting the content itself can be very insightful for your next video now another myth in an outdated YouTube SEO tactic that I actually see a lot of YouTube gurus talking about still this year which really kind of blows my mind but it is naming your video file with
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keywords and so the theory here was that after you shot your video and edited it and exported the actual file you rename the file to be like best- walking dad- review and that's just a waste of time now to be fair it's not a waste of
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time for your own file management and organization on your computer or hard drive or external hard drive but it's not going to help your video perform better here's the truth YouTube does not use file names for SEO anymore what YouTube does now is it actually scans
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the content of the video and it's pretty wild what YouTube and the parent company alphabet and Google actually can see when you upload a video file YouTube uses Ai and machine learning to scan exactly what is inside of your YouTube
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videos Beyond just the metadata in fact they could see these five things spoken words YouTube autogenerator for keywords onscreen text if you edit text into your videos or if you share a presentation of some kind
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with PowerPoint slides or keynote slides AI can read the words in your video also visual elements Google can recognize objects faces locations logos and even
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emotions music and audio YouTube can detect copyrighted music in fact that is a challenge for some people background sounds and even your tone of voice and the fifth thing is engagement data how viewers react to a video once it's
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public it's looking at the likes the comments the watch time which is going to affect how YouTube recommends the video and so the reason this matters for creators is you just can't fake YouTube SEO anymore changing your file name is a waste of time at least in terms of
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influencing how your video ranks and performs and what's actually more powerful than changing the video file name that you're uploading is actually using the keywords that you want to ring for in the video itself or even showing
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products on screen that you're going to be talking about if you can edit in b-roll and you can make a rich content experience for the viewer that Google is scanning and seeing like wow this video is thorough it's educational there's a lot of good information in it that's going to be better optimization in
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today's world now the third outdated SEO tactic is using exact match keyword phrases in your titles instead instead of natural highly clickable titles so stuffing the exact match keywords in your title feels robotic and It
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ultimately hurts clickability so in the past people would write a title like for a video like this best SEO tips YouTube SEO strategy for ranking videos and that just doesn't work very well anymore the reason for this is YouTube's Ai and algorithm has continued to evolve so it
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can understand things like natural language as well as synonyms so if the key Concepts are included in your title and related phrases really you don't need to force exact matches even more importantly titles need to be engaging
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and not just optimized so a keyword stuffed title might rank but if no one clicks it won't matter you're talking to humans and so you want the metadata like a keyword phrase to be in your title but then around the title you want it to be an experience that's interesting and
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highly clickable by real humans that would click on the video and CTR which means clickthrough rate is King YouTube prioritizes videos that people actually click on and actually watch so what you can do instead is make sure your title is compelling and curiosity driven use
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natural conversational language and you could still include keywords in fact you should but you want to blend them in smoothly so an example if we're still talking about walking pads is best walking pad review walking pad treadmill
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review pretty boring right keyword stuffed as opposed to something like I tried this viral walking pad is it worth it question mark curiosity driven you put a good thumbnail around that idea and you have a video that can be
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anchored in what people are searching for walking pad or viral walking PAD as well as something that could be suggested by the YouTube algorithm number four is keyword stuffing in descriptions and so the big idea here was that people would do their research
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and they would get as many phrases best camera for YouTube cheap cameras for YouTube and they would just stuff as many keywords as possible in the description and the truth is this just does not fool YouTube and it can actually hurt your video performance so
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in today's world YouTube actually prioritizes natural language even that's written in your YouTube description the algorithm understands context and synonyms so repeating the same keyword over and over looks spammy furthermore it's a bad user experience let's
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remember that the point of building a YouTube channel is to connect and help real people to build real community and every piece of content you put out there is an experience with you in your brand so if your description is just packed with a bunch of meaningless information and huge blocks of text then it's really
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not giving an individual a good experience and low engagement on your video will Le lead to low rankings and ultimately we already learned that YouTube's AI scans your content it listens to your video it analyzes your captions it checks for your behavior so
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stuffing keywords won't help now one cool thing that will help is including the best keywords in your description in a nice easyto read block of text in fact here's a cool way to do it so what we're going to do here is quickly optimize our
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video and description with keywords in a natural way of flowing language using vid IQ and so this is a YouTube short but I'm just going to use it as an example it's about something else but let's say I wanted to do a video on the best budget walking pad on Amazon and so
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what I can do is use their title tool which is going to give me really well-written highly clickable titles that also includes the keyword I found the best budget walking pad on Amazon you won't believe the amazing features
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of this budget walking pad I tried the cheapest walking pad on Amazon and here's what happened great video ideas so let's just say I found the best budget walking pad on Amazon and maybe I put something in there like walking pad
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C2 which by the way is the walking pad that I purchased it literally is changing my life it's pretty amazing if you're interested in it I will link it up in the show notes it's my favorite purchase in the last five to 10 years yeah this is the one walking pad C2 it's
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foldable I think I got the white one in fact why would I not know that I would totally understand what color I got and so it yeah it's a whole vibe it's really been awesome and so anyways now that we've quickly decided our title in like 10 seconds we can actually go down and
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use this description feature here that says AI description generator and what I did was I copy pasted the title and I clicked generate description and it says looking for the best walking pad on Amazon check out my review the walking pad C2 the perfect option for walking
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and staying active at home and it gives you a couple VAR variations and you could either insert it or copy it and now you're good to go with some very short but interesting description text the fifth outdated SEO tactic is embedding videos on external websites
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for higher rankings embedding videos on other websites does not directly boost YouTube rankings in the past some believed and I think it was true that getting your video embedded on multiple sites would trick the YouTube algorithm
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into ranking your videos higher it was the SEO concept of backlinks but today YouTube prioritizes user engagement on its own platform things like watch time people actually clicking on your videos watching your videos not just where a video appears externally which brings up
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the question do back links still matter for YouTube SEO and the answer is yes if they still drive traffic that includes real viewers who actually engage with your video then that can really indirectly help ranking the point is if
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these are individuals that are giving you watch time audience retention engaging on your videos it's not just because your video is linked or embedded on somebody's site that your rankings would be boosted but it is the fact that if that website drives a real individual to your video that engages and loves
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your video then it's the on platform metrics that matter and the sixth outdated YouTube SEO tactic that doesn't just not work but is also dangerous is buying fake likes fake comments and fake views and the reason for this is YouTube's AI is too smart it can tell
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where traffic is coming from bot views fake likes spam comments and fake views do not equal real watch time and so Bots or lowquality traffic that don't actually watch your video then your watch time will tank which will also
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hurt your video you also have low engagement rates if you buy 100,000 views but you get almost no comments or real interaction then YouTube will know something is off and people like me will know as well because we use tools like vid IQ and we can sometimes see a spike of traffic and then at flat flat lines
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you're like oh they purchased views up to that level or you could see the view to Comet ratio and you're like something's off here so real ones know and so there's just no reason to do it and also you do run the risk of demonetization or Bans so YouTube can
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limit reach or even demonetize or delete your channel if you're violating their terms of service and you're caught manipulating engagement so uh just don't do it what you should do is focus on organic growth even though it's harder it's better over time create valuable
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content real people want to watch boost engagement naturally if you can ask questions encourage comments and then promote your videos smartly so share your video with the Right audience on social media email list Niche forums so sharing your video out there is great if you can attract people that are truly
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interested in the content all right I hope you're staying hydrated during this indepth master class because as we land the plane let's just look at the top 10 ranking factors that actually matter for YouTube SEO
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this year all in one complete and concise list number one watch time and audience retention trumps keywords the longer people watch the better your ranking engaging content keeps viewers hooked number two CTR AKA clickthrough
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rate topic titles and thumbnails are critical if people don't click they don't watch number three study competitors content don't copy their tags instead study their content strategy their video formats their engagement tactics and the insights that
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you can learn and borrow that can influence your own content all right number four viewer engagement getting comments getting likes and getting shares YouTube boost videos that spark interaction so encourage comments and responses in your videos in fact let me
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pass a question off to you what is one of the biggest challenges you're having on YouTube right now or is there a topic you would want us to cover in the future here on this channel let me know in the comments number five optimize your videos for search and suggested rank your videos and search matters but
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getting videos into YouTube's suggested and recommended algorithm is way more powerful number six realize YouTube's Ai and contextual understanding know that YouTube reads your scripts scans the visuals in your video and detects intent
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so keywords still matter but they must be naturally woven into your content number seven chapters and detailed descriptions especially for educational content YouTube uses timestamps for SEO making it easier for viewers and search
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engines to find relevant parts of your videos that's that's why a video like this includes what's called YouTube chapters it's not just the entire video that can rank it's individual Parts number eight personalization in session watch time YouTube recommends videos
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based on individual viewing habits and rewards creators whose videos keep people on the platform longer and so the Creator who understands the viewer best wins and the Creator who keeps individuals on the platform longer by perhaps creating a video series instead
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of just a singular video is going to dominate number nine external traffic and off-platform promotion while backlinks do not boost rankings bringing real viewers from social media from email lists from Niche communities like Reddit or Kora can help
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push your YouTube content further and number 10 freshness and consistency YouTube favors creators who consistently upload and keep content fresh in search results especially with trending topics bottom line YouTube SEO isn't just about
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keywords anymore you need great content engagement and optimization strategies to win this year and if you want my complete Youtube upload and optimization checklist just click or tap the screen to watch my deep dive video on that
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topic if you got value can you hit the like button my name is Sean canell your guide to building a profitable YouTube channel this is think media and I will catch you in a future video