How to Unlock The Traffic Driving Potential Of YouTube SEO

In the oversaturated online landscape with which businesses operate, generating effective website traffic through a tailored digital marketing strategy is one of the most fundamental yet difficult factors in growing a brand. Whereas social media can be a fantastic channel for generating engagement and similarly email marketing can be effective at drawing in returning patrons, an effective website will captivate prospective customers and guide them to the converting stage. Whether a B2B or B2C business, a website is key to highlighting a brand and building trusting relationships with prospective customers.

But how do you generate more web traffic?

Most digital marketers would rightly point to optimising content and improving a business’s organic search rankings as part of their Search Engine Optimisation strategy. Others would equally suggest a tailored and efficiently planned Pay-Per-Click marketing plan. However despite generating around 2.1 billion active users every month, one channel that is frequently overlooked as part of a web traffic-driving strategy is YouTube. With the increasing growth of both short and long-form video content, YouTube can be a valuable channel to draw in new and relevant leads to your website.

With that said, here are a few key strategies to get the most out of YouTube and drive traffic to your website.

Create an optimised user journey

Similar to traditional SEO, a business’s YouTube footprint should always be tailored to optimise the ease that users discover and move through the customer journey. YouTube is a great tool to generate potential leads, but this means nothing if there is no direct way for the user to reach the website – or other engagement channels – through the content creation platform.

While there are multiple ways of going about this user journey optimisation, we’ve simplified it into 4 key pointers.

Keyword Research

Like any other organic channel, SEO marketing on YouTube is all about providing the closest answer to a user’s search query. With that said, optimising your video titles and description is super important to drawing in impressions and subsequently views. This is especially true on a platform like YouTube which is oversaturated with hours upon hours of content; you want a way for your content to be more actively visible, rank organically higher and convey greater reliability than other similar videos. Putting together a piece of keyword research around the video and integrating these phrases into the title and descriptions can go a long way to extending the potential reach of the video to prospective customers.

YouTube Links

Fundamental to any customer journey is the inclusion of in-links that directly take users to the website – or social channels for further engagement. YouTube offers multiple ways to go about doing this. Firstly, links should be included near the top of video descriptions just below the main top-end description points as well as in the business channels about page. They can even be included in the brand channel banner, posts on the community tab and within the comments section – although be careful not to oversaturate the channel with too many links. In terms of the content itself, it can often be a good idea to include the website – and any other channels – in an intro video card and/or within an outro. For starters, it not only looks more professional – rather than having a video start and end abruptly – but also conveys a sense of branding to the user before they’ve even visited the website.

Community Engagement

While most would associate user engagement with platforms like Facebook and Instagram, replying to YouTube comments can also be a great step to creating the optimised user journey. It helps to build brand authenticity and trust as well as boost the engagement rate from other users. This form of interaction develops increased brand awareness from those in the researching stage of the user journey. Comparatively, try and do some research around similar videos to determine how audiences are consuming/engaging with the content. Perhaps they engage more with YouTube Shorts? Maybe long-form videos? Perhaps even both can work as part of a combined strategy?

Calls-To-Action

Central to the user journey is also clear and effective calls-to-action that relate to the website itself. For instance, if a power supply business produces a YouTube video about a specific product range, the call to action could relate to viewing the website for more detailed information on efficient power supplies. It’s this hook of additional information and offering of an answer to a potential search query that will prove most effective to generate additional traffic for a website.

Create Valuable Content

As part of a YouTube site-driving strategy, marketers should aim to create content that is both valuable and popular for the customer.

As previously said, a key part of creating value is the implementation of relevant keywords that users might search – found through keyword research of course – to create what potential customers/clients view as ‘valuable’. It’s also a good idea to conduct further research on the high-volume terms before creating any content.

For instance, what is the specific content/topics your target market wants to see? Will they be more engaged with long or short-form videos? What are the specific issues or problems they’re facing? And how can you best present a solution to their concerns in a way that will be appealing and engaging to them? This additional research provides a basis for the customer journey by emphasising the value that the content and subsequently the brand can provide to the client/customer.

Building on from this, it’s also a good idea to optimise the length of the content to really emphasise the value it provides. While YouTube does allow for both short-form and longer-form videos, striking a balance between content length and content fluff can prove challenging. While YouTube shorts are generally 30 seconds to 1 minute long, some experts suggest the optimal length for long-form content can range from 5-15 minutes as SEO can vary widely depending on the brand, video type, and audience just to name a few. The best suggestion here is to simply make the video as long as it needs to be – within reason – to get all the key information, calls to action, solutions, USPs and more across whilst still retaining viewer interest.

Remember, a key element of YouTube SEO is the percentage watch time; whatever the type of video it should contain all the main information whilst still retaining viewer interest. If you’re not 100% sure what works and what doesn’t, look at your video analytics; see what video topic, length etc has worked in the past and try to build on it.

Technical Quality

No longer is YouTube the ‘Broadcast Yourself’ wild west it once was that would see everyone upload any video idea that came to mind. Today a key factor in both search ranking and user perception of a video is the technical qualities. What is the resolution like? Is it in High Definition? What is the sound quality and editing like? While videos don’t necessarily have to reach 4K resolution, there should be a sense of quality control established. Without these technical elements, it conveys a sense of unprofessionalism that can hurt the perception of a brand itself. Safe to say, this limits any chance of prospective users reaching your website.

This also extends to a video’s preview thumbnail. This essentially acts as the billboard of the content and is quite likely to be the first exposure a user has to a Youtube channel and perhaps even a brand. It’s no surprise that according to YouTube, 90% of its best-performing videos have customised thumbnails. Given the time you would have likely spent optimising the user journey through extensive research and content planning, it would seem like an open goal to not have a well-constructed thumbnail. Choosing to use a unique style across every thumbnail can be a great way to convey a sense of brand and continuity in channel content. Consider using the brand colours already and presenting a clear crisp image that advertises the topic of the video without being oversaturated with text or other visually distracting visuals. It creates a smooth user journey for prospective customers/clients from YouTube to the website, whilst also highlighting the brand quality.

YouTube as a traffic driver going forward.

With over 90% of users around the world saying that they first discovered a new brand/product on YouTube, the benefits to brands utilising SEO on the platform are clear. Despite this, most have yet to realise its traffic-driving potential or perhaps even how it can benefit them.

It’s true that this is not an overnight traffic-driving machine; building a following on the platform takes time and work. However, by applying a strategic approach to YouTube SEO as suggested in this blog and using it as a tool within the wider online strategy, the platform can be extremely valuable in increasing a business’s overall visibility and subsequent success.

If you’re looking for help to get started with your YouTube traffic-driving strategy, contact us today.