Step 2: Creating a Keyword Strategy

Keywords help people find your channel.  They serve as signals in the major search engines that will connect your audience to the content they’re looking for.

In fact, just by optimizing your channel so it includes relevant and highly-targeted keywords may be all you need to do to drive in traffic, especially if your content caters to a hungry market.

This means, you’ll want to add relevant keywords in the “About Section” of your channel.

Doing this will help you rank organically in the search engines and make sure your channel appears when someone enters search terms directly into the YouTube search bar.

You’ll find the About Section here: https://www.youtube.com/advanced_settings

 

Try to come up with 10-15 relevant, long-tail keywords that best describe your content.

You can use them throughout the different areas of your channel as well as within the description of each video.

You’ll also want to optimize your video descriptions so that they are focused on both your audience and search engines. This means that instead of writing a long description for each video, focus on including your primary keywords early in the text but make sure they read smoothly.

You don’t want to keyword stuff to where a subscriber reads your description and it doesn’t make any sense to them. 

Your most important keywords should always appear in the first line of your description otherwise it’ll be truncated with a “Show More” link, but again, make sure your description isn’t just a series of keywords – it needs to provide your audience with important information about your content.

In addition, you’ll want to include relevant keywords in your video titles as well, especially your focus keyword (the main keyword you’re hoping to rank for). 

 

Keep your video titles short and focused on engagement. You want them to be exciting and to immediately capture attention.

 

Always take advantage of any opportunity to include keywords in your content. In addition, vary the keywords used so that you’re able to rank for a variety of long-tail keyword phrases.

 

Here are a few ways to leverage free YouTube keyword tools:

HyperSuggest: https://www.hypersuggest.com/
There’s a free version of this keyword tool that will allow you to search by country while providing important data, such as potential search volume.

WordTracker: https://www.wordtracker.com/
This tool will provide search volume, overall competition and other information that will help you optimize your channel such as the number of times keywords appear in the anchor and title of popular YouTube channels.

This tool makes it easy to uncover relevant, high-traffic keywords while being able to reverse-engineer popular channels in your niche.

 

And finally, you’ll want to create a secondary keyword list that focuses on tags.

Tags function the exact same way keywords do and so they’ll become a very important part of your channel. 

Unfortunately, tags aren’t displayed by default in video descriptions so you won’t be able to uncover them just by browsing popular videos in your niche. However, there are a handful of free tools that will solve this problem.

These include:

TubeBuddy:
https://www.tubebuddy.com/

Tags for YouTube: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tags-for-youtube/dggphokdgjikekfiakjcpidcclbmkfga?hl=en-US

Once you install these Chrome plugins, whenever you visit a YouTube channel and look through the description, you’ll be able to see what tags are being used by the creator.  This spy tactic is invaluable because it’ll show you exactly what others are using successfully. 

 

And while tags aren’t the only way to optimize your videos and overall channel, they’re important when it comes to signaling to YouTube search and Google what your video is about. 

 

Tags will also help your videos populate in search as well as in related video views.