Have you maxxed out your SEO for YouTube?

Great photo by Grok.

Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing? 
 
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. 
 
Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. 
 
But first, the genesis of this story. 
 
As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). 
 
The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. 
 
But how? 
 
There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 
 
1. The actual title of the video. 
2. The YouTube description of the video
 
Let’s review each. 
 
1. The title
 
We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” 
 
You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. 
 
But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). 
 
So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” 
 
Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. 
 
But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? 
 
There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. 
 
Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first.
 
It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. 
 
Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 
 
2. The description
 
Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. 
 
The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. 
 
That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. 
 
Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. 
 
The search engines like stuff like that. 
 
Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. 
 
And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. 
 
Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. 
 
Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. 
 
Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

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