SEO is a very important technique for your website. Anyone who has a website or an online shop will have heard of it and wondered why it is so important.
Positioning your website ensures that when a user does a search, if your website has the keywords that the user is looking for, it should appear among the first results in the browser. The different websites that have indexed that keyword will appear in the list of browser results.
In other words, we can define SEO as the process focused on placing your website at the top of the search engine results list.
SEO applied to YouTube
YouTube is the second most visited platform in the world, and 79% of Internet users claim to have an account on the platform. It is owned by Google, and true to its owner, SEO strategies are very similar to those of the Internet giant.
The platform shares videos created and edited by its users. It has recently incorporated some new functionalities such as YouTube Stories or YouTube Shorts. Both functionalities have similarities with Instagram stories or the video format on TikTok, although they do not share exactly the same characteristics. However, YouTube's star format is the videos that are uploaded to the platform and kept on it permanently.
When we talk about SEO on YouTube, we are referring to the positioning of these videos among the first results in the platform's search engines. YouTube does not rely on the content of these videos as such to position them, but on the titles that headline them, the descriptions and the tags.
Obviously, the quality of the sound and image of the videos will have an influence on whether the videos get more views, and thus on the optimisation of their SEO positioning. But the importance has always resided in all the elements that we find in the description box.
YouTube SEO trends in 2022
We are starting a new year, and with it we are evolving a little more, both online and offline. We should not confuse SEO trends on YouTube with the YouTube trends section, as both are different.
Communication technologies reinvent themselves every year, and YouTube has not been left behind, nor have the trends it incorporates in its SEO positioning in 2022:
- Short and attractive titles
Unlike videos, short and attractive titles will continue to be a trend in the new year. They are the first thing that catches the eye on YouTube videos. The first thing that the user will see, and the first thing that the platform will register. It is important that the title is eye-catching, and YouTube often achieves better traffic and positioning by using the clickbait technique.
That's right, in 2022 clickbait will still be around, if not stronger than ever. This technique consists of using eye-catching headlines that invite the user to click on the link to the video.
- Include keywords
Keywords are the essential tool to improve SEO on YouTube, and it is a trend that we foresee will never die. It is very important to include keywords in all the elements of the description box of a YouTube video: in the description itself, in the titles, in the file name, in the tags, ..
- Hashtags or tags
Hashtags are the elements that will position you among the first results of YouTube search engines. This tool used properly can attract a lot of traffic to your YouTube channel.
It is essential to use hashtags that include keywords that the user will search for in the YouTube browser. The tags must be related to the subject of the video, although in many cases you can include tags with popular topics of the moment. This is intended to be used only as a tool to attract a greater number of users and thus improve SEO positioning.
- Improve the user experience
YouTube's algorithm is very similar to TikTok's in some ways. Basically, it presents you with videos related to topics of interest or topics you have previously consumed. YouTube is increasingly focusing on improving the user experience by offering content that it knows will be of interest to the user.
It is up to the content creators to record what that content is and identify how they can deliver it to users. The youtuber also has to create their own marketing strategy to meet their objectives within the platform.
- Longer videos
YouTube has confirmed that longer videos are the new trend on the platform, content that is usually better able to retain users and is shared more frequently.
Content creators on YouTube are going to increase the length of their videos in order to rank higher on the platform. This does not mean that they should just offer longer videos without putting any effort into the product content itself. Quality has to go hand in hand with quality.
- Voice search
Voice search is set to increase significantly by 2022, with an estimated 58% of consumers using voice search to find information on the web, mostly on Google or other assistants such as Siri or Alexa.
This does not change when applied to YouTube. According to experts, voice searches will become the majority of search engine queries in the future, so all platforms are preparing for it.
Trends in the vast majority of cases do not appear, but evolve. We can apply this to YouTube SEO, which is reinventing itself and envisions a 2022 with numerous trends. Catchy titles, voice searches and even longer videos are trends that everyone should be preparing for. Not only applied to YouTube, but to a large number of other platforms.
