How To Upload and Optimize your Video to YouTube
May 31, 2022
YouTube is a great place to brand your small business. If you have any videos about your business, maybe testimonials from customers, some behind the scenes that you’ve shot, an event at your place of business, or you’re planning to shoot how-to style videos about your business or industry, these sorts of things are all great content for creating a YouTube video. Creating videos that are designed to rank well in search results through keyword research is essential for attracting attention and enhancing visibility across platforms like YouTube and Google. Additionally, strategically uploading videos to ensure greater visibility and engagement on the platform is crucial.
If you read my previous blog on How to Find, Hire and Work With a Video Editor you are most likely ready to advance your YouTube presence even more. Now that you have a video edited and ready to be published to YouTube, you now want to optimize and upload your video so that your audience sees it. This video is going to go over
How to Upload Video and Optimize It on YouTube
Why should you optimize your YouTube video?
The simple reason is so people can find you on YouTube. According to Rand Fischkin, YouTube has more search traffic then both Bing and Yahoo, more than twice Amazon’s and three times Facebook, and if you optimize your video, when someone goes searching for the information that’s included in your video, they’ll find your video, and if you don’t optimize the video, they might not. Effective video SEO techniques can lead to increased traffic and engagement.
Whether you are interested in housing a place for your videos, or want to grow your YouTube channel, you always want to optimize. Following these optimization steps only takes a few minutes, but it can make the world of a difference when people are trying to search for worthy content. To optimize videos for search on Google and YouTube, it is crucial to create a comprehensive video SEO strategy to enhance visibility and ranking in SERPs.
Preparing Your Video for Upload
Before uploading your video to YouTube, it’s essential to prepare it for optimal performance. This step is crucial in ensuring that your video is discoverable, engaging, and meets YouTube’s guidelines. Start by ensuring your video is of high quality—both in terms of content and technical aspects like resolution and sound. High quality videos are more likely to retain viewers and encourage them to engage with your content.
Next, make sure your video adheres to YouTube’s community guidelines and copyright policies. This means avoiding any content that could be flagged or removed, which can negatively impact your channel. Additionally, consider adding a brief introduction and conclusion to your video to give it a professional touch and provide context for your viewers.
Steps to Optimize and Upload Your video to YouTube
1.Title Your Video
We start with the video's title, which you should use to name the video file that will be uploaded to YouTube and in the “title field” on YouTube itself. Your YouTube video's title should be relevant to what the video’s about, and also, contain terms people might use to search for the content of this video. While creating a title, it’s important that it grabs the attention of others, as well as being keyword-rich for better optimization.
2. Upload Your Video
Before you completely upload your video, make sure it is set to ‘unpublished’. This is because you will still have a few more changes to make before making it live to the public.So I'm going to select a file, a pre-recorded video from my desktop. As it uploads, complete the remaining video optimizing steps.
3. Add a Description to Your Video
For the video description, it’s super important to load it with multiple keywords or key phrases. Most people don’t need to read the description of the video, since they already read the title prior to clicking in the video. So think the main job of the description is to help with optimization, aka people finding the video. So reiterate here what the video is all about.
The first sentence of the description should repeat the title that you chose in step 2. So I want you to use five sentences that reuses your title over and over again. First, you write the title. "How to Upload and Optimize A Video on YouTube to Brand Your Small Business." And then something like, "Do you want to brand "your small business using YouTube? "You should watch this video on how to upload "and optimize a video on YouTube to brand "your small business." Do this until you have about five sentences, this way the description is loaded with strong keywords for optimizing.
4. Tag Your Video
YouTube gives you the option to add 500 characters in the tag section. Be sure to use all 500 characters, it will help you reach more people. The goal is to find tags that are relevant but not too popular. You can use the service on Tube Buddy, Google or even Instagram to determine what hashtags will work best.
Determining hashtags can take a lot of research because you have to think about what the audience is searching to find your video, and what hashtags will directly correlate. Hashtags can be used on most social platforms, as it is another way to be social and see what others are posting about, this way you have the opportunity to connect with them if you’d like. I have a previous blog that you can reference for determining the best hashtags for Instagram. These practices can be a game-changer when it comes to your account or content being discovered!
5. Create a Custom Thumbnail
Thumbnails are the little photos associated with each video you see on YouTube. Creating thumbnails can be a great way to make your video stick out. You can most certainly take a snippet of your YouTube video and set it as the image viewers see as the thumbnail. However, you can spice it up even more by using Canva to edit the photo.
Canva actually provides a YouTube thumbnail template. Just add keywords, or your title of the video to make your video more intriguing to viewers. The idea is to stand out with bold colors, a fun photo and BIG font so it is legible.
Once your graphic is complete, be sure to download it to your computer. We're going to go back to YouTube while that downloads. At this point the video should be done uploading and you're able to head to the Creator Studio to add your custom thumbnail by clicking the ‘edit’ button.
6. Closed Caption Your Video
Adding closed captions to your videos will add optimization, and make your videos searchable just by having subtitles. YouTube will do this for you, but I found it tedious to clean up all of the mistakes in the YouTube version. I pay $1/minute for www.rev.com caption service. Something as simple as adding subtitles to your YouTube video makes a big difference in how your video is discovered.
Enhancing Video Engagement and Watch Time
Engagement and watch time are critical metrics that YouTube uses to rank videos. Here are some tips to enhance video engagement and watch time:
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Create Compelling Intros: The first few seconds of your video are crucial. Start with a hook that grabs your viewers’ attention and makes them want to keep watching. This could be a surprising fact, a question, or a brief overview of what they will learn.
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Use Video Chapters: Break your video into sections using timestamps. This not only helps viewers navigate your content but also keeps them engaged by providing a clear structure. Video chapters can also improve your video’s SEO by making it easier for YouTube to understand the content of your video.
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Encourage Interaction: Ask your viewers to like, comment, and subscribe. Engaging with your audience through comments can also boost your video’s ranking. The more interaction your video gets, the more likely it is to be recommended by YouTube.
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Keep It Concise: While longer videos can increase watch time, it’s important to keep your content concise and to the point. Avoid unnecessary filler and make sure every part of your video adds value to the viewer.
Measuring Video Performance
Measuring video performance is crucial in understanding how your video is performing on YouTube. Here are some metrics to track:
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Watch Time: This is the total amount of time viewers have spent watching your video. Higher watch time indicates that viewers are engaged with your content.
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Audience Retention: This metric shows you how well your video is keeping viewers’ attention. It can help you identify which parts of your video are most engaging and which parts may need improvement.
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Click-Through Rate (CTR): This measures how often viewers click on your video after seeing the thumbnail. A higher CTR means your thumbnail and title are effective in attracting viewers.
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Engagement: Track likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions. High engagement signals to YouTube that your content is valuable and worth promoting.
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Traffic Sources: Understanding where your viewers are coming from can help you optimize your promotion strategy. Whether it’s YouTube search, suggested videos, or external sources, knowing your traffic sources can guide your future content creation and marketing efforts.
By regularly monitoring these metrics, you can gain valuable insights into your video’s performance and make data-driven decisions to improve your content and grow your YouTube channel.
It’s Time to Go Public
It’s now time to change this video from unlisted to public, and then hit save. I'm not going to do that right now, because one final tip is if you are working to grow your audience through YouTube, then experts agree that the first 24 hours is the most important time for your YouTube video, meaning you need to show YouTube that lots of people want to watch your video.
Now the video is public, so anyone with the link or that discovered the link can find your YouTube video. Wherever you can to drive traffic to that video from outside of YouTube, that will tell YouTube,” Hey, people like this, I'm going to show it to more people on YouTube”. Then you might find new audience members. Once your video is upload, optimization is going to be what drives your audience to your video or channel.
Happy Optimizing!
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