3 Ways To Boost Your YouTube Traffic
So you’ve spent ridiculously long hours to create your YouTube video only to find out that no one’s watching. You use the best equipment and editing tools to make sure you are delivering high-quality video content, but your total number of views is abysmal.
You ask yourself: What am I doing wrong?
Well, it’s not so much about what you’re doing wrong, it’s what you’re not doing. The common misconception is that once you upload your YouTube video, the views will come.
That only works if you belong to the elite YouTubers who rake in millions of views in a matter of days. For a small channel that’s just starting out, you need a little help from search engine optimization (SEO).
There are a number of ways to boost YouTube traffic through SEO strategies, but we’ll focus on three things that we’re pretty good at.
Add Closed Captions to Your YouTube videos.
YouTube now has auto-captions but it’s a hit or miss kind of thing. It’s only 70 percent accurate, which makes your captions 30 percent laughable. This not only affects the reading comprehension of the reader, but it also changes the meaning of your video content. Speech recognition software, no matter how sophisticated, are still inferior to human skills. So, ditch YouTube’s automatic caption and hire a professional transcription service (that’s us!) to get the most accurate captioning possible.
The reason why closed captions must be added is that search engines spider crawl the captions (because they can’t really watch the videos) and rank your video as they see fit.
But even without all that technical SEO stuff, captions increase user engagement, which translates to more comments, likes, and shares. This is the kind of engagement that you’d want to have because YouTube algorithms would suggest your videos, which in turn, give you more views.
Add the Transcript of Your Video in the Description
Perhaps one of the most underutilized sections on YouTube is the description field. Many YouTubers are not aware that the description is that sweet spot where search engines could crawl and index videos. It’s just the best place to put the transcript of your video. With 4,850-character limit, it’s enough for a 5-10-minute video, depending on how much dialogue it has. For longer videos, you can put a condensed version of the transcript.
Adding the keyword-rich transcript gives search engines enough reason to crawl your video for those strategic keywords that could land you on the top of the search or at least a recommendation from the YouTube algorithm.
Translate Your Video Transcription into Multiple Languages
Translating the transcribed video into multiple languages makes your videos accessible to a wider audience. That’s a market much bigger than the US and just imagine the potential traffic to your YouTube channel. It’s an enormous opportunity for growth that you must tap into.
Search engines will be able to index your translated captions and descriptions in foreign markets. So when people from other countries do a search, your videos will show up. You have a higher chance of ranking because there’s lower competition when it comes to foreign keywords.
These three YouTube SEO strategies are surefire ways to increase views, likes, shares, comments, and subscriptions. If you want to know more about how you can increase traffic to your YouTube channel, contact us.
