Last week I posted How to get more views on your YouTube videos and, whilst there is never any guarantee in SEO, I was fairly confident that I would be able to prove a good meta description will improve search performance.
In that article I describe a very simple experiment, in which I posted the same video to two different YouTube channels. The video title, tags and thumbnail would be identical, as would the latter 90% of the description. The only difference would be the first 160 characters of text i.e. the video’s meta description.
I’m going to let both videos run for a month before doing a follow up but, truth be known, it’s a really bad experiment. In reality, I should have posted two videos onto brand new channels with zero subscribers. However, had I done that for something as competitive (in search terms) as “how to get more views on your YouTube videos” then neither would have received much attention.
As it stands, the video with the better meta description has ten times more views than the other but this is impacted by the fact one was seen by my 400 subscribers and subsequently received numerous likes and shares. In YouTube terms, this is essentially link building which, in turn, bumps the video up the search engine.
Obviously, I’ll cover all of this when I do my follow up video but, for now, I want to share this image, which shows the impact of tweaking the meta description of some of my older videos….
YouTube SEO: tweaking the description can lead to more video views
As you can see, my gaming channel has seen a massive spike in views since 11th January. What you can’t see is that I spent a few hours tweaking the meta descriptions for some of my older videos a couple of days beforehand. If you drill down into my YouTube analytics you can see this can be attributed to my How to get gold + diamond guns in Black Ops 2, AVerMedia Game Capture HD unboxing and Best Rushing Class in Black Ops 2 videos.
Whilst I will probably post the entire series to this blog, I would suggest you subscribe or follow this YouTube SEO playlist if you wish to view the videos as soon as I upload them. I have already posted Episode 2, which shows you how to get your YouTube Subscription link. It isn’t strictly SEO but it will help you to pull in more subs and, ultimately, views.
If you have any questions on YouTube SEO please feel free to leave them in the comments below or on one of my videos. I’ll try to deal with questions individually but if the same thing pops up a few times then I’ll address it by way of a video.
