B2B marketers know how important it is to optimize their websites for search. However, what they often fail to realize is that their search strategy must be expanded beyond their websites to be an integral part of all aspects of their comprehensive marketing strategy, including videos that are uploaded to YouTube. 

What B2B marketers may not know when they are uploading a video on YouTube—the world’s second largest search engine that receives an estimated 829,400 new video uploads every single day— is that the video is competing with every single video that exists on YouTube. Without a search strategy to optimize a video’s rank with YouTube, it’s unlikely that the target audience will ever see a video that took considerable creative and financial resources to create.  

The real goal for optimizing videos, just like websites, is to make it easy for the target audience to find the video on YouTube. Boost the rank of the video by clearly indicating to the YouTube web-spiders what the video is about. When uploading a video to YouTube, take time to create an engaging title and description, rich with keywords that will interest the target audience. To follow best practices, tag the video with up to seven relevant keywords, including those that are also associated with other videos already posted on YouTube. By adding similar keywords, the video can be shown as a “related video” and will result in increased viewership.

There are a few other aspects of uploaded videos that can be easily controlled to improve its ranking. In addition to optimizing text, inbound links also factor into ranking, just like in website optimization. Inbound links also include embedded video, which allows the video to play anywhere while backlinking to YouTube. The more inbound and embedded links a video receives, the higher the ranking. YouTube also takes a video’s ratings and comments into account when calculating a video’s rank. YouTube presumes that videos with large viewership and many comments are of higher quality. Therefore, videos with many comments and positive ratings will receive a boost in rank.

Optimizing a video for YouTube is not difficult, but by implementing a good SEO strategy, B2B marketers can plan for success.