YouTube SEO strategies for visibility

If you want to establish yourself in the world of online marketing, it’s important to understand the connections between different platforms. YouTube has established itself as the second-largest search engine, and its relationship with SEO is by no means trivial. In this tutorial, I will show you how you can strategically use YouTube to increase your visibility without having false expectations.

Main Insights

• YouTube delivers nofollow links that do not directly contribute to improving your website's organic search.
• It is possible to optimize videos for better discoverability on YouTube.
• A video can show signs of engagement that positively affect your SEO ranking, but that is not the main reason to create videos.

Connection Between YouTube and SEO

YouTube is a product of Google, which means it has a certain connection to the main search engine. You receive a so-called nofollow link when you place a link in the video description. This means that YouTube does not directly use the link to enhance your website's authority. Nevertheless, this link has its value because it comes from a Google platform and signals a kind of connection.

A crucial point is that a nofollow link can also be part of a healthy link structure. You don’t need to exclusively aim for dofollow links to be successful.

However, there is no direct correlation between YouTube videos and better placement of your website in organic search results. This means that an optimized YouTube video does not automatically lead to your website being found better.

Video Optimization for YouTube

Despite the mentioned limitations, you shouldn’t shy away from the idea of creating videos for YouTube. This includes optimizing your videos so they can be found better on YouTube itself.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and in Google's Universal Search, videos can also be displayed. One example here would be a search for “Porsche Workshop Berlin,” where a video might be shown on the second page of results. Such a video could be optimized to return to the first page.

To optimize your videos for video search, I recommend paying attention to keywords that are displayed in 13% of search queries. By this optimization, you can achieve better visibility within YouTube and Google.

It is important to emphasize that while videos should be well optimized, they should not be the main focus of your SEO strategy. If your only goal is to make your website visible in organic search, a video is probably not the crucial tool.

Integrating the Video into Your Own Website

Once you have created a video, it also makes sense to integrate it into your own website. Keep in mind that the video itself does not necessarily lead to your ranking improving. However, it helps to keep visitors on your page longer, which may result in a higher average visit duration.

This can yield positive signals for SEO, but again, if the content of your website is not appealing enough to hold visitors, a video alone will not be sufficient to achieve your goals.

Content Strategy and Audience Focus

When creating videos, it is crucial to consider why you are creating them. You should always ask yourself if you want to help users who have a specific problem. Purely informative image videos are often not the best choice because they do not provide the desired value.

I recommend focusing on problem-solving content to provide real value. The optimization of videos has its own course, and it’s important that you familiarize yourself with the techniques to succeed.

Summary – YouTube and SEO: Optimization for Higher Visibility

You have seen a variety of approaches to how you can utilize YouTube for your SEO strategy without losing sight of the main goals. You should create videos to share content that helps people and can be the solution to their problems. Do not rely on YouTube alone to improve your organic visibility – consider it as a complementary tool in your digital toolbox.