SEO Tools for YouTube Videos

Creating quality videos takes time and effort. Ensuring they are discoverable in organic search is often a missing step. Here are three tools to help.

Ahrefs

A free tool in Ahrefs identifies keywords to insert in YouTube video titles, increasing the chances of ranking in YouTube’s and Google’s organic search results.

Ahrefs pulls keywords from YouTube’s autocomplete results. It also shows the organic search volume on YouTube for each keyword, providing the potential clicks if your video ranks for that term.

Ahrefs identifies keywords to insert in YouTube video titles. This example is for the keyword “content marketing.” Click image to enlarge.

Click the “Questions” tab to find queries on YouTube associated with the keyword.

Clicking “Questions” shows YouTube search queries containing the keyword. Click image to enlarge.

Gemini

Video descriptions can make or break rankings and engagement. Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard) streamlines video description composition. To test, I used this video for content marketing on Reddit.

I then entered the following prompt into Gemini:

Generate key takeaways from this video [URL].

Unlike Gemini, ChatGPT won’t work for this task because it cannot access YouTube videos. Here is Gemini’s response:

Here are the key takeaways from the video:

Reddit is a great platform to find content ideas and promote your content because it has a lot of stories, data, and studies shared there. However, it’s important to follow the rules of each subreddit and become part of the community before trying to promote anything.

You should not just drop your link and leave it. Instead, find a cool comment to go with the link, a question, or something to provoke a discussion. It’s also important to mix in sharing other people’s links and content that you found interesting.

Reddit has a voting system, so it’s important to make sure your content is high quality and helpful for people. This will help you get more upvotes and visibility.

By being active on Reddit, you can learn what approaches work best for your target audience and what kind of content gets shared the most.

Michael Cottam’s Embed Code

YouTube’s embed code slows down a page and doesn’t include Schema.org markup, which would help Google generate a video rich-snippet.

A free tool from Michael Cottam, a search engine optimization consultant, fixes both problems. Instead of using the embed code, the tool creates a still image containing a “Play” button. When “Play” is clicked, the tool swaps the image for an iframe that embeds the YouTube video and plays it.

To use, upload the video to YouTube and enter into the tool its:

• URL,
• Title and description,
• Duration,
• Upload date.

Consultant Michael Cottam’s tool optimizes page speed and rich-snippet visibility for embedded YouTube videos. Click image to enlarge.

The embed code doesn’t load until the image is clicked, preventing slow page speeds. The tool also includes structured data markup for the Google rich snippet.