5 YouTube SEO Mistakes 99% of Small YouTubers Are Making
Hey, content creators, it's Ryan and I'm sharing with you my YouTube channel tip & experience SEO is something that can confuse a lot of creators right at the start of their channel because they heard that this is the key to getting them discovered on YouTube.
And I just want to put on and I just want a lot of these strategies completely to rest because most of the SEO strategies that I've seen small YouTubers try out on their channel are a literally complete waste of time. But you know, what isn't a waste of time,
Check More...↓
YouTube SEO Mistake No. 1
And you'll be helping out an aspiring YouTube creator SEO mistake number one is your tags and description.
I just started working with a couple clients the other week. And what I have to say about that is that two of them actually came up to me and asked me, Hey, does it matter? How many characters are within my description?
Do I have to have a lot of keywords in there? Or does it not matter at all, because they were genuinely confused about this because they might have heard from some YouTubers saying that,
Obviously, their videos blew up because they had a specific amount of characters within their description, or they had specific keywords that got them ranked in search.
And I have to say, at the end of the day, from what I have found my experience, and what I've learned about YouTube is that none of it matters, none of the keywords and the amount of characters that you have within your description matter at all.
That's why if you look at a lot of my videos, the descriptions, a lot of them are getting 1000s upon 1000s of views. But guess what my keywords in my descriptions literally have one sentence in them. And that's all you need.
And now you may say to yourself, well go for this audience. And no, that's not entirely true. Because if I just relied on my large audience, then obviously every single one of my videos would probably be getting the same amount of views.
But that's not the case at all, some videos don't do so well. Some videos do really well. And it's all because of the click-through rate of your video. And if people actually are enjoying your video, that's what it really comes down to at the end of the day.
And I made these exact same mistakes, especially with my older channel. I literally just stuffed this entire thing there were like paragraphs upon paragraphs, and a lot of it just didn't even make any sense.
Instead of you just focus on maybe one or two keywords, you just put it probably right at the beginning and one sentence of your description, you're going to be fine. The same thing goes with tags. Tags at the end of the day are literally meaningless.
The reason why tags are meaningless is because YouTube doesn't base everything off keywords anymore. At least that's what they say. And if you don't want to take my word for it, that's totally fine. Instead, you should take YouTube's word for it.
Because when you're uploading a video and you're putting in your tags, I have a little info icon right above the tags.
And they literally tells you that they only use tags for misspellings within your description in your title, meaning that they don't use these to rank your videos in search, browse features or even suggested videos.
So honestly, they really don't matter at the end of the day. But of course, I still tell everybody make sure you're putting in a description and tags, you still want to cover your best practices just in case YouTube decides maybe tomorrow that they are going to matter and they're going to have more impact on your videos, it's probably just best to cover all your bases.
YouTube SEO Mistake No. 2
I see a mistake number two is keyword stuffing your titles is something that small YouTubers have the problem of all of the time they overthink their title so much,
where instead of trying to make a title for people, they try to make a title for algorithms and robots because they want to get ranked in search, or they just want to get promoted.
And they want to make sure YouTube knows that this video is about the specific topic that they're talking about within the video.
And so they think if they put the keyword saying it three times in the title that's going to make YouTube know exactly what the video is about, even though the algorithms are actually extremely smart and will know exactly what your video is about.
Before you even put in your title description or tags. The reason why they know that is because they literally are analyzing your video. So even if you have a title that has maybe one or two of those keywords, that's all you need,
because YouTube has already went through while processing your video and uploading it and already pointed out all the different keywords that you talk about within that video. So literally, that's why keywords at the end of the day, really don't make a difference at all.
And that's why focusing on creating titles that tease your audience, or maybe to a specific result that you're going to get your audience that is what's going to get more clicks for you down the road. And if you feel a little alone in this and you're like overthinking every single part.
Don't worry, you're not alone at all. This is something that I personally still do to this day. I personally overthink one thing specifically and that's going from subscribers in the title to going to subs in the title.
So literally that minor change just changing subscribers to subs because obviously, I want to shorten my titles and really just give a specific value proposition of exactly what the video is all about.
And I think that saying subs in the title is just way more effective than saying subscribers sometimes but a lot of the time I overthink this I think to myself.
It's gonna get confused by this but of course, they're not they know exactly what they're doing. I have gathered an audience that is all about growing their channel on YouTube. So clearly, if I put subs in the title, they know exactly what to the end of the day, trust your audience.
And they'll know that you made this video by Just Your thumbnail and title specifically my thumbnails where I always show my dumb reactions and, but they'll also understand those abbreviations as well.
YouTube SEO Mistake No. 3
SEO mistake number three is to buddy in vid IQ keyword research scores. Now a lot of small YouTubers can get really hung up on the keyword scores in making sure that they have a perfect 100 on their keyword SEO.
Honestly, this is something that I have done in the past probably like four years ago, but I amended this pretty quick because I realized that everyone was talking about getting a perfect keyword score, that they weren't really telling the truth about how to get views on YouTube.
Or if they weren't telling the truth, I don't think that they knew exactly what they were talking about. Because every single time I personally have uploaded a video that had 100 on to buddy and vid IQ almost every single time I never got views on the video, those scores mean absolutely nothing to me today,
I never use it to indicate exactly which video I'm going to make on which topic or anything like that. The reason for this is that they don't just factor in the search volume behind that specific keyword, but they also factor in competition, and they factor in optimization.
But at the end of the day, if you're someone with 100 subscribers, and you're able to get a really high click-through rate and audience retention on your video higher than someone with a million subscribers, you eventually over time will beat their video out and you'll get promoted more.
That's how new channels are getting discovered all the time. It's not because of their keywords or anything like that, once again, it's all because they're going after specific topics that have a lot of traffic around them.
And they're getting a higher click-through rate and longer audience retention than their competitors. That's it at the end of the day. That's all YouTube cares about. And if you disagree with me at me in the comments,
YouTube SEO Mistake No. 4
let's go to mistake number four is thinking that Keywords are the reason why videos get ranked in YouTube search. And I was somebody not too long ago when I first started this channel,
I still thought this because my old channel was about entertainment a little it was just an entertainment-based channel. So I never focused on ranking in search or anything like that, because I knew for that specific channel, it never mattered.
If I ranked in search at all, it said, you're an education-based channel that matters a little bit more. That's where a lot of those YouTubers are going to be getting the bulk of their views.
So I knew that obviously, I probably need to focus more on keyword research in ranking in search. But this video right here that I talked about all time, prove me wrong pretty fast in this one right here as well. The reason is because obviously, just like every other traffic source,
YouTube has realized that if they promote the videos that have the best click-through rate and audience attention that is going to keep people on the platform longer.
So that's why focusing on those keywords really just doesn't matter. Obviously, you need to focus on a couple keywords if you want to rank for that specific search query. But at the same time,
If you just have a really high click-through rate on that video within that specific search query, you're going to get ranked higher than others. And that's what happened to this video right here. First, it blew up in browse features. But now it's getting the bulk of its views through a YouTube search. And you can see it right here.
This video says nothing about how to get views on YouTube. But this is still at the end of the day one of the top search terms that are getting me the most views as of right now.
YouTube SEO Mistake No. 5
SEO Mistake number five is saying your targeted keywords in the first 30 seconds of your video. This one really to me just doesn't really make that much sense. But I can honestly understand why a lot of small YouTubers tried to do this because obviously,
If you're focusing on keywords, and you put it in your title, you put in your description, your tags, you're obsessing over these keywords because you think this will get you ranked.
And then of course within the first 30 seconds of your video, you want to say those keywords so YouTube knows that this is what this video is about.
And this is the keyword you want to get ranked for. It just doesn't make any sense at all. Because once again, when you look at it and you think to yourself, people are gonna pick up when you're saying these specific keywords and you're only trying to rank for that specific keyword.
So honestly, I think this is probably one of the worst things I've ever heard people do. And I would immediately stop doing it because it has absolutely no impact on your video success whatsoever.
Most of these keywords mistakes are really just going to waste your time and won't bring you any closer to success. And you need to focus on what really matters, which is creating great content for your audience.