Visibility is as important to your business as making a profit, if not more so. At the risk of sounding like my mother, if I've said it once I've said it a thousand times. If you're not ensuring the visibility of your page on search engines like Google, which is the king of all search engines, then you're making your job that much more difficult. Search engine optimization (SEO) is half of the battle for most companies, but it's far from the hardest. I've mentioned various ways Google itself helps you with SEO, but there are other way to accomplish this.

Need to Know About SEO

In case you forgot, or were not otherwise aware, search engine optimization is essentially the act of increasing a perceptible presence on search engines by creating rank-worthy content. Google does things like crawling and indexing to determine where they will rank a site on its search engine. Many other search engines follow this same formula.

The reason that establishing visibility for your site is so important is because many times, the way most people find you is via search. Sure, some consumers will find you via word of mouth, but more often than not, people will find you because they were searching for something. If your content isn't being ranked highly enough, then people won't find you. But don't worry and don't be afraid. Google has tools that will help you optimize the visibility of your site, but using Google tools isn't the only way to accomplish this. You could employ influencers or you could get a little more creative and use YouTube.

At first glance, you might think that using YouTube is pointless and unnecessary, but let me tell you the truth: according to Hubspot, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. The first is, obviously, its parent company, Google. It would be madness not to tap into that potential. YouTube is more than just cat videos.You could use YouTube as an SEO strategy that could potentially help grow your business.

Some of the Basics

Getting started with YouTube is relatively easy. One of the first things I would recommend when starting a YouTube channel is to establish continuity between your site and your channel. Try to keep the channel name as similar to your site name as possible. This will make it easier for consumers to find your channel when they're on YouTube. You can change this by going to your channel settings and changing the name. Keep in mind, though, that once you change it, you can't change it again.

After you've established your presence in terms of your name, it's on to the videos themselves. Think of every video you've ever watched on YouTube. What are some of the running themes?

1. Keywords

2. Like, comment, subscribe

3. Closed captions

Keywords

Keywords are important for obvious reasons. Besides going directly to your channel, keywords are the easiest way to find your videos. If you employ the use of a keyword-rich title, description, and tags, you will find that it'll be a lot easier for consumers to find and view your videos. Next time you're on YouTube and you notice the person in the video using a certain word or phrase more than once, and that same word also happens to be in their title and description, it's safe to assume that word is their keyword.

Utilizing keywords is probably one of the most effective SEO strategies one can employ while venturing into YouTube world. The more your keyword is used in the title, description, tags, and video itself, the more likely it is to appear amongst the most relevant search results. Conversely, you also don't want to over-saturate your videos with keywords. You'll want a happy medium.

Like, Comment, Subscribe

You have the final say on what your videos will contain. Whether it's tutorials (how-to's are probably the most searched on YouTube) or just advice pieces. Perhaps you might want to talk about new launches or do comparisons. Whatever the case may be, at the end of the video you'll want to recommend your viewers to like, comment, and subscribe. This is for obvious reasons. What happens when you do that on a YouTube video now in your everyday life? Think about it. It increases awareness and popularity to say the least.

Asking your viewers to like, comment, and subscribe has multiple benefits. Liking and commenting increases a given video's popularity within YouTube. The more comments, the better. Sometimes you can even get the conversation started yourself by asking a question related to the video's content. Having a higher amount of subscribers helps because it increases your channel's ranking on the site and it also increases the likelihood that viewers will comment and like.

Closed Captions

Closed captions are not a necessity, but they can be helpful. They're two-fold. On the one hand, it will help the hearing impaired, or anyone who might be having difficulty understanding you at a given time. Having captions will decrease the likelihood that someone will be discouraged to watch your videos because they can't hear or understand you. Additionally, they can be crawled by Google which is amazingly beneficial to you and your SEO. In case you didn't know, crawling is the way search engines find content and information from your site and add it to the search engine index. Needless to say that crawling is critical to expanding the visibility of your site.

You don't necessarily have to use closed captions to accomplish this, there are hundreds of ways to do so, but closed captions are an easy and effortless way to do it. If users don't want them, they can turn them off. Also, make sure that you are doing the editing and transcribing for the captions. YouTube has the capability to do it on the site, but sometimes it's not always accurate. In your mind you might think that's not a big deal, but it is. Trust me. If it's not transcribed properly, it could translate to gibberish. Then, a bot (the thing that does the crawling) might categorize your page as spam. We don't want that, so make sure you dot your i's and cross your t's yourself.

Additional Details

A few other things to bear in mind when working on your channel is the chief rule of them all: Consistency is key. You have to post content in a relatively consistent matter for anything to really matter. If there's too little content, your page won't get crawled often enough to be indexed and ranked on Google (which is obviously a no-go).

Thumbnails are important too. You'll want an image that will snag a viewer and convince them to click on your video as opposed to other videos. It has to be relevant to your video for obvious reasons. Thumbnails are additionally important because it will not only help increase your rankings on YouTube but also contribute to the optimization of your video. You'll want your video as optimized as possible when you finally publish it.

Playlists play a big role in SEO optimization as well. Creating different playlists allows you to utilize more keywords and generate more traffic. Your playlists can consist of almost anything. So, even if you're new to YouTube and don't have a lot of videos, don't be afraid. You can use other users' videos. This will help both channels in terms of engagement and visibility. Additionally, playlists make it easier for users to share several videos at a time since they can share multiple videos in one link. It's a win-win for everyone.

Conclusion

It's okay if you had never considered YouTube as an SEO strategy, many people don't. But now you know that you can and I highly recommend it. There are so many people on YouTube, it's a hard opportunity to pass up. People use it in the background when they're doing various tasks, while they're waiting, searching, you name it. It's a gold mine second only to Google! If you've been ensuring the visibility of your site and increasing the SEO, then this is just another apple in the basket for you. You're on your way to becoming master of the Internet. I'll see you on YouTube.