Episode 035 Search Factors on YouTube
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Welcome to SEO Day Studio with your hosts, the Findability Queen Denise Millet, and the Entrepreneur Whisperer, Kim White. This is a space to hear the questions that fellow entrepreneurs have about SEO and get them answered. So many discussions involving techy topics like SEO or loaded with jargon and unnecessary complexity.
So much so that anyone outside the tech industry has difficulty getting to the real meeting inside the information. Denise believes that every entrepreneur can benefit from search engines. Once they hear how they work in a clear and straightforward way. She's on a mission to help entrepreneurs get the content They spend hours creating included in search engines, so when their customers search online, they're findable because she believes if they can't find you, they can't do business with you.
So stay tuned. The fun starts now.
Welcome to the SEO Day Podcast Studio. I am the official mailbag keeper around here, Kim White, and I'm joined by the lovely findability queen herself, Denise Millet. Denise, thank you for giving business owners a place to get their questions answered about findability and SEO.
And I have to add also. Creators apparently for YouTube. So there you go.
Hey Kim, thank you again for being here with me on another episode of SEO Day Podcast on SEO Day Tuesdays.
I love it. If you haven't already made Tuesdays your SEO day, please mark it on the calendar. That's the day the podcast episodes drop, and that's the day that we set aside to make sure we're doing those things to get found.
Because Denise says, if you're can't be found, they can't do business with you. There you go, Denise. Thank you. So today's questions come from, and it came outta the mailbag, but it is actually a friend of mine who is a YouTube influencer who chose to be anonymous. Remember when you send your questions in, we'll give you a shout out if you let us, if you don't want the shout out, send it in.
Let us know, and we won't call your name out, but you know who you are. I'm just gonna say out there, these questions came from my friend who asked, what do I need in my video description on YouTube?
This is a great question. Your video description is an opportunity to reinforce what your, or tell what your video is about.
So give the YouTube search engine an idea of what the video's all about beyond your title and your file name or your thumbnails, so you get to go a little bit more into depth. So I would use whatever keywords you've chosen for this video about the topic that you're, you're speaking about, but you also have an opportunity to, put chapters in so you can put a time stamp in and a description, which is like the, the chapter name, which also is like a list of subtopics that are in your topic.
And that just helps the search engine organize and categorize what's in the video. Because we know they can look at a video and see the transcript and they can understand context. But what you put in the description reinforces what they think they saw when they went through the video. So. Everything that you put in there is an opportunity to speak more plainly about what your intent was and who you're trying to talk to and speak to them directly with what's in there.
So people aren't going to see the description unless they click into the video and look at it. It's not like search where the beginning of it shows up, not like Google search, where it shows up on the list. You'll see the thumbnail and the title, but you don't see the description. It's very powerful in the background to give as much information as you can about what's in the video.
great answer. So question number two from my friend is, do tags make a difference for my video in YouTube search?
Yes they do. so what we're talking about with tags is when you go to set up the video and you upload it, there are the video details and there's a section. If you scroll down below some of the settings, you'll see a box for tags and you have 500 characters that you could put in there.
Those tags are another opportunity to reinforce what your video's about, to kind of give it. Subtopics or. Another name for the topic. So they say that you could put misspellings of what people might type in looking for it in there. But what I would say is these search engines are pretty smart to correct misspellings.
So only use that if like your name as Con, constantly typed incorrectly or, There's, a technical term that people use that you want to expand or something you know, is commonly misspelled. Don't go for like the regular misspellings, you know, fat finger typing or anything like that. Go for things that, you know, if your name is, my name's Denise.
If they were to spell it Denice all the time, I put Denice in there instead of Denise. You know? I don't thank goodness, but you know, tags, so you have 500 characters, so you put them in there, comma, separated. So like for me it would be search. Marketing is something that I associate with a lot of the things that I do, but that not, may not come up in the text, but it's search strategy or search marketing or search content.
Those are things that help identify what I've put in the video a little bit more and categorize it so they are helpful. They're not the primary thing that are looked at, but they support what you put in your description.
Love it. Thank you, Denise.
Thanks.
So question number three, and I love this question.
Are shorts or videos better for me to show up in search?
And we are talking about YouTube search here. So, YouTube search is broken down by sections. So there are short, so by type of video. So there's a shorts type and there's a clip type of video that are landscape versus the vertical. And
I don't think that you have better chance of showing up in either or. What I would say is you should direct it towards the people that are looking. So if you're looking for someone who's just scrolling by in their time on their mobile, right, shorts are a really great way to get someone's attention to then point them to something else that's more in depth.
Because when they show a regular video clip on mobile, it's smaller and it doesn't have the same impact as a short might. So I don't think one is better than the other. Search results are gonna show you them. section by type people are gonna go to that type and look at it. I think what's the better question is what's better for your people and what's going to, interest them more based on who they are, what they're doing when they search, what you're trying to convey.
Great answers, Denise.
Thank
you. So let's take a quick break and head over to a word from our sponsor today.
This episode is brought to you by the Findability Queen Denise Millet. Visit her YouTube channel youtube.com/@findabilityqueen for her collection of short videos, answering questions about findability and SEO for entrepreneurs every day.
Thank you for joining us for the SEO Day podcast. We're excited to be back talking about YouTube search in particular today. And our next question is, does the length of your description on a YouTube video make a difference for SEO?
I'm gonna say yes. There is no hard and fast length that you have to meet.
There's nothing, we would say for a blog post, it doesn't have to be 1500 words. It doesn't have to be 200. That's true of a description. But because the description. Reinforces what's in your video. I think it's important to make it as long as it need to be to really show a search, YouTube search what's in the video.
So I think it's very valuable. So I think it's worth your time to put as much in there as you can detail. I don't mean a transcript, I mean put as much idea ideas about what you've written, whether it's in a list or sub list, or. However you wanna do it, give as much information as you can. I don't mean be repetitive stuff it full of information, but do a good job about describing your video beyond just a sentence or two, and you'll get better results.
Thank you Denise. And our final question for today are keywords on my channel, the same as the tags on each of my videos.
Oh, this is a good one. So, what they're talking about here is if you go to this. Settings on your channel, it's you go to settings and then there's the list on the left and you choose channel.
There's a box for keywords, and that is also 500 characters. They are different than the tags that are on your video individual videos. So what a channel, what channel keywords do. Or help define the categories your channel is appropriate for if someone were to search for them. So it helps narrow down where things are gonna maybe come from as they're trying to put results together for you when you do a search.
So. Search can only do so much search, like it tries to narrow down its work as much as possible. So if you give it clues about you're about entrepreneurship or you're about marketing, then that can help. It puts you in the right place for when they get searches about those things. So. Does that make sense?
Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for answering these questions, Denise. We're gonna close the mail bag for today and we'll jump back in next week. You did a great job of making it clear what SEO is and how we can use it for our businesses and YouTube channels, so thank you, Denise. Millet.
Thank you, Kim, for being here with me today.
I really appreciate all the questions from the person who submitted them. And if you have questions, please head over to the website and look for the questions page, the, links in the show notes. And you could submit your questions there too. We'd love to answer them. I've also created a guide to help you with your keywords choices, and as you're trying to figure all that out for your videos, if you go to.
The link in the show notes, you can download the quickly find your perfect keywords, guide the simple and easy way to be findable, and it'll help you just get started on that journey a little bit so you can feel confident in your keyboard choices. And we're so thrilled you were here with us this week.
And until next time, have a good week.
Thank you for joining Denise and Kim in the SEO Day studio for today's discussion. If you would like one of your SEO questions answered in the future episode, head on over to denise Millet.com/questions to let us know. The link is also in the show notes. We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of the SEO Day podcast.
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