YouTube SEO: How to Get More Subscribers Without Paid Ads
If you run a YouTube channel, you already know how tough it can be to win new subscribers and grow your organic reach.
Even when you publish consistently, it often feels like something is missing: a “magic touch” or a “secret ingredient” that finally makes the channel take off.
If that sounds like you, and you want better ways to reach new subscribers without pouring money into paid traffic, YouTube SEO is exactly what you are looking for.
In this article, you will get a clearer picture of how YouTube works and how you can use Search Engine Optimization techniques to take your channel to the next level.
What is YouTube SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a powerful ally when it comes to making your content easy for search tools to read, whether that is Google’s search bar or YouTube’s.
Everything on the internet is built from code designed to create and run commands, and YouTube is no different.
YouTube is a platform that hosts videos, and today it serves roughly 4.95 billion video views every single day.
In other words, people search YouTube for specific content every day, and SEO is what helps the platform find your video and serve it to those viewers more easily.
Here is an example.
Say you produce videos about bees. Every Wednesday and Friday you publish a new video about your hobby. Your latest upload was titled “5 Fun Facts About Beekeeping.”
The next day, someone typed “beekeeping” into YouTube search, and guess which video showed up? Yours!
All because your title included what we call a “keyword.”
What are keywords?
Keywords are terms with high search demand, and they are considered the single most important tool in SEO.
On YouTube, we tend to think of keywords as the tags we add at the end of a video.
Adding tags is an important part of SEO, since tags classify your video’s content and make it easier for YouTube to understand what you have published.
But it is just as important to include keywords in your video description, and above all, in your title.
Do that, and you will naturally start applying one of the core SEO techniques, called readability.
What is readability?
Readability simply means making the written content around your channel easier to read and parse, and there are several ways to do it.
You can start by adding keywords to your video description, along with timestamps and topics covered in the video, for example:
- 00:10 – What counts as a hobby
- 00:35 – How beekeeping works
- 01:20 – Fun fact 1: Bees
That is an example of a description that helps you build sharper SEO while also improving the experience for your viewers.
Another way to make your content more readable is to add captions to your videos. That way, YouTube also understands that your video is easier to watch and follow, because it includes captions for the user.
Finally, using a short title (under 70 characters) will help you get better readability performance.
Of course, your YouTube video can still get plenty of reach even without these techniques. But the goal is for every piece of content on your channel to reach more people and bring in new subscribers, and applying SEO techniques makes that far easier.
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How to do SEO for your YouTube channel
The first thing you need to do is take stock of where your channel stands right now. Head to “Your videos” and then “Analytics” to see details like total views, subscribers, watch time, audience, and your most-watched content.
With that information in hand, you will get a sense of what is and is not working on your channel, and from there you can build a content strategy.
If your channel is brand new, you just need to start with the strategy and think through the audience and the content you want to bring to it.
Once your content is mapped out, it is time to record, upload to YouTube, and roll up your sleeves to apply SEO.
Start with tags
Tags will appear on every one of your videos, and to get solid reach, you need to know which tags perform well for your topic and which do not.
For our beekeeper, for instance, highly technical terms may not get searched much on YouTube, so it makes sense to lean on more common keywords like “bees,” “honey,” “hobbies,” and so on.
The same goes for your content. You need to find the tags that are trending, and to help with that you can use VidIQ or Google Trends.
This research gives you access to keywords with higher search volume, and you can pick the ones with the most reach to apply to your videos.
That is how you create titles that are both compelling and well optimized for SEO.
Round out the video
Now that you have settled on your keywords, it is time to put real care into your video description.
Descriptions also let you spell out what your video covers and document information for your audience, while giving you another spot to work in keywords and make your video easier for YouTube to read.
A few other important features:
End screens
The end screen is what recommends more of your channel’s content to viewers as a video wraps up. Adding one is quick and easy, and it helps boost views across your channel.
Adding it is simple: open the video you want, select “End screen” in the top right, choose the layout you want, then set when it should appear, and you are done.
Add it to a playlist
Playlists matter for your content too, because they keep your channel organized.
When you add a video to a playlist, it also helps your YouTube SEO.
How do you know if your SEO is working?
Analysis is essential to good SEO, and the practical way to track your performance is to look at the numbers and the data. Watch the individual view count for each video, the reach it earns online, and how many subscribers it brings to the channel.
Compare across time periods and adjust your SEO whenever you want to measure results. If you already have an active channel, just compare your results against the last few months.
If you are building a channel from scratch with SEO in place from day one, simply review your SEO every two months to compare results and refine your keywords as needed.
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