YouTube ranks as the second largest search engine after Google. With over 4 billion videos viewed every day and 60 hours of video getting uploaded every minute, YouTube offers your business an incredible platform for reaching new customers. However, with so much content to sort through, customers won’t just stumble onto your videos. To increase engagement, you need to optimize a channel so that your feed appears when customers make relevant searches.

Let’s take a look at a few of the steps you can take to successfully optimize a channel so your brand can better engage with its target audience.

Place a Keyword into the Name of Your YouTube Channel

From the moment you first create an account, you need to start considering what are the most common terms users will search for on YouTube and Google. Once you’ve identified a primary keyword, try to find an organic way to make that part of your channel’s title. This will allow informational users to quickly find your channel through a targeted keyword search.

Use Keywords in Your Titles and Descriptions

Google places a lot of importance on video titles when determining what appears in a user’s search results. While funny and engaging names may provide value helping to attract users, keyword placement is what will attract search engines. You should include a keyword in every video title to help improve your Google search rank.

Additionally, optimizing your video descriptions to include keywords increases the odds your video will appear in a user’s suggested videos sidebar. Descriptions also make the ideal place to include links to your website, other channels, or any platform where you want to increase engagement.

Complete the ‘About Us’ Page

The ‘About Us’ section of a YouTube channel provides your business with an opportunity to establish its credentials to the viewer as a source of valuable information. The first 48 characters of your About page will also show up in search results, so make sure to describe yourself using concise details and the right keywords.

Create Eye-Catching Thumbnails

Convincing a potential viewer to click on your video becomes a lot easier if you create impactful thumbnails. Custom thumbnails typically enjoy far more user interaction than stock images or company logos. YouTube provides a few tips on how to create more dynamic thumbnails, but just the process of capturing and posting a screenshot of your video as a thumbnail can improve engagement.

Add a Transcript to Your Description

Adding a transcript to your video’s description offers an easy way of creating captions, which helps increase a video’s appeal to more potential viewers. If your transcript happens to include optimized keywords, that makes it incredibly easy for YouTube’s search algorithm to find your video when a user searches for a relevant term.

Say Your Keyword in the Video

Bots crawl over YouTube videos recording and cataloging transcripts for relevant information. This means voice- and video-based keywords offer just as much value as written ones. Make sure to say your keyword in the video so that search engines know that the title of your video matches its actual content.

Add Time Stamps for Key Moments

Users are far less likely to view an entire video to find the relevant information they desire. By time stamping your video to mark key moments or when different topics are discussed, you can help users quickly navigate to where they want to watch rather than risk losing them early on.

If you need help creating or optimizing your business’ YouTube channel, LocalFresh can help. Click here to see just how big a difference LocalFresh can make to your online search marketing strategy.