No matter if you’re a YouTuber, streamer, advertiser, or a small business owner looking to leverage the most popular video platform on Earth , you should know by now that simply uploading your latest creation and hoping for the best won’t result in your video going “viral” – or even reaching your target audience. Despite the number of improvements made to the service since its inception in 2005, it’s still unclear how end users are meant to optimize their content to ensure it reaches the largest viewership possible. Of course, Google wants video creators to take advantage of their advertising service, but the return on investment versus traditional media platforms remains unclear.

How can organizations without major financial support at their backs take advantage of YouTube’s ever-growing, highly-engaged audience? These three money-saving tips can help you boost your YouTube views, subscriber counts, and overall engagement without breaking the bank.

Perform and Implement Keyword Research

Keywords are the terms users are entering in search fields to find the content they want. General phrases, like “dog sitting,” are highly competitive and require extraordinary effort to achieve success. These are usually targets for big-dollar companies in the corporate realm – think Rover or DogVacay. But, if you’re running a small dog sitting business looking to put a personal, friendly touch on your services, adding an appropriately-named “long tail” keyword to your video’s title such as “friendly dog sitting Minneapolis,” you’re much more likely to rank competitively on results pages when viewers use a combination of those words.
Tools like Keyword Keg offer great insight into how competitive certain phrases are, so taking a few minutes to do your homework could reap huge rewards.

Optimize Video Metadata

Metadata, or the information pulled by search engines that helps define the content of a video, webpage, or image, is often overlooked by the casual YouTube user. Its importance in search rankings on both Google and YouTube, however, should not be underestimated.

Remember that keyword research you did for your title and description? It’s also highly effective in attracting viewers from secondary or referral sources such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, and more. When you settle on a keyword phrase you’d like to target for your video, adding it to your video’s description and tags fields will go a long way to helping users find the content they want – no matter where they’re coming from.

Provide a Written Transcription of Each Video

We’ve talked extensively about the benefits of video transcription services, but the biggest advantage may be the most crucial for boosting metrics on YouTube: long tail SEO. Even if you have blog posts, white papers, or other supporting text to go along with your video, providing a written transcription of exactly what is said is the only way to ensure people will find your video in search results. Without a transcription, they’ll simply miss it.

Automated transcription services won’t be a reliable solution here, as search engines filter out results containing improper spelling, grammar, and gobbledygook often found in voice-to-text tools. For a professional video transcription service that won’t harm the piggy bank, contact Transcription Hub today.