YouTube SEO is key to getting your content seen. Finding the right keywords is step one (TubeBuddy Keyword Explorer can help there). Optimizing your content to target those keywords is next. That’s where TubeBuddy SEO Studio comes in.
SEO Studio takes a step-by-step approach to optimizing your video title, video description, and tags so that YouTube search and other search engines know exactly what to make of it. When it’s done well, YouTube SEO can send viewers in droves.
After doing all the creative work to produce amazing content, that content needs to be easy for viewers to find in search or they’ll never find it. Optimizing your content for YouTube SEO is vital, and SEO Studio makes it easy.
SEO Studio is another good reason to upgrade from a free TubeBuddy account to TubeBuddy Legend.
How to Find SEO Studio in TubeBuddy
Make sure you’re signed in to your TubeBuddy account on YouTube to access the tool. Just open the dashboard and select SEO Studio from the TubeBuddy drop-down dashboard located in the top right corner.
If you’re a Pro, or Legend license holder, you have full access to this feature.
How to Optimize YouTube SEO with SEO Studio
Once you found the perfect keyword to target, that’s where SEO Studio really comes into its own. Let’s show you how.
Clicking on SEO Studio will open a dashboard for the tool. The first thing to do is to type in your target keyword (in our case, ‘low fat vegan chocolate cake.’) Click START to… start.
A new window will instantly show you an SEO score for any term you typed in. In our example, ‘low fat vegan chocolate cake’ scores 62%. 62% isn’t terrible, but YouTube SEO demands better.
The SEO Studio workflow will help you get that score into the 90s or better with tips and recommendations, and easy YouTube SEO tips to optimize your title, description, and tags. As you make changes, you’ll see your SEO YouTube score increase.
On the right-hand side of the SEO Studio workflow, you’ll see the steps you need to take to improve your YouTube SEO ranking. Opportunities for improvement are highlighted in pink. We’re going for all green here.
SEO YouTube Best Practices
SEO Studio steps creators through all the important SEO YouTube best practices such as:
- Including your target keyword in the title
- Include at least 80% of your target keyword in the title
- Include your target keyword in the first 60 characters of your video’s title
- Include your target keyword multiple times in the first 200 characters of your video’s description
- Include partial matches of your keyword target in your description
The key with SEO (YouTube and other search engines) is to include your optimizations while using natural language. In other words, to write for humans, optimize for computers. In SEO Studio, you’ll see tips in pink advising you to include your target keyword naturally in the title and include partial matches of your target keyword in the description. So let’s do that to see how much that changes our SEO score:
Just by following the instructions in the tool, our score has shot up to a near-perfect 95%. By choosing a key phrase with relatively low competition, these simple YouTube SEO efforts could shoot us to the top of the rankings. We just need to give it some time.
Click next to open the Tags tab. The tool is suggesting tags to use, and by adding them to our actual tag window, we’ve hit 99%. Not bad for a few minutes work!
Clicking Next will open the Thumbnails dashboard. A compelling custom thumbnail is vital because it can boost your click-through rate, one of the most important metrics for visibility and discoverability.
Thumbnails Matter for SEO on YouTube
The tool will present a series of thumbnails for the top videos ranking for your chosen keyword. Just upload yours to compare as we did. SEO Studio liked our thumbnail. That’s good. If it didn’t, we could use TubeBuddy Thumbnail Generator to create a better optimized thumbnail to drive more clicks.
Once you’ve made every YouTube SEO improvement you can and you’re happy with the results, just click Next and TubeBuddy will take care of the rest.
YouTube SEO is important when you’re uploading new videos, but don’t sleep on your older videos. Taking a little time to optimizing existing videos with SEO Studio can give your channel a real boost.
SEO Studio will also let you experiment with new titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails on published videos. If you’re editing an existing video, you can apply the changes directly to the video via YouTube Studio. Just run your suggestions through the tool first to get the highest score you can.
Learn more about all the benefits of TubeBuddy Legend, and check out the TubeBuddy SEO Studio FAQ for more info on this simple, powerful tool.
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