Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?
Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.
The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.
How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!
Prioritize Crawl Issues
Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!
Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.
Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages
The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.
Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.
Identify and Fix Duplicate Content
The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.
Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.
Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements
As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.
Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.
Technical SEO work ensures that the time you’ve spent on on- and off-page SEO pays off — if a website can’t be crawled and indexed, the content on that site can’t rank no matter how high-quality or link-worthy it is. For that reason, SEO pros know that a comprehensive search marketing strategy should include periodic audits of a website’s technical health and its opportunities for improvement. But as you uncover these opportunities, how do you know which ones are most important? What information can you provide to your managers and web developers so that they know which issues deserve their time and attention?
Every website’s technical SEO situation is different, depending on platform, code base, history, and complexity. As the SEO Manager here at Moz, I use information from our Campaign tools to make recommendations about the urgency and predicted impact of our site’s technical SEO needs. Our devs use these insights to plan their sprints, making sure to prioritize the most pressing fixes and those that are most likely to move the SERP needle.
The Site Crawl tools within Moz Pro can help you identify a wide variety of issues that may affect the crawling, indexing, and ranking of the content you’ve worked so hard to develop. In this series of Daily Fix videos, we’ll show you where to find those issues and, just as importantly, how to use the tools’ sorting, filtering, and CSV export functions to organize them by the impact they’ll have on your overall technical SEO health.
How do you prioritize your technical SEO work? Let us know which metrics mean the most to you and your website in the comments!
Prioritize Crawl Issues
Once the Moz crawler has finished its crawl of your website, the All Crawled Pages report will offer a full list of crawling, indexing, and content errors discovered during the process. With such comprehensive coverage, this list can be overwhelming!
Zac demonstrates how to filter and sort your full list of issues within your Moz Pro Campaign and using a CSV export, allowing you to focus on pages with the most issues or those with the highest Page Authority.
Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages
The Crawl Depth metric describes how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to any other page within your site. Both search engines and users visit easy-to-reach pages more often, so it’s important that all pages with user value are quickly accessible.
Eli shows how to analyze your site’s architecture via crawl depth, so you can adjust your internal linking structure to ease access to your most important pages and save on valuable crawl budget.
Identify and Fix Duplicate Content
The Content Issues tool within Site Crawl provides a fast and easy way to identify potential duplicate content on your site, which can cause search engines to index and rank the wrong version of a page.
Jo uses the Duplicate Content feature to find pages that would benefit from canonicalization, redirection, or rewriting of content to avoid SERP confusion.
Prioritize Site Performance/CWV Improvements
As of June 2021, Google uses important site performance metrics called Core Web Vitals to inform its SERP rankings. Sites that load slowly or otherwise provide poor user experiences could get left behind in the wake of this newest algorithm update.
Using Moz’s robust Performance Metrics tool, Emilie shows how to audit your pages’ Core Web Vitals in bulk, saving you time and helping you understand where your site developers should concentrate their efforts.
On-page SEO is when you blend the art of writing with the science of SEO to rank individual pages for specific keywords. On-page SEO includes everything from meta tags, content format, and keyword optimization to get your content found by search engines and move your audience to convert with you.
While it’s only one part of the equation, on-page SEO guides your content to match customer intent, user engagement, and tactics to increase conversions.
You need to have a map on you before you head out to the forest if you don't want to get lost. Just like hiking, you need to have a good idea of where you're going if you want to stay on track to your destination.
The same line of thinking can be applied to content production, because you should know how to structure content on your site to help sculpt search results and meet the needs of your customers to drive more conversions.
It’s not easy to write content that ranks in Google and drives conversions, but if you follow a few simple steps, you’ll be on your way to ranking, driving more clicks, and appealing to customers on all types of devices. Let’s take a look at three on-page optimization tactics that you can use to get the right message to the right people at the right time.
It’s tough to serve these two goals, but you can get the best of both worlds by formatting your content in a way that helps robots and readers scan content and focus on information on different devices.
While you can spend time with “SEO hacks,” the best way to improve your online visibility and increase conversions is to format content for readers and robots. Let’s take a look at how breaking up text, keeping paragraphs short, and bullet lists will make your content easier to read and boost rankings today!
Break up text with H2 tags
One of the first things you can do to improve on-page SEO is to break up text with H2 subheaders. These headers allow you to insert keywords to fuel the technical side of SEO, and these headers also help your readers scan through your content when they first reach your site.
Here are a few quick notes to make the most out of your subheadings:
I like to add H2 subheadings every 300 words or so.
Insert H3 headers with an additional 50 words of content for each section when appropriate.
Use target keywords and exact-match questions in subheadings whenever possible.
I have found a lot of success with Google Search Console (GSC) when optimizing existing on-page content. You can open up a page in GSC to find first-party data on what Google is ranking your content for and then add keywords in the H2 and H3 sections of your site to see a good boost in rankings.
Make your content easier to read for humans and search engines by breaking up your content with H2 and H3 subheadings. Don’t forget to get the most out of this on-page SEO tactic by including keywords and exact-match questions in the section headings for maximum results!
Keep paragraphs short
If you want to engage your readers and drive more conversions, then you have to optimize every inch of your content based on the needs of your target audience. Large blocks of text are difficult to read, and this is especially true on a phone or tablet.
I like to limit paragraphs to only 2-3 sentences each to ensure content looks good on mobile devices and does not overwhelm a reader as they read through my content.
Use bullet points
Bullet points are a powerful copywriting tool because they allow you to summarize information in a concise manner while also drawing attention to important data in a punchy format. Here are a few reasons to use bullet points in your content to boost on-page SEO:
Break content up and make blocks of text easier to read on mobile devices.
Highlight valuable points to increase conversions on service web pages and product pages.
Add internal links to bullet points to help guide customers through the buyer's journey.
Try to keep bullet point lists between 3-7 bullets each. Shorter lists look goofy, and long lists are difficult to read.
I like to include a bullet list in the first paragraph of each blog post to help readers understand my content, plus this bullet list can help secure a featured snippet (more on tha later). I also like to add a bullet list near CTAs to draw the attention of readers to drive more conversions.
Bullet points are just one example of how you can format content to help your readers and search engines- they are the perfect balance between content marketing and technical SEO tactics.
2. Optimize for featured snippets
As online search changes, Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide the right information to searchers as quickly as possible. A featured snippet is a bite-sized snippet of information that Google places above organic listings based on specific search queries.
Featured snippets are your best friend if you want to establish your brand's authority and drive more organic traffic to your site. Here are a few reasons to format new content and optimize existing content to trigger featured snippets:
Dominate "position zero" above paid ads and other organic search results.
Build your brand authority by ranking at the top of the Search Engine Results page for target keywords.
Drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Build more backlinks as more people click on and link to your content.
Push your competitor's online listings down in SERPs.
There are several types of featured snippets that Google can display based on search intent, search query, and search history. Let’s take a look at how you can format your content in specific ways to help secure the three major types of featured images.
Paragraph featured snippet
Paragraph featured snippets show 40-50 word explanations based on a search query with a link to the source content. This type of featured snippets can be secured with proper on-page SEO and content formatting.
I like to summarize the answer and main point of my content in the first paragraph of my blog posts and online content to secure more paragraph featured snippets. I also like to create a concise summary of different sections to help trigger more featured snippets throughout my content.
List featured snippet
You will notice that most types of “how-to” search queries will trigger a list featured snippet. This information is presented in either a numbered list or a bulleted list, and is a powerful way to generate more traffic for recipe sites or process-oriented content.
Google may include a table at the top of SERPs for search queries about pricing options, comparisons, and data. Most table featured snippets are 3-4 columns wide and 6-7 rows long.
I like to add a HTML table to my blog posts to summarize a process, show price comparisons, or just to provide a summary of different types of data. I’ve noticed that Google prefers HTML tables compared to tables made in CSS or other languages.
3. Add an FAQ section & FAQ schema
Structured data are bits of code that you can add to your blog posts and web pages to help Google understand your content. You can format your content along with markup language to spoon-feed search engines information about your content and shape your appearance in SERPs.
Once you add an FAQ section to the bottom of your content, you can get even more bang for your buck by adding FAQ schema to the backend of the content. FAQ schema offers a number of benefits for your SEO strategy like:
Boost impressions: FAQ schema will help drive more organic impressions, which can lead to a higher Click Through Rate (CTR).
More website clicks: As your pages get more impressions you will start to see more clicks to your web pages and blog posts.
Interlinking: You can add a link to each answer in your FAQ schema. Only point internal linking to non-sales content (like a blog post) to help drive more engagement.
Improve online visibility: FAQ schema makes your content more visible because it pushes your competitors lower on SERPs.
I like adding 3-4 common questions and answers at the bottom of each blog post and web page to help customers and search engines. I’ve found that FAQ sections at the end of my content helps with keyword rankings and allows me to implement FAQ schema to get found in search engines.
Supercharge your on-page SEO game today!
A winning SEO strategy is rooted in getting your message to the right people at the right time, and on-page SEO tactics can help you get found online and drive more conversions.
Use the tips in the above sections to make your content easier to read, easier to scan, and even sculpt your content in SERPs today!
On-page SEO is when you blend the art of writing with the science of SEO to rank individual pages for specific keywords. On-page SEO includes everything from meta tags, content format, and keyword optimization to get your content found by search engines and move your audience to convert with you.
While it’s only one part of the equation, on-page SEO guides your content to match customer intent, user engagement, and tactics to increase conversions.
You need to have a map on you before you head out to the forest if you don't want to get lost. Just like hiking, you need to have a good idea of where you're going if you want to stay on track to your destination.
The same line of thinking can be applied to content production, because you should know how to structure content on your site to help sculpt search results and meet the needs of your customers to drive more conversions.
It’s not easy to write content that ranks in Google and drives conversions, but if you follow a few simple steps, you’ll be on your way to ranking, driving more clicks, and appealing to customers on all types of devices. Let’s take a look at three on-page optimization tactics that you can use to get the right message to the right people at the right time.
It’s tough to serve these two goals, but you can get the best of both worlds by formatting your content in a way that helps robots and readers scan content and focus on information on different devices.
While you can spend time with “SEO hacks,” the best way to improve your online visibility and increase conversions is to format content for readers and robots. Let’s take a look at how breaking up text, keeping paragraphs short, and bullet lists will make your content easier to read and boost rankings today!
Break up text with H2 tags
One of the first things you can do to improve on-page SEO is to break up text with H2 subheaders. These headers allow you to insert keywords to fuel the technical side of SEO, and these headers also help your readers scan through your content when they first reach your site.
Here are a few quick notes to make the most out of your subheadings:
I like to add H2 subheadings every 300 words or so.
Insert H3 headers with an additional 50 words of content for each section when appropriate.
Use target keywords and exact-match questions in subheadings whenever possible.
I have found a lot of success with Google Search Console (GSC) when optimizing existing on-page content. You can open up a page in GSC to find first-party data on what Google is ranking your content for and then add keywords in the H2 and H3 sections of your site to see a good boost in rankings.
Make your content easier to read for humans and search engines by breaking up your content with H2 and H3 subheadings. Don’t forget to get the most out of this on-page SEO tactic by including keywords and exact-match questions in the section headings for maximum results!
Keep paragraphs short
If you want to engage your readers and drive more conversions, then you have to optimize every inch of your content based on the needs of your target audience. Large blocks of text are difficult to read, and this is especially true on a phone or tablet.
I like to limit paragraphs to only 2-3 sentences each to ensure content looks good on mobile devices and does not overwhelm a reader as they read through my content.
Use bullet points
Bullet points are a powerful copywriting tool because they allow you to summarize information in a concise manner while also drawing attention to important data in a punchy format. Here are a few reasons to use bullet points in your content to boost on-page SEO:
Break content up and make blocks of text easier to read on mobile devices.
Highlight valuable points to increase conversions on service web pages and product pages.
Add internal links to bullet points to help guide customers through the buyer's journey.
Try to keep bullet point lists between 3-7 bullets each. Shorter lists look goofy, and long lists are difficult to read.
I like to include a bullet list in the first paragraph of each blog post to help readers understand my content, plus this bullet list can help secure a featured snippet (more on tha later). I also like to add a bullet list near CTAs to draw the attention of readers to drive more conversions.
Bullet points are just one example of how you can format content to help your readers and search engines- they are the perfect balance between content marketing and technical SEO tactics.
2. Optimize for featured snippets
As online search changes, Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide the right information to searchers as quickly as possible. A featured snippet is a bite-sized snippet of information that Google places above organic listings based on specific search queries.
Featured snippets are your best friend if you want to establish your brand's authority and drive more organic traffic to your site. Here are a few reasons to format new content and optimize existing content to trigger featured snippets:
Dominate "position zero" above paid ads and other organic search results.
Build your brand authority by ranking at the top of the Search Engine Results page for target keywords.
Drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Build more backlinks as more people click on and link to your content.
Push your competitor's online listings down in SERPs.
There are several types of featured snippets that Google can display based on search intent, search query, and search history. Let’s take a look at how you can format your content in specific ways to help secure the three major types of featured images.
Paragraph featured snippet
Paragraph featured snippets show 40-50 word explanations based on a search query with a link to the source content. This type of featured snippets can be secured with proper on-page SEO and content formatting.
I like to summarize the answer and main point of my content in the first paragraph of my blog posts and online content to secure more paragraph featured snippets. I also like to create a concise summary of different sections to help trigger more featured snippets throughout my content.
List featured snippet
You will notice that most types of “how-to” search queries will trigger a list featured snippet. This information is presented in either a numbered list or a bulleted list, and is a powerful way to generate more traffic for recipe sites or process-oriented content.
Google may include a table at the top of SERPs for search queries about pricing options, comparisons, and data. Most table featured snippets are 3-4 columns wide and 6-7 rows long.
I like to add a HTML table to my blog posts to summarize a process, show price comparisons, or just to provide a summary of different types of data. I’ve noticed that Google prefers HTML tables compared to tables made in CSS or other languages.
3. Add an FAQ section & FAQ schema
Structured data are bits of code that you can add to your blog posts and web pages to help Google understand your content. You can format your content along with markup language to spoon-feed search engines information about your content and shape your appearance in SERPs.
Once you add an FAQ section to the bottom of your content, you can get even more bang for your buck by adding FAQ schema to the backend of the content. FAQ schema offers a number of benefits for your SEO strategy like:
Boost impressions: FAQ schema will help drive more organic impressions, which can lead to a higher Click Through Rate (CTR).
More website clicks: As your pages get more impressions you will start to see more clicks to your web pages and blog posts.
Interlinking: You can add a link to each answer in your FAQ schema. Only point internal linking to non-sales content (like a blog post) to help drive more engagement.
Improve online visibility: FAQ schema makes your content more visible because it pushes your competitors lower on SERPs.
I like adding 3-4 common questions and answers at the bottom of each blog post and web page to help customers and search engines. I’ve found that FAQ sections at the end of my content helps with keyword rankings and allows me to implement FAQ schema to get found in search engines.
Supercharge your on-page SEO game today!
A winning SEO strategy is rooted in getting your message to the right people at the right time, and on-page SEO tactics can help you get found online and drive more conversions.
Use the tips in the above sections to make your content easier to read, easier to scan, and even sculpt your content in SERPs today!
Many marketers approach Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features from the wrong angle. Instead of asking what you can do to rank for SERP features, ask what SERP features can do to inform your content strategy. By flipping this thought process, you can build a successful content strategy that speaks to your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey, using the most efficacious language and content format.
SERP features are designed to provide users with the most relevant answers to their questions, and they’re formatted to package this information in the best way possible. In other words, the exact language and format of each SERP feature is the most accurate representation of the type of language and content format that your audience seeks (at least according to Google). As a digital marketer, this is gold. With a little digging, you can now mimic the keyword topics, style, and format of the SERP features present for your target keywords, creating content that engages your audience exactly where they are in the buyer’s journey, and in the format they desire.
Top organic SERP features
While chasing the sought-after SERP features, many marketers fall short because they overlook the most important clue: the SERP feature itself. SERP features contain meaningful knowledge about your audience and how they prefer to consume information. Here are a few of the most popular organic SERP features used on Google:
Knowledge Graph
Featured Snippet
Related Questions
Image Pack
Reviews
Video
In-Depth Article
In this next section, I’ll break down these features into stages of the buyer’s journey and explain how they can inform your SEO content strategy.
Aligning SERP features with stages of the buyer’s journey
Awareness stage
The top of the buyer’s journey is the awareness stage, where your audience is aware that they have a problem and will begin to conduct research to better understand and define this problem. At this stage, your audience is seeking a concise explanation of the problem and is not ready for a solution yet. SERP features that indicate an awareness stage audience include:
Knowledge Graph: often illustrates high-level biographical information and keyword cluster definitions. This feature is a staple of the awareness stage.
Featured Snippet: often provides concise keyword definitions and explanations of concepts or problems. This feature is also a staple of the awareness stage when it provides definitions or answers “what is” questions.
Related Questions: when the inquiries begin with “what is” and “how to” they align perfectly with the educational aspect of the awareness stage.
Videos: FAQ videos and how-to videos indicate the high-level thinking of the awareness stage.
Images: often indicate a one-word or short-tail keyword query, in line with the awareness stage.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for an awareness stage audience, it’s important to remember that they have very little understanding about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. By addressing these high-level questions, you can introduce yourself in a way that frames your company as a thought leader in the industry. When doing so, pay close attention to the type of language you are using.
SERP features in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey take advantage of clear and concise language, so make sure you do the same. Avoid flowery descriptions or rambling explanations, and keep your definitions short and to the point (ranging from 40-50 words).
Likewise, this is your chance to develop trust with this new awareness audience. Keeping your content informative and easy to understand helps build trust, illustrating that you care about educating your audience without bogging them down with complex industry jargon or heavy handed branding.
Questions abound at this stage in the buyer’s journey, and it’s a good idea to include a question and answer format when you observe it in the SERP feature. Use headers, bullet points, and/or numbered lists when possible, and make it easy for your audience to scan the content without committing a chunk of their time. Images are especially useful at this stage, but make sure to include an image alt tag.
Consideration stage
The middle of the buyer’s journey is the consideration stage. At this point, your audience can identify and understand their problem (with the help of your educational awareness content), but they still don’t know the best way to solve it. They’re seeking information about various solutions, and want to learn more about how your solution can solve their problem. SERP features that indicate a consideration stage audience include:
Featured Snippet: when the snippet is formatted for lists or comparisons instead of clear cut definitions, it indicates the consideration stage.
Related Questions: “why” and technical questions belong in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Reviews: service or product reviews indicate that your audience is actively searching for and comparing solutions, which aligns with the consideration stage.
Videos: service and product videos belong in the consideration stage, as they explain why a specific service or product is a viable solution to your audience’s problem.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for a consideration stage audience, it’s important to focus on building a comprehensive and compelling argument. By using specific examples to frame your service as the most valuable solution to your audience’s problem, you can illustrate how and why they should consider investing in your solution.
SERP features in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey allow for content that is longer than in the awareness stage, and the language also employs more descriptors. Technical language is appropriate at this point, and this is your chance to explain what makes your solution stand out.
However, staying true to your solution’s capabilities is critical here, because you don’t want to over promise results that aren’t actually possible. Instead, use this moment as a chance to build trust with your audience. Keep your reasoning authentic and your examples specific to the value that your solution can deliver.
Comparative language is also more prevalent in the SERP features at this stage, so include detailed reviews that demonstrate why your service or product is the best. When using video, make sure your content is also searchable on YouTube.
Decision phase
The end of the buyer’s journey is the decision phase, where your audience has already identified their problem, compared different solutions, and is now ready to commit to a final decision. At this point, your audience knows how to talk about the solution they’re looking for, and now they want to know exactly why they should commit to you. They want content that proves that other customers have had a positive experience with your solution, and are willing to commit more of their time to confirming their final choice.
People Also Ask: questions leveraging phrases like “the best solution’” or “most advanced solution” indicate users transitioning from the consideration to the decision phase of the buyer’s journey. Customers want to confirm that they’re making the right decision, and are looking for hard proof.
Videos: customer testimonial videos align with the decision phase, providing your audience with proof about whether they should commit to your solution or not.
Long-Form Content: long-form pieces of content range from 2,000-5,000 words.These pieces of content can appear as organic site links, scholarly articles, or in-depth articles. They tend to position themselves as thought leaders in the industry, and explain the overall problem and solution. Quite often they take the form of buyer’s guides, providing in-depth information about each solution and answering questions with long-tail keywords.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for a decision stage audience, make sure to address any questions that haven’t already been answered in your previous pieces of content. While this may sound intuitive, it’s an essential part of the process seeing as an unanswered question can trigger your prospect to leave your site and go to a competitor’s site to find the answers they’re looking for. At this point in time, don’t underestimate the depth and detail of information your audience is seeking.
SERP features in the decision phase of the buyer’s journey address the audience as pseudo-experts in the subject matter, as should you. At this stage your audience is able to string together long-tail keywords that include modifiers, and your content should provide detailed answers to these highly specific inquiries that address your audience as knowledgeable members of the industry.
Leverage compelling statistics and results-oriented examples that explicitly frame the value that your solution provides. By using clear data points and specifications, your audience can easily see for themselves how your solution can benefit them.
Technical language is widely understood, and the audience wants to hear the nitty-gritty details of your solution. Long-form content is encouraged at this point, so don’t shy away from a high word count. Cite your customers when possible, and consider using video to break up the heavy reading.
Content strategy takeaways
Google SERPs are designed to anticipate user needs, and the SERP features present for your target keywords are some of the most telling clues about the type of audience associated with your keywords. By taking note of the SERP features present for your target keywords and paying attention to the style and format of the content, you can leverage Google’s search engine algorithms to your own advantage.
Once you’ve identified the types of SERP features present for your keyword, you have also discovered your audience’s stage of the buyer’s journey and the keywords, style, and format of content they prefer. As a digital marketer, you can use this information to craft a content strategy that perfectly aligns with your audience’s desires. This takes the guesswork out of your content strategy and ensures that your content resonates with your audience exactly where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Many marketers approach Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features from the wrong angle. Instead of asking what you can do to rank for SERP features, ask what SERP features can do to inform your content strategy. By flipping this thought process, you can build a successful content strategy that speaks to your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey, using the most efficacious language and content format.
SERP features are designed to provide users with the most relevant answers to their questions, and they’re formatted to package this information in the best way possible. In other words, the exact language and format of each SERP feature is the most accurate representation of the type of language and content format that your audience seeks (at least according to Google). As a digital marketer, this is gold. With a little digging, you can now mimic the keyword topics, style, and format of the SERP features present for your target keywords, creating content that engages your audience exactly where they are in the buyer’s journey, and in the format they desire.
Top organic SERP features
While chasing the sought-after SERP features, many marketers fall short because they overlook the most important clue: the SERP feature itself. SERP features contain meaningful knowledge about your audience and how they prefer to consume information. Here are a few of the most popular organic SERP features used on Google:
Knowledge Graph
Featured Snippet
Related Questions
Image Pack
Reviews
Video
In-Depth Article
In this next section, I’ll break down these features into stages of the buyer’s journey and explain how they can inform your SEO content strategy.
Aligning SERP features with stages of the buyer’s journey
Awareness stage
The top of the buyer’s journey is the awareness stage, where your audience is aware that they have a problem and will begin to conduct research to better understand and define this problem. At this stage, your audience is seeking a concise explanation of the problem and is not ready for a solution yet. SERP features that indicate an awareness stage audience include:
Knowledge Graph: often illustrates high-level biographical information and keyword cluster definitions. This feature is a staple of the awareness stage.
Featured Snippet: often provides concise keyword definitions and explanations of concepts or problems. This feature is also a staple of the awareness stage when it provides definitions or answers “what is” questions.
Related Questions: when the inquiries begin with “what is” and “how to” they align perfectly with the educational aspect of the awareness stage.
Videos: FAQ videos and how-to videos indicate the high-level thinking of the awareness stage.
Images: often indicate a one-word or short-tail keyword query, in line with the awareness stage.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for an awareness stage audience, it’s important to remember that they have very little understanding about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. By addressing these high-level questions, you can introduce yourself in a way that frames your company as a thought leader in the industry. When doing so, pay close attention to the type of language you are using.
SERP features in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey take advantage of clear and concise language, so make sure you do the same. Avoid flowery descriptions or rambling explanations, and keep your definitions short and to the point (ranging from 40-50 words).
Likewise, this is your chance to develop trust with this new awareness audience. Keeping your content informative and easy to understand helps build trust, illustrating that you care about educating your audience without bogging them down with complex industry jargon or heavy handed branding.
Questions abound at this stage in the buyer’s journey, and it’s a good idea to include a question and answer format when you observe it in the SERP feature. Use headers, bullet points, and/or numbered lists when possible, and make it easy for your audience to scan the content without committing a chunk of their time. Images are especially useful at this stage, but make sure to include an image alt tag.
Consideration stage
The middle of the buyer’s journey is the consideration stage. At this point, your audience can identify and understand their problem (with the help of your educational awareness content), but they still don’t know the best way to solve it. They’re seeking information about various solutions, and want to learn more about how your solution can solve their problem. SERP features that indicate a consideration stage audience include:
Featured Snippet: when the snippet is formatted for lists or comparisons instead of clear cut definitions, it indicates the consideration stage.
Related Questions: “why” and technical questions belong in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Reviews: service or product reviews indicate that your audience is actively searching for and comparing solutions, which aligns with the consideration stage.
Videos: service and product videos belong in the consideration stage, as they explain why a specific service or product is a viable solution to your audience’s problem.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for a consideration stage audience, it’s important to focus on building a comprehensive and compelling argument. By using specific examples to frame your service as the most valuable solution to your audience’s problem, you can illustrate how and why they should consider investing in your solution.
SERP features in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey allow for content that is longer than in the awareness stage, and the language also employs more descriptors. Technical language is appropriate at this point, and this is your chance to explain what makes your solution stand out.
However, staying true to your solution’s capabilities is critical here, because you don’t want to over promise results that aren’t actually possible. Instead, use this moment as a chance to build trust with your audience. Keep your reasoning authentic and your examples specific to the value that your solution can deliver.
Comparative language is also more prevalent in the SERP features at this stage, so include detailed reviews that demonstrate why your service or product is the best. When using video, make sure your content is also searchable on YouTube.
Decision phase
The end of the buyer’s journey is the decision phase, where your audience has already identified their problem, compared different solutions, and is now ready to commit to a final decision. At this point, your audience knows how to talk about the solution they’re looking for, and now they want to know exactly why they should commit to you. They want content that proves that other customers have had a positive experience with your solution, and are willing to commit more of their time to confirming their final choice.
People Also Ask: questions leveraging phrases like “the best solution’” or “most advanced solution” indicate users transitioning from the consideration to the decision phase of the buyer’s journey. Customers want to confirm that they’re making the right decision, and are looking for hard proof.
Videos: customer testimonial videos align with the decision phase, providing your audience with proof about whether they should commit to your solution or not.
Long-Form Content: long-form pieces of content range from 2,000-5,000 words.These pieces of content can appear as organic site links, scholarly articles, or in-depth articles. They tend to position themselves as thought leaders in the industry, and explain the overall problem and solution. Quite often they take the form of buyer’s guides, providing in-depth information about each solution and answering questions with long-tail keywords.
Tips for content strategy
When creating content for a decision stage audience, make sure to address any questions that haven’t already been answered in your previous pieces of content. While this may sound intuitive, it’s an essential part of the process seeing as an unanswered question can trigger your prospect to leave your site and go to a competitor’s site to find the answers they’re looking for. At this point in time, don’t underestimate the depth and detail of information your audience is seeking.
SERP features in the decision phase of the buyer’s journey address the audience as pseudo-experts in the subject matter, as should you. At this stage your audience is able to string together long-tail keywords that include modifiers, and your content should provide detailed answers to these highly specific inquiries that address your audience as knowledgeable members of the industry.
Leverage compelling statistics and results-oriented examples that explicitly frame the value that your solution provides. By using clear data points and specifications, your audience can easily see for themselves how your solution can benefit them.
Technical language is widely understood, and the audience wants to hear the nitty-gritty details of your solution. Long-form content is encouraged at this point, so don’t shy away from a high word count. Cite your customers when possible, and consider using video to break up the heavy reading.
Content strategy takeaways
Google SERPs are designed to anticipate user needs, and the SERP features present for your target keywords are some of the most telling clues about the type of audience associated with your keywords. By taking note of the SERP features present for your target keywords and paying attention to the style and format of the content, you can leverage Google’s search engine algorithms to your own advantage.
Once you’ve identified the types of SERP features present for your keyword, you have also discovered your audience’s stage of the buyer’s journey and the keywords, style, and format of content they prefer. As a digital marketer, you can use this information to craft a content strategy that perfectly aligns with your audience’s desires. This takes the guesswork out of your content strategy and ensures that your content resonates with your audience exactly where they are in the buyer’s journey.
With more than 3 billion monthly searches, YouTube is not just a popular social networking platform, but the second largest search engine on the Internet. Five hundred hours of video footage was uploaded to YouTube every single minute in 2019 — and that figure has likely grown since.
YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day. With content coming in at that volume, it gives a more accurate sense of scale to think of any individual video not as a person shouting amidst a crowd, but as a single grain of sand on a beach. It’s not a perfect analogy, because grains of sand on the beach are not individually identifiable, searchable, or able to be organized and catalogued. YouTube videos are.
That doesn’t mean that it’s in a marketer’s best interest to have an “if we build it, they will come” mentality on YouTube. Content creators and marketers who publish video to YouTube sometimes assume that the most interesting content is naturally selected by the algorithm and pushed to the front page, to be rewarded with millions of views by some combination of timing, luck, and merit. But considering the sheer scale of content available on YouTube, it’s a bit more useful for our purposes to think of YouTube as the largest video library archive ever to have existed. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be special enough or loud enough to get noticed in the throng. Rather, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making it searchable in the catalogue for viewers who are already looking for videos like yours.
YouTube is a search engine
Does this sound really similar to the SEO principles that get websites to rank on Google? That’s because it is. YouTube is a search engine for video, which means that videos can be optimized to perform better by making them easier to search for.
This post is a primer on how YouTube tags, catalogues, and recommends videos to their users, and how you can use those features as tools to help you set your video up for success. This assumes, of course, that generating more views on your videos is a part of your strategy. Many people use YouTube as a convenient hosting platform for their videos to embed to their own websites and social feeds, and attracting viewers on YouTube isn’t a priority for them. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to use the platform. We’re going to focus on how to optimize video content that is intended to attract new viewers and broaden your audience, and the technical steps needed to do it.
Plan for the audience you want, then work backwards
To increase the views on your YouTube videos, you need to start by making it easy to find you for those already interested. You can only do that effectively when you know who those people are, and why they would want to see what you post. Starting there, you can work backwards to tag your video as likely to be relevant to them.
The benefit of posting to mega-networks like YouTube is that the audience is already there without you having to build it. But because of the sheer amount of video content offered, waiting for viewers to find your stuff serendipitously is unlikely to get you more than a handful of views and very little return for your investment. For your video content to be worth the cost and effort of producing it, you need to proactively plan your content and posting around the specific people you want to see it and marketing outcomes you want to achieve.
Check out Moz’s resources on audience targeting and content strategy if you’re just getting started on that. With those basic outcomes in mind, you can start working backwards to determine what metrics you’ll need to watch to gauge your success, and how you’ll structure your content to get there.
Before we take a deeper dive into YouTube keywords, it’s important to define the different KPIs that we use to measure the success of videos. In simplest terms, they’re the stats on your video that tell you whether your plan for video marketing is working or not. They include:
Watch time: This KPI measures the total amount of minutes a viewer spends watching your content. Content and channels that have longer watch times are elevated by YouTube in the recommendations and search results. A low average watch time can indicate that your viewers are getting bored or that your video is too long to hold their interest.
Retention rate: This is the percentage of audience members who stay to watch the video all the way through compared to those who leave before it’s over. The YouTube platform favors videos with high retention rates, judging them to be more likely to be relevant and recommending them to more viewers.
Engagement: This refers to the actions that viewers take beyond just watching the video, like taking the time to comment, like, share, subscribe, or bookmark for later. Engagement is often the most important metric for marketers to track, because it tells you how many people are interested enough in your content to take further action. Comments can paint a clear picture of how your content affected viewers. Shares gauge how much viewers value your video and your brand, and are crucial to growing a following. Likes and dislikes can help you evaluate what content did or did not work, and it further indicates to YouTube what content is likely to be high quality when recommending videos in users’ feeds.
Thumbnails: The thumbnail is the picture of your video that appears with the title on a results page or link. It provides a sneak peek of the content you’re sharing to help the viewer decide whether to watch it or not. A thoughtfully crafted thumbnail is easy to make and can have a big impact on how many viewers will ultimately choose to click and watch your video.
Title keywords: The keywords you use in your video title tells YouTube what’s in it, and helps guide viewers to your content when they search for similar words or phrases.
Re-watches: This metric measures the number of times viewers re-watch particular parts of your video. If there is a high re-watch rate, viewers are likely interested and invested in the topics you’re covering, and might want to know more. This can be useful for strategizing and planning future content.
Demographics: These stats account for the different types of viewers who are watching your content, segmented by gender, age, and geography.
It’s important to understand what these YouTube metrics are meant to measure. They all play an important part in your video rankings on both YouTube and Google, so it’s prudent to implement some basic best practices to keep these stats out of the gutter, as we’ll outline below. However, it’s important to keep your focus on the end goals, and not just chase the stats. Good metrics are to be used as indicators of your progress, not the goal in and of itself.
How Google ranks YouTube videos
YouTube views don’t only come from people already logged on to YouTube. Google is also a huge driver to your YouTube videos. Google needs to understand the content of your video in order to include it in search results. Google ranks YouTube content in the following ways:
Crawling the video and extracting a preview and thumbnail to show the user
Extracting meta tags and page texts from your video descriptions to tell the user more about the video’s content
Analyzing the video sitemap or structured data to determine relevance
Extracting audio to identify more keywords
Keywords aren’t pulled just from the text attached to your video in the descriptions and tags -- they can also be pulled from the audio itself. This is why including the right keywords in your video script will help boost the video’s rankings on Google.
Choosing keywords is about relevance, not volume
This begs the question: what, then, are the “right” keywords? A better question might be: what makes a keyword the right one? Let’s return to the “YouTube is like an enormous library archive” analogy for a moment. If only making noise and getting noticed mattered, then the right keywords would be the ones that get the most search volume to attract the most viewers. But like we said, YouTube is too saturated a platform to count on viral spread. Search engines don’t really think in terms of “best and worst” videos to make their rankings. (Search engines don’t really think at all, but that’s a topic for another day.) Search engines are designed to identify “what video is best for this particular viewer, in this particular instance?” That’s not a question of volume or popularity. That’s a question of relevance.
It is rarely going to be an effective marketing goal to merely seek out lots and lots of viewers regardless of who they are. Most campaigns are better served by a smaller group of highly engaged fans than by millions of lukewarm passive viewers. If you spend all of your focus optimizing your content for Google’s bots, high volume and low engagement is what you’re likely to get. If you want to build a meaningful fan base, then you must build your content for the people watching it, not just the search engines ranking it.
Defining your audience and their needs
You must have a clear idea of who you are trying to address with your YouTube content if you want to know what to say to them. Defining your target audience first will make the SEO optimization process more goal directed and specific.
Identifying and defining your target audience can start with the motivations behind their video searches. Some common motivations include:
YouTube Studio Channel Dashboard courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.
I want to know: The user wants to learn more about a specific topic they’ve already identified. They’re likely to be interested in tutorials, how-to’s, and explainer videos.
I want to do: The viewer has a specific action already in mind that they want to take, like planning a trip or exploring a new hobby. They might watch videos either aspirationally or proactively, like vlogs for inspiration or travel guides for actionable tips.
I want to buy: The potential viewer is seeking information related to a specific product they want to purchase, including reviews or comparisons. They might look for unboxing videos, reviews from influencers, or product demos.
Understanding your audience, their pain points, and their purchase drivers is key to identifying which keywords can help guide those viewers to your YouTube videos. Keywords are the language viewers use to ask a search engine for specific content, which is why we often start with viewer intent and work from there. Jot down a few words or phrases that a viewer might use to describe what they want to see in your video. Think about both the featured topic (like “dogs” or “makeup” or “golf swing”) and format/genre (like “tutorial” or “vlog” or “Let’s Play” or “reacts”). List the relevant verbs, like “buy”, “play”, “learn”, “explain”, “explore”. By building out a word cloud like this, you’ll have a starting point for your keyword research.
Begin your keyword research with an autocomplete tool or competitor browsing
The simplest way to start the keyword research process is by playing around with a keyword tool (Moz offers a free Keyword Explorer,) or the search function right on YouTube and Google. Trying out some different searches that your audience is likely to make can give you insight into what your target audience is already searching for, what they’re interested in, and the specific words or phrases they use when they’re talking about it online.
Type one of your potential keywords into the search box. As you type, YouTube will suggest related popular searches — this is an autocomplete feature built right in. The Ubersuggest tool is also a good place to try this exercise, which will run through the alphabet for the first letter of the next word in your search phrase.
Gauging YouTube keyword search volume
It’s also good to know which of your keywords people search for most frequently. The free Google Trends application “YouTube search” option lets you compare potential keywords in your list to see which ones rank higher and appear in more searches. Keep in mind that higher search volume usually also means more competition to rank for that particular word or phrase.
You can also keep tabs on the keywords your competitors are using to compare to the ones on your list. Find channels within your niche that have a few thousand subscribers, and sort through the content using the “Most Popular” option. Click on the video with the highest number of views and make note of the keywords used in the title, tags, and description. This can show you which keywords might already be saturated in your market with high competition, or reveal gaps where there are opportunities to provide content.
Attaching keywords to your videos
YouTube Channel, Basic Info Keywords courtesy of SustainablePR.
When you’ve identified a list of high-value keywords, it’s time to put them to work. Here are all the places you can incorporate keywords when first posting your YouTube video:
Video file name: SEO optimization begins before you even upload the video. Include keywords prominently in the video file name.
Video title: The title should be punchy and concise. Think about what you would want to click on. Avoid using video titles longer than 70 characters, because they’ll get cut off on the search engine results page and thumbnails. Try to include the keyword towards the beginning of the title when you can.
Description: Many content creators make the mistake of only writing a couple of sentences in their video description. The more words your description has, the better. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters for video descriptions, so be sure to utilize that real estate. Include strategically placed keywords, information about the video, an enticing hook, and a specific call to action.
Transcript: The video transcript, or caption, is another opportunity to include keywords because it provides additional text used by the platform’s ranking algorithm.
Tags: When tagging your video, include the top relevant keywords, the brand or channel name, and the more specific keyword phrases. Keep all tags under 127 characters. The more the merrier, as long as they are all relevant and concise. No one likes a bait and switch, and too broad a range of topics in your tags will signal to YouTube that your video isn’t strongly relevant to anything in particular at all.
Try audio keywords to get more traction
A unique way to include even more keywords in your video is to speak them in the video itself. Since Google and YouTube no longer need to crawl a transcript to understand what you’re saying, you can utilize audio keywords. Always try to include the keywords in the first two sentences you speak in the video to keep your viewer retention rate up.
Bottom line: prioritize relevance over volume, and start with the viewer and work backwards
If you take nothing else away from this guide, know that a search engine like Google or YouTube has no concept of what “best” means. It cannot judge a video by merit, and it does not rank individual videos as being more or less worthy of views. Only the viewers can make value judgments like that. A search engine can only make determinations of relevance, and only using the keywords we give it, as compared to the keywords provided by the user when they perform a search.
The search engine only knows if it provided the right video for the right search by interpreting the actions the user takes next. If you give YouTube and Google plenty of keywords to parse by completely filling out your description, tags, titles, and transcripts, your video will be returned in more searches. If the viewer then leaves comments or subscribes to your channel after watching, YouTube’s algorithm concludes that your video was highly relevant, and returns you in more searches. It’s a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship, not a mystical process.
Play around with some of the free SEO tools and Learning Center resources that Moz makes available, and see what you turn up. A little bit of effort, forethought, and consistency goes a long, long way when it comes to improving your performance on YouTube.
With more than 3 billion monthly searches, YouTube is not just a popular social networking platform, but the second largest search engine on the Internet. Five hundred hours of video footage was uploaded to YouTube every single minute in 2019 — and that figure has likely grown since.
YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day. With content coming in at that volume, it gives a more accurate sense of scale to think of any individual video not as a person shouting amidst a crowd, but as a single grain of sand on a beach. It’s not a perfect analogy, because grains of sand on the beach are not individually identifiable, searchable, or able to be organized and catalogued. YouTube videos are.
That doesn’t mean that it’s in a marketer’s best interest to have an “if we build it, they will come” mentality on YouTube. Content creators and marketers who publish video to YouTube sometimes assume that the most interesting content is naturally selected by the algorithm and pushed to the front page, to be rewarded with millions of views by some combination of timing, luck, and merit. But considering the sheer scale of content available on YouTube, it’s a bit more useful for our purposes to think of YouTube as the largest video library archive ever to have existed. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be special enough or loud enough to get noticed in the throng. Rather, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making it searchable in the catalogue for viewers who are already looking for videos like yours.
YouTube is a search engine
Does this sound really similar to the SEO principles that get websites to rank on Google? That’s because it is. YouTube is a search engine for video, which means that videos can be optimized to perform better by making them easier to search for.
This post is a primer on how YouTube tags, catalogues, and recommends videos to their users, and how you can use those features as tools to help you set your video up for success. This assumes, of course, that generating more views on your videos is a part of your strategy. Many people use YouTube as a convenient hosting platform for their videos to embed to their own websites and social feeds, and attracting viewers on YouTube isn’t a priority for them. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to use the platform. We’re going to focus on how to optimize video content that is intended to attract new viewers and broaden your audience, and the technical steps needed to do it.
Plan for the audience you want, then work backwards
To increase the views on your YouTube videos, you need to start by making it easy to find you for those already interested. You can only do that effectively when you know who those people are, and why they would want to see what you post. Starting there, you can work backwards to tag your video as likely to be relevant to them.
The benefit of posting to mega-networks like YouTube is that the audience is already there without you having to build it. But because of the sheer amount of video content offered, waiting for viewers to find your stuff serendipitously is unlikely to get you more than a handful of views and very little return for your investment. For your video content to be worth the cost and effort of producing it, you need to proactively plan your content and posting around the specific people you want to see it and marketing outcomes you want to achieve.
Check out Moz’s resources on audience targeting and content strategy if you’re just getting started on that. With those basic outcomes in mind, you can start working backwards to determine what metrics you’ll need to watch to gauge your success, and how you’ll structure your content to get there.
Before we take a deeper dive into YouTube keywords, it’s important to define the different KPIs that we use to measure the success of videos. In simplest terms, they’re the stats on your video that tell you whether your plan for video marketing is working or not. They include:
Watch time: This KPI measures the total amount of minutes a viewer spends watching your content. Content and channels that have longer watch times are elevated by YouTube in the recommendations and search results. A low average watch time can indicate that your viewers are getting bored or that your video is too long to hold their interest.
Retention rate: This is the percentage of audience members who stay to watch the video all the way through compared to those who leave before it’s over. The YouTube platform favors videos with high retention rates, judging them to be more likely to be relevant and recommending them to more viewers.
Engagement: This refers to the actions that viewers take beyond just watching the video, like taking the time to comment, like, share, subscribe, or bookmark for later. Engagement is often the most important metric for marketers to track, because it tells you how many people are interested enough in your content to take further action. Comments can paint a clear picture of how your content affected viewers. Shares gauge how much viewers value your video and your brand, and are crucial to growing a following. Likes and dislikes can help you evaluate what content did or did not work, and it further indicates to YouTube what content is likely to be high quality when recommending videos in users’ feeds.
Thumbnails: The thumbnail is the picture of your video that appears with the title on a results page or link. It provides a sneak peek of the content you’re sharing to help the viewer decide whether to watch it or not. A thoughtfully crafted thumbnail is easy to make and can have a big impact on how many viewers will ultimately choose to click and watch your video.
Title keywords: The keywords you use in your video title tells YouTube what’s in it, and helps guide viewers to your content when they search for similar words or phrases.
Re-watches: This metric measures the number of times viewers re-watch particular parts of your video. If there is a high re-watch rate, viewers are likely interested and invested in the topics you’re covering, and might want to know more. This can be useful for strategizing and planning future content.
Demographics: These stats account for the different types of viewers who are watching your content, segmented by gender, age, and geography.
It’s important to understand what these YouTube metrics are meant to measure. They all play an important part in your video rankings on both YouTube and Google, so it’s prudent to implement some basic best practices to keep these stats out of the gutter, as we’ll outline below. However, it’s important to keep your focus on the end goals, and not just chase the stats. Good metrics are to be used as indicators of your progress, not the goal in and of itself.
How Google ranks YouTube videos
YouTube views don’t only come from people already logged on to YouTube. Google is also a huge driver to your YouTube videos. Google needs to understand the content of your video in order to include it in search results. Google ranks YouTube content in the following ways:
Crawling the video and extracting a preview and thumbnail to show the user
Extracting meta tags and page texts from your video descriptions to tell the user more about the video’s content
Analyzing the video sitemap or structured data to determine relevance
Extracting audio to identify more keywords
Keywords aren’t pulled just from the text attached to your video in the descriptions and tags -- they can also be pulled from the audio itself. This is why including the right keywords in your video script will help boost the video’s rankings on Google.
Choosing keywords is about relevance, not volume
This begs the question: what, then, are the “right” keywords? A better question might be: what makes a keyword the right one? Let’s return to the “YouTube is like an enormous library archive” analogy for a moment. If only making noise and getting noticed mattered, then the right keywords would be the ones that get the most search volume to attract the most viewers. But like we said, YouTube is too saturated a platform to count on viral spread. Search engines don’t really think in terms of “best and worst” videos to make their rankings. (Search engines don’t really think at all, but that’s a topic for another day.) Search engines are designed to identify “what video is best for this particular viewer, in this particular instance?” That’s not a question of volume or popularity. That’s a question of relevance.
It is rarely going to be an effective marketing goal to merely seek out lots and lots of viewers regardless of who they are. Most campaigns are better served by a smaller group of highly engaged fans than by millions of lukewarm passive viewers. If you spend all of your focus optimizing your content for Google’s bots, high volume and low engagement is what you’re likely to get. If you want to build a meaningful fan base, then you must build your content for the people watching it, not just the search engines ranking it.
Defining your audience and their needs
You must have a clear idea of who you are trying to address with your YouTube content if you want to know what to say to them. Defining your target audience first will make the SEO optimization process more goal directed and specific.
Identifying and defining your target audience can start with the motivations behind their video searches. Some common motivations include:
YouTube Studio Channel Dashboard courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.
I want to know: The user wants to learn more about a specific topic they’ve already identified. They’re likely to be interested in tutorials, how-to’s, and explainer videos.
I want to do: The viewer has a specific action already in mind that they want to take, like planning a trip or exploring a new hobby. They might watch videos either aspirationally or proactively, like vlogs for inspiration or travel guides for actionable tips.
I want to buy: The potential viewer is seeking information related to a specific product they want to purchase, including reviews or comparisons. They might look for unboxing videos, reviews from influencers, or product demos.
Understanding your audience, their pain points, and their purchase drivers is key to identifying which keywords can help guide those viewers to your YouTube videos. Keywords are the language viewers use to ask a search engine for specific content, which is why we often start with viewer intent and work from there. Jot down a few words or phrases that a viewer might use to describe what they want to see in your video. Think about both the featured topic (like “dogs” or “makeup” or “golf swing”) and format/genre (like “tutorial” or “vlog” or “Let’s Play” or “reacts”). List the relevant verbs, like “buy”, “play”, “learn”, “explain”, “explore”. By building out a word cloud like this, you’ll have a starting point for your keyword research.
Begin your keyword research with an autocomplete tool or competitor browsing
The simplest way to start the keyword research process is by playing around with a keyword tool (Moz offers a free Keyword Explorer,) or the search function right on YouTube and Google. Trying out some different searches that your audience is likely to make can give you insight into what your target audience is already searching for, what they’re interested in, and the specific words or phrases they use when they’re talking about it online.
Type one of your potential keywords into the search box. As you type, YouTube will suggest related popular searches — this is an autocomplete feature built right in. The Ubersuggest tool is also a good place to try this exercise, which will run through the alphabet for the first letter of the next word in your search phrase.
Gauging YouTube keyword search volume
It’s also good to know which of your keywords people search for most frequently. The free Google Trends application “YouTube search” option lets you compare potential keywords in your list to see which ones rank higher and appear in more searches. Keep in mind that higher search volume usually also means more competition to rank for that particular word or phrase.
You can also keep tabs on the keywords your competitors are using to compare to the ones on your list. Find channels within your niche that have a few thousand subscribers, and sort through the content using the “Most Popular” option. Click on the video with the highest number of views and make note of the keywords used in the title, tags, and description. This can show you which keywords might already be saturated in your market with high competition, or reveal gaps where there are opportunities to provide content.
Attaching keywords to your videos
YouTube Channel, Basic Info Keywords courtesy of SustainablePR.
When you’ve identified a list of high-value keywords, it’s time to put them to work. Here are all the places you can incorporate keywords when first posting your YouTube video:
Video file name: SEO optimization begins before you even upload the video. Include keywords prominently in the video file name.
Video title: The title should be punchy and concise. Think about what you would want to click on. Avoid using video titles longer than 70 characters, because they’ll get cut off on the search engine results page and thumbnails. Try to include the keyword towards the beginning of the title when you can.
Description: Many content creators make the mistake of only writing a couple of sentences in their video description. The more words your description has, the better. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters for video descriptions, so be sure to utilize that real estate. Include strategically placed keywords, information about the video, an enticing hook, and a specific call to action.
Transcript: The video transcript, or caption, is another opportunity to include keywords because it provides additional text used by the platform’s ranking algorithm.
Tags: When tagging your video, include the top relevant keywords, the brand or channel name, and the more specific keyword phrases. Keep all tags under 127 characters. The more the merrier, as long as they are all relevant and concise. No one likes a bait and switch, and too broad a range of topics in your tags will signal to YouTube that your video isn’t strongly relevant to anything in particular at all.
Try audio keywords to get more traction
A unique way to include even more keywords in your video is to speak them in the video itself. Since Google and YouTube no longer need to crawl a transcript to understand what you’re saying, you can utilize audio keywords. Always try to include the keywords in the first two sentences you speak in the video to keep your viewer retention rate up.
Bottom line: prioritize relevance over volume, and start with the viewer and work backwards
If you take nothing else away from this guide, know that a search engine like Google or YouTube has no concept of what “best” means. It cannot judge a video by merit, and it does not rank individual videos as being more or less worthy of views. Only the viewers can make value judgments like that. A search engine can only make determinations of relevance, and only using the keywords we give it, as compared to the keywords provided by the user when they perform a search.
The search engine only knows if it provided the right video for the right search by interpreting the actions the user takes next. If you give YouTube and Google plenty of keywords to parse by completely filling out your description, tags, titles, and transcripts, your video will be returned in more searches. If the viewer then leaves comments or subscribes to your channel after watching, YouTube’s algorithm concludes that your video was highly relevant, and returns you in more searches. It’s a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship, not a mystical process.
Play around with some of the free SEO tools and Learning Center resources that Moz makes available, and see what you turn up. A little bit of effort, forethought, and consistency goes a long, long way when it comes to improving your performance on YouTube.
