Video SEO: How to Get More
Your video has a low view count; this must mean the content wasn't good enough. Probably not!
Your low view count is to do with not telling YouTube or Google what the video actually contains, so it never had a chance to be shown to anyone searching for it.
You need to optimise your video for search engines. We’re not tricking an algorithm or hacking our way to number one. We’re giving search engines the information they need to match your video to the people looking for it.
Search engines read your video; they don't watch it.
YouTube's recommendation system and Google's index don't sit through your product demo and look at the images for credibility. It works from the text around it and in it: the title, the description, the captions, and how people behave after clicking.
If a video is titled "New product Final v2" with no description, no captions, there's nothing for either system to go on.
What affects whether people find it
Title. Use the phrase your audience would search, not the internal name for the project. If customers search "how to set up [product]," that phrasing should be in the title, not "product intro."
I like to go with the ‘solve X with Y’ approach to titles.
Description. Only the first line or two show before someone clicks to expand it. Put the real information there, what the video covers and who it's for.
Transcript. This one is skipped but super important because, as before, SEO reads it; it doesn't watch.
Where it's hosted, YouTube functions as its own search engine, so hosting there in addition to your own site gives the video two paths to be found.
Embedding video on a web page also tends to help that page's own search performance. Cutting the video up into social shorts for other platforms is also key in a video's growth.
These 1st four are very easy for anyone to implement. The final two are more trial and error if you don't have your audience data in front of you.
Thumbnail. Click-through rate is a ranking factor on most platforms. A thumbnail that clearly shows what the viewer will get tends to perform better than a random frame from the video. This one is always a struggle, and you need to remember that the cool frame from the video may not be the best thumbnail for the video.
The opening seconds. Average view duration is one of the strongest signals platforms use, and a lot of it is decided in the first ten seconds. A slow intro or logo animation before the content starts can quietly suppress how often the video gets recommended. Solve the problem fast and get more views.
Why it matters more when you don't publish often
A channel posting daily can absorb a few underperforming uploads; there's enough volume for the algorithm to learn from, and very few businesses can meet this churn of content. Most businesses publish video far less often, so video needs to be properly optimised the first time. There isn't enough volume to average out a missing transcript or a vague title. There's also a practical side benefit: a transcript can be reused as a blog post, social captions, or an email, so the optimisation work done for one video often produces other content for free.
Before launching remember
The Title must use language people actually search, not internal shorthand (findquestions.com is great for this)
Put the key information in the first line of the description (who it's for and why)
Add a full transcript or accurate captions (Do both)
Use a thumbnail that shows what the video is actually about (get creative with this one)
Cut anything slow before the content starts.
Follow the steps above, and your video will have a better chance of being seen by the people already searching for what it covers.
