Did you know that 65% of executives have visited a vendor’s site after watching a video? Are your videos ready to convert? In order to help them get found and ensure people are watching them it is important to make sure your videos are optimized. Lets take a look at 5 steps you can take to optimize your videos.

Title

Titles help audiences and YouTube’s discovery systems make sense of your content. When writing your title tag you will want to create an engaging title that includes relevant keywords. Additionally, you’ll want to keep it concise. Even though there is a 100- character limit for a video title, in order to ensure your full title is shown in search results it is best to keep your title at 60 characters.

Descriptions

A video’s description field is valuable real estate, helping audiences and YouTube’s discovery systems understand what your content is about. When searching for a video, the first few sentences of the description will display in the results so you want to make sure you start with a compelling few sentences. Just like the title, don’t forget to use relevant keywords where possible. We also recommend giving your viewer a call to action at the end of your description. This could be a link to the next video in a series, another video, or a page or landing page on your website. The key here is to keep your call to action relevant.

Tags

Tags are keywords that the YouTube discovery systems use to help new users discover your videos. When choosing tags you will want to choose keywords relevant to your brand, the topic of the video, or any other keyword that will accurately describe the contents of the video. When choosing tags, put yourself in the place of the viewer and think about different words that they may use to get to your video.

Thumbnail

Thumbnails act as miniature marketing posters for your videos – they attract viewers to your content and compel them to click through to watch. We recommend creating a high quality custom image that represents the content. YouTube recommends using an image (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, or .PNG.) with a resolution of 1280×720 that is under 2MB.

Annotations

Annotations are clickable text overlays on YouTube videos that are used to boost engagement, give more information, and aid in navigation. Using annotations you can ask users to like or share your video, have users to subscribe to your channel, direct users to relevant pages on your website and much more. Annotations are completely customizable giving you the ability to decide when they pop up, how long they stay for, what they say, where they link to, what they look like, and where they are placed. You can really be creative with the use of these, but be careful not to go overboard so it doesn’t look spammy.

Now that you have an optimized YouTube video don’t forget to track the performance of your videos with YouTube analytics to see what is working and what you can improve on. You’ll also want to make sure you are sharing your videos to make sure people are watching them. Share them across your social channels, write a blog post about it, or even mention it in your email newsletter. You put the effort into making this video, now get it out there.

Are you getting the most out of your YouTube videos? If you have not optimized your videos in the past, do not fret. We recommend spending the time to go through your previously posted videos and ensuring they are optimized.