By Caroline Forsey

YouTube is the second largest search engine, with over 2 billion users per month — so it’s an undeniably powerful channel for your marketing efforts.

However, if you don’t use YouTube for your current marketing strategy, you’re not alone. In fact, businesses choose Facebook as a channel over YouTube, even for video content.

In 2018, the HubSpot Academy team didn’t take advantage of YouTube, either. But in the latter half of the year, the team feared the major losses in traffic they could face if they didn’t hop on board — so they implemented a strategy that enabled them to grow YouTube subscribers by 25% in just two months. Because YouTube is a search engine, part of that strategy relied on optimizing the videos to increase the chances of discoverability.

One of the most important tactics for optimizing your YouTube channel is writing descriptive YouTube descriptions.

YouTube Channel Description

A YouTube channel description is similar to the “About” page of a website. In fact, it even appears under the “About” tab of your channel’s YouTube page.

The YouTube channel description is meant to convey to potential viewers what your content is about: the topics you cover, the themes you tackle, and why. You’ll not only need to convey what you discuss but also what you bring to the discussion and why they should listen to you. The goal here is to turn a one-time viewer into a long-term subscriber and consumer of your content. You’ll be able to add this when setting up your YouTube channel.

In addition to its primary goal of turning viewers into subscribers, this text can also be crawled by YouTube and could help your channel get found by people who are looking for channels like yours. With that in mind, be sure to use the terms that you think people would use to search for your content.

YouTube Video Description

The YouTube video description can be found underneath the viewport of the video itself.

While the YouTube channel description talks about the body of video content that you upload, each video will also need a unique description to increase the likelihood of your video getting found when someone is searching for a particular topic.

In this video, the creator summarizes the question being asked and specifies the audience that the video is meant for. This text will help audiences (and YouTube) understand what the video is about. In addition, it’s also prime real estate to include contact information and calls to action.

Ultimately, if you’re ready to begin using YouTube to attract and convert an audience, it’s critical you optimize your video descriptions for SEO. If you’re unsure how to start crafting compelling YouTube descriptions, keep reading — here, we’ll explore various tactics you can employ, and provide templates to ensure you have everything you need to excel …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron