YouTube SEO has become an important factor for any YouTube channel now. Working and analyzing numerous successful channels, I always had a major conflict with verifying whether I followed and implemented all the requirements.
To solve it, I made a checklist, the ultimate one at that, sourced from studying more than 100 successful YouTube channels, and including the technical aspects of YouTube SEO.
(This article includes a detailed explanation. For access to only the checklist in Excel sheet and Word file, you can subscribe or write your email ID in comments.)
Hence this is a must-to-get checklist for your channel, which you could immediately apply and get results, regardless of the niche. The authenticity?
Everything on this list is a BASIC requirement showing GREAT results…
So, if you are a new channel or a struggling channel, this list is for you.
Table of contents
Basic Channel SEO
YouTube first verifies the completeness of your channel. Hence this checklist. It includes all the basic requirements when you set up a YouTube channel. If you are here for Video SEO, you can access it directly through the table of contents. Let’s dive in…
1. Channel Name
There is no technical SEO linked with the channel name, but YouTube guidelines do. Yes, these guidelines are also applicable to your channel name, hence make sure to verify.
✅Channel name shouldn’t express any foul intent towards any community or person and shouldn’t include any foul language.
✅Does your channel name depict the intent behind your channel?
✅Is it unique and short, if not derived from the channel’s intent?
✅Is it memorable?
Channel name is the most important factor to attract and engage your audience so make sure to select one carefully. You can also get ideas from a post by VidIQ.
2. About
Regardless of the success you achieved on YouTube, the ‘About’ page makes a big difference. As explained by Timothy Schmoyer in his book, “30 Days for a Better YouTube Channel”:
“The About page is the place where your potential audience connects with you.”
So, make sure to express what your audience can expect from your channel. The checklist follows:
✅Does your ‘About’ page explain what you do with your YouTube channel?
✅Being formal was never a rule. Is your ‘About’ info eye-catching and creative?
✅Most importantly, did you include your seed keywords in the info?
Once your audience and at the same time YouTube know what you do with your channel, they will move on to the next visible options. The social links…
3. Social Links and Contact info
Social links don’t directly impact SEO but they are one of the most important factors. The reason is that it is a goldmine to pull and engage your traffic.
As previously stated, YouTube is the largest social platform after Facebook. Connecting social platforms with YouTube creates a loop of followers coming to your channel and vice versa.
Sharing contact information is optional. If you have any business queries section, then it is important to share your business id, to let people reach out to you. Hence, the checklist follows:
✅Did you connect all your social media handles to the channel?
✅Did you add your business mail or contact details?
4. Playlists
Watch time of playlists is double the views!!!
It is practically observed and stated by one of the leading Tech review channels “Think Media” in their video on how to use playlists.
If your channel already has video content then you must segregate them into playlists. This is important from both SEO perspective and to increase traffic.
Playlists organize your channel content and help your visitors understand what your channel is all about. And in SEO, it also helps YouTube to organize and crawl through your videos easily. Here comes the checklist…
✅Did you organize your playlist in a meaningful manner with meaningful titles?
✅Did you cover all videos under these playlists without leaving any uncategorized?
5. Video Length
Your channel’s video length impacts your revenue!
Yes, it’s true. Based on video length, the placement and the number of ads are determined. Hence, longer videos generate much revenue. But making longer videos without a reason is the biggest mistake you could commit.
Videos longer than 12 minutes tend to lose viewers!!!
If the video is too short, there is a high possibility of the viewers going through it completely. In terms of SEO, it is extremely useful, but for revenue, it isn’t recommended.
Then what should you do? Follow the checklist…
✅Is your video length more than 8 minutes?
✅If not a tutorial or a story, did you end your video within 12 minutes?
✅Did you decide on a video length to be applied for all videos?
Having consistency in video length improves your viewers’ memory of your channel. So, decide on a length for each type/playlist before creating content. Check this article by VidIQ for reference.
6. Thumbnail Template
YouTube themselves stated that:
“90% of best-performing videos have custom thumbnails“
Thumbnail gets the first view from your audience before anything and they are the ones that bring you traffic. Hence, instead of taking it as ‘complementary’ take it seriously. The checklist follows:
✅Did you decide on a color pattern/branding consistency for your channel?
✅Did you use the same branding on your thumbnail template?
✅Are the words on your thumbnail visible, and are the images clear?
✅If possible, did you add graphics?
This post by Backlinko explains the importance of technical details of thumbnail design and might be of help.
7. Channel Tags
This is not about the video tags that you find while publishing.
It is a small feature on YouTube with a big impact. Channel tags define your channel to the crawler in the language it understands. Hence, it is an important factor in SEO. Adding too many tags might dilute the visibility.
You can find channel tags in under channel section in settings option.
YouTube studio>Settings option>Channel>Keywords
What to add? The checklist follows:
✅Did you add brand name of your channel?
✅Did you add keywords related to the videos you post on your channel?
✅Did you add your competitors names? (optional)
✅Did you only add relevant keywords without stuffing the irrelevant ones?
Adding competitors’ names might help YouTube to suggest your videos when a person searches for their name, but not always.
8. Feature Eligibility
Without this you can’t monetize your channel!!!
Many people know about Feature eligibility when they scratch their heads unable to monetize the channel even after reaching the requirements. This is where the unknown factor lies.
Feature eligibility authenticates and verifies your identity for YouTube. You can find it under the same channel section in settings. Update it to Advanced features, and only then you can monetize. Hence the checklist follows:
✅Did you submit the required documents and enables Feature Eligibility to Advances features?
Video SEO
This is the most important part of YouTube SEO. From title to tags, the way you optimize them determine your ranking and viewer engagement. This checklist will help you increase traffic by at least 30%.
9. Keyword research
First thing a viewer would do upon entering YouTube is to search. The probability of that search term matching with your video title, description etc determines your ranking on search. Keyword research is a vast topic, and you can use this post by semrush for reference.
If your video is informational, try to add navigational words such as how/why/what/who/where etc. This is a common practice not only in Google SEO, but also in YouTube SEO. This is simply saying to YouTube that:
“Hey YouTube, I have answer for that searcher’s question. So how about showing my video to him?”
YouTube would immediately say: “Sure! That was helpful.”
Hence video ranked!!! So, without further ado, the checklist follow:
✅Did you use seed keywords for your video topic?
✅Did you find the related keywords with less difficulty to rank but has high viewership volume? (This criteria varies with the type of video)
✅Visit the research tab on analytics from YouTube studio. This helps get what your search terms are popular to your viewers.
Keyword research is extremely important and I suggest using tools like VidIQ along with your research. If you are done, time to make it generate traffic.
10. Video Title
When you first observed this post, what did you actually read? The title right! As my reader did, so do your audience. Hence having a crafty-captivating-title embedded with SEO is prominent. The checklist follows:
✅Does your title include your keyword? (Possibly in the beginning)
✅Does your keyword embed naturally into the title?
✅Is your title attractive and intriguing?
Here are some tips provided by YouTube themselves. To save time, here is a post on 4 proven methods to write SEO-optimized YouTube video title for your reference.
11. Video Description
Many YouTubers including some from the most successful ones (found from my research) ignore writing crisp and clear description to their videos. Let me say this “It is not complementary, it is compulsion.”
Why? In terms of SEO, having keyword in your description increases the possibility in ranking. But most importantly, for reader engagement, it is the place to best express your video. Hence the checklist follows:
✅Did you include your keyword in the video description?
✅Is your description looking natural or keyword stuffed?
✅Did you mention all important points about your video?
If you description is keyword stuffed, then YouTube decreases your authority. I will post an article on different description outlines soon, so I urge you to bookmark or subscribe to my blog.
12. Title tags and hashtags
Hashtags and title tags are similar to articles for crawlers. They tend to help crawlers identify your topic, important keywords and provide your video in relevance to the search. Hence they play an important role.
Many channels simply stuff their video with 100s of hashtags. But YouTube has different plans:
“If a video or playlist has more than 60 hashtags, we’ll ignore each hashtag on that content.”
Ideally use only those terms that are relevant to your video and over usage might also dilute the relevance to your topic.
Main tags are the ones that appear beside title. Use seed keywords and your channel name as key identifiers for main tags. Here comes the checklist:
✅Did you use relevant hashtags?
✅It is suggested to maintain a hashtags list file with those you might use frequently? Did you make one?
✅Did you stuff more than 60 hashtags?
✅Did you include your keyword in the main tags?
13. Captions/subtitles
Adding captions/subtitles to your video helps in increment of views and engagement by more than 80%. Adding captions helps physically impaired people and also people with different accent or language.
Before posting their first reaction to an Indian film, Jaby Koay (Now Cine Desi) had an average of 50K views. But their first Indian film reaction shows 3.9M views. That is 7,700% increment!!! Subtitles helped Indians understand their reaction even if they don’t understand their accent, widening the reach.
In website SEO, keyword should be mentioned in the first paragraph. Crawlers crawl the content of article in Google SEO. Then what about YouTube? YouTube crawls the transcription or captions of your video. So mention your keyword in the beginning of the video. Hence adding captions would boost your SEO. Here is how you add subtitles:
YouTube studio>Subtitles>select the video>choose language>Add
The checklist follows:
✅Did you add captions to your video?
✅Did you mention your keyword at least once in the beginning of video which in turn show up in subtitles?
14. Related and end cards
While publishing a video, many people under different circumstances skip adding related video cards and end cards. In a sense, you are missing out extra views!!
The ‘i’ icon on the top right corner indicates ‘related video’ card and the suggested videos shown at the end are end cards. These two allow and pull the viewers into other related videos increasing their engagement and watch time on your channel. But how to choose videos for these cards? The checklist follows:
✅Did you add relevant videos to related videos card?
✅Did you add your high-converting videos to your end card?
✅If you have merchandise, did you add it to end cards?
Off-Site SEO
Yes, you read it right! I did mention Off-site SEO for YouTube. Just a simple logic: When someone recommends, a person trusts you faster than gaining it from being a complete stranger. Hence off-site SEO does play a key role.
15. Vice-Versa technique
The views is 3M more than the subscribers!!!
Vice-Versa technique is a name I coined specifically for the process of gaining traffic and authority through other channels.
Off-site SEO for google includes adding channel’s link to your blog, social handles (or) collaborating with other YouTubers on a video (or) recommending them to suggest your channel for any related video. They are, as said by Brian Dean, your “Linkreators” for YouTube.
In this process, your channel get exposure to the audience of other channel and vice-versa, and hence both of you gain new audience. This helps in increase of your authority and hence ranking.
I will post a separate article on Vice-Versa Technique. Make sure to subscribe to get updated. The check-list follows:
✅Did you find your potential collaborators?
✅Did you make content that is worth to link or recommend by your collaborators?
16. Embedded YouTube video
You might have seen many websites embedding their YouTube videos on relevant pages. Have you ever wondered whether the views through websites count? Yes they do count, but only in one case.
If the video is not on autoplay, then views from the audience even without them logging in, count. Hence don’t lose these extra views by playing your video on autoplay in your website without a reason. Hence the checklist follows:
✅Did you add your YouTube video to the relevant page on your website?
✅Did you make sure they are not in autoplay?
Conclusion
Hence this ends the must-have 16-step YouTube SEO checklist. It would be tiresome to come back and find each point, every time you post your video. I made a doc file and an excel file for the same checklist without the mentioned details.
You can use the doc form to verify them each time and use the Excel sheet to make a note of data you used for your video and channel. Just subscribe or write down your mail id in comments and I’ll mail the zip file to you.
This is my very first blog post on this website, and through this, I will post many elaborate, quality-driven, YouTube, and Google SEO-related content which you could always look up to. If you liked my content or have any suggestions please do comment below, and I will get back to you.
The Indian SEO 
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