Algorithm, Search & Distribution
YouTube SEO
Also called: video SEO, YouTube search optimisation
Search on YouTube behaves like search anywhere else: someone types a phrase and expects the result to answer it. YouTube SEO covers the decisions that make a video the obvious answer, starting with picking a topic that has real search demand and carrying through to the title, the description and what gets said out loud on camera. Google Trends can be filtered to YouTube search instead of web search, which gives a read on demand before anything is filmed. The common mistake is treating this as a metadata job done in the last five minutes before publishing. By then the topic is fixed, and the topic was the decision that mattered.