How to use copywriting to improve your YouTube subscriber engagement

Are you a new YouTube creator or already have an established channel? You may want to consider leveraging some SEO tricks to help your audience find your videos. SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization is a practice used in copywriting that helps search engines like Google better understand your content so that it can help users find your sites online. Think of it as your organic online visibility.

During my days in marketing, I worked for a global audiovisual solutions company. One of my responsibilities was to support my manager with optimizing the company’s YouTube account through copywriting. Their channel had over 120 videos at the time in 2021, and my manager and I worked together to rewrite video titles, descriptions, playlists, keywords using an Excel spreadsheet. This not only helps the overall subscriber experience, but also increases your visibility online. In this blog, I will share some tips I used for you to try on your channel and future videos. 

1. Research the right keywords before recording your video

   A keyword is a word or phrase that best represents the content in your site or page.  Research good keywords relevant to your video. Never fear! YouTube has its own plug in called Tube Buddy. It is a keyword explorer tool that can suggest related keywords  to your channel or show you how your existing keywords rank against other competitor channels and videos similar to yours. While recording your content, try to say your keywords throughout your videos. Google can’t technically “listen” to your videos, but it can pick up on many kinds of text based elements like subtitles and this can improve your videos SEO. Finally, those keywords can be placed in the tags section in YouTube studio.

   
   

2. Use your keywords in your video title and make your titles an appropriate length. 

   To help your video rank high on a relevant Youtube search, try to place your keyword first in the video title. Make sure your keyword is relevant to the video because if viewers start watching your videos and see that it's not, they close your videos within seconds and that can hurt your channel SEO. Also note that if the number of characters in your title are too short or too long, it could hurt the video ranking.

   
   

3. Include as much content as you can in the video description box

   New YouTubers, this ones for you! Keep in mind the video description box is not only for your subscribers to read but to also help YouTube better understand what your video is about. The more information you put, the better, even up to 500 words. Try to add as many keywords as you can as naturally as possible. DO NOT just paste them in there as this works against YouTube community guidelines. Of course affiliate links and hashtags are great additions to this section. Just try to limit your hashtags to three or four at most as YouTube only considers the first few.

   
   

4. Upload your own subtitles or review the auto subtitles for accuracy

   Errors are possible and the wrong words can place you in unrelated search results. Also, if your audio quality is not that great, the auto subtitles may add unrelated words or nothing at all for some sections.

   
   

5. Don’t ignore your channel settings

   Your keywords can also be used for your overall channel. Include them in your channel description (naturally of course) while telling subscribers what value your offer, and in your channel tab under settings. Here you can add as many keywords as you like.

Now how exactly can you put this all together? Using the Excel spreadsheet I mentioned before! To be brief, create a table with the columns: Video title, Video description, “channel playlist name”, Tags (SEO keywords), External links, etc. This is great if you already have many videos on your channel and I can help you with that. 

If you need assistance optimizing your videos, identifying your target keywords or advice improving your channel SEO, I am happy to help. You can reach out to me on my Contact page. 

Santé!