Grow Your Audience With a YouTube Search Strategy
A high-performing YouTube strategy can turn your brand’s videos into a powerful tool for search engine discovery. Our proven SEO experts will get you there with fully customized YouTube management services that harness the power of algorithmic discovery and SEO best practices.
When done right, YouTube video Shorts can help interested audiences find your brand through trending topics and keywords. This improves your brand reputation, drives traffic to your website or e-commerce store, and ultimately brings more revenue to your business.
Since YouTube is integrated into Google’s sophisticated search network, you need a management agency that understands the nuances of ranking in search. That’s where SEO Design Chicago can help. As an established growth agency, we have over 10 years of experience helping businesses of all sizes grow through strategic paid and organic search strategies — all customized for your specific business goals and budget.
Request a free comprehensive SEO analysis today to see how your brand is showing up in trending searches.
Complete YouTube SEO System
YouTube increasingly prioritizes short, visually catchy vertical content.
To fully leverage YouTube content as a growth generator, you need a full system that integrates your SEO strategies for YouTube Shorts with your long-form content and your overall search strategy.
That’s exactly where SEO Design Chicago can help. We design fully customized digital marketing strategies that look at your business’s entire online presence and create targeted, data-driven solutions just for you.
Here’s how.
Shorts Creation & Editing
YouTube Shorts have seen explosive growth over the past two years — up to 70 billion views per day in 2024 — and they can help increase brand awareness and drive clicks to your business if they’re done correctly.
Our experienced video creators know Shorts. We design effective, clickable Shorts specifically for YouTube, then track their performance to ensure maximum audience engagement.
Our YouTube creators will create and edit short videos that conform to YouTube’s best practices, including:
- Vertical video
- Hook in the first 2 seconds
- Image-focused
- Audio-optional
- Conversion-focused design
- Under 60 seconds
- Fully optimized for YouTube and Google search bars
Thumbnail & Hook Optimization
A key to YouTube search engine optimization is a powerful hook that contains the keywords your target audience is looking for. Since YouTube Shorts are usually viewed while scrolling a feed, you need an attention-getting hook within the first few seconds that encourages viewers to interact further with your brand’s content.
Additionally, Shorts need a visually powerful thumbnail. Many brands make the mistake of using the same branded image for all their thumbnails, or just letting YouTube’s automatically generated description tools pick a screenshot at random. This doesn’t do anything to communicate what your video is about and won’t “stop the scroll.”
Our team of experienced designers combines video editing, image stills, and creative text hooks to get viewers invested while including trending keywords and topics — all without feeling like clickbait.
Keyword-Driven Metadata Optimization
Just like any other content online, YouTube uses metadata to send signals to YouTube and Google search results about how they should categorize your video.
Our YouTube Shorts SEO optimization includes optimization of your titles, tags, descriptions, and thumbnail images. Including the right keywords and topics can help you show up in YouTube search results with your ideal customers. For example, trending keywords and hashtags like “try on haul” will reach a more specific audience than broad topics like “fashion” or “outfit.”
This is all based on in-depth audience and trend research — no guesswork, just data.
Audience & Trend Research
Effective SEO for YouTube Shorts relies on staying relevant with your audience. Our team will design your SEO efforts around your ideal audience profiles to make sure that your content drives engagement from the potential customers most likely to make a purchase from your business.
Everything we do at SEO Design Chicago is data-driven. This means that we will continuously track how your videos perform with your target audience and fine-tune the results to respond to trends we see in likes, engagement, comments, shares, and conversions.
Long-Form & Short-Form Integration
Looking at the explosive growth in YouTube Shorts, is long-form content dead? Not at all! Long-form video is still a powerful driver of user engagement. The amount of time viewers spent consuming long-form content on YouTube has grown 8% in recent years.
Long form is still best for:
- Tutorials
- Behind-the-scenes
- Building brand loyalty
- Driving revenue through midroll ads
- In-depth storytelling
Shorts are great for:
- Brand awareness
- SEO
- Quick links to your brand site or other social channels
The key is creating a seamless interaction between your short- and long-form content to give YouTube algorithms clear indicators of what to recommend next. Ideally, you should be optimizing your Shorts to feed naturally into your long-form content, which drives more revenue through ads and through increased customer engagement.
Our team’s technical optimization will ensure that your short- and long-form content work together to create a logical, storytelling flow of related content.
Content Clustering
Topic clusters are a useful organization tool to help YouTube recommend thematically connected videos to your viewers. It’s a great strategy to connect your long- and short-form media. Typically, a longer video on one topic forms the “hub” of the content cluster, with Shorts forming the “spokes” that all connect back to the hub.
If your brand has an established library of content, our team can transform it into a lead-generating system. If you’re building from scratch, we can design logical content flows that promote additional engagement with your brand.
Channel Performance Improvement
YouTube now offers multiple discovery options for viewers to find your videos, especially Shorts. These all count towards your creator rankings, whether audiences discover it on game consoles, smart TVs, or, of course, through the app.
If you’re noticing that your YouTube channel just isn’t getting the CTR you think it should be, our SEO agency can help you achieve better SEO rankings to boost your views, clicks, shares, and comments.
Analytics & Retention Insights
Having lots of views on YouTube is nice, but your ultimate goal is to use it to drive more revenue to your business. Our team leverages detailed YouTube analytics along with other audience, conversion, and retention measures through tools like Google Analytics and customized GA4 dashboards.
This provides you with clear, actionable data that shows you exactly how YouTube Studio is helping bring customers and revenue to your business. Even better — you have 24/7 access to your business’s analytics, so you can check up on your strategy at all times.
YouTube Shorts SEO
YouTube Shorts have taken the search algorithm by storm. Unlike traditional long-form YouTube content, Shorts are limited to 60 seconds, display vertically, are algorithmically suggested to viewers, and usually auto-play with a default mute.
Optimizing YouTube Shorts requires a sophisticated blend of algorithm-driven strategy and user-focused design. As customers’ viewing habits change, your YouTube Shorts content needs to be catchy and fresh to compete.
Here are some of the tactics that SEO Design Chicago uses to optimize YouTube Shorts for SEO.
Trend Alignment
We all know that trends come and go with lightning speed on social media. That means you need an agile, responsive team that can quickly align your brand with trending or emerging topics to keep you ahead of the curve.
As a full-service digital marketing firm, SEO Design Chicago uses sophisticated trend analysis and SEO tools to identify topics with a high search volume. We align both short- and long-form YouTube videos with trending searches and detailed audience profiles to help your videos appear in Google and YouTube’s search results for your industry. This keeps your brand top-of-mind for new and returning customers alike.
Hook-Based Scripting
When promoting your Shorts on YouTube, you don’t have a lot of time to grab viewers’ attention. Often, Shorts start out muted, so you need a strong visual hook within the first two seconds to encourage viewers to watch all the way through.
Our scriptwriters know how to write for the Shorts feed. You can expect catchy, creative scripts that prioritize those valuable first few seconds.
Fast-Paced Editing
High-momentum videography is ideal for YouTube Shorts. Audiences are accustomed to quick cuts and short scenes that are often synced to music. This isn’t the place for long, contemplative camera sweeps — YouTube Shorts are built around short attention spans.
Our video team produces expert content that fits with YouTube’s preferred styles. This helps your brand use Shorts to communicate quick impressions of your brand, ultimately moving viewers toward a more favorable perception.
A/B Testing for Multiple Cuts
Which performs better — a product video opening onto the item or onto the tester? Rigorous testing can give the answer. Our team will test each new video and track already published Shorts’ performance to give you actionable information on what kind of content performs better with your target audience.
Armed with this information, we can make incremental improvements to your videos that build on previous successes and drive more traffic and conversions to your brand.
Cross-Platform Distribution
A smart content strategy gets maximum value out of each video. Your YouTube SEO strategy can include sharing your Shorts on multiple platforms to increase traffic and brand awareness.
As a top omnichannel marketing provider, SEO Design Chicago can mobilize your content across platforms, including:
- Email marketing
- Blogs
- Web content
- Social ads
- Podcasts
- Shared links
This is the benefit of getting all your SEO efforts managed in one place — we can ensure that you get the maximum ROI from strategically repurposed content.
Technical Optimization for Your YouTube Channel
Your channel needs the right background information to help Google and YouTube categorize and promote your videos properly. To ensure that your long-form videos and Shorts appear to your target audience, our team will leverage industry-standard tools and on-page SEO best practices to ensure that your high-quality content has the background support it needs to perform at the top of your niche.
YouTube Metadata Optimization
Updating any given video’s metadata will help YouTube understand what the video is about and how to index it. This helps the platform display your content to the most interested audiences, and it also helps boost your rankings in the SERPs.
Our team will optimize your YouTube video’s metadata to maximize your views, including adding hashtags and updating your code.
Google Video Search Optimization
Google search results pages are increasingly dynamic. They include AI summaries, rich snippets, local service ads, shoppable product listings, and, of course, videos.
To ensure that your videos appear highly ranked on SERPs, we’ll optimize each element:
- Video description
- Meta tags
- Titles
- Thumbnails
- Transcripts
- Captions
- Image size
- Schema Markup
Schema Markup for Video Embeds
Embedding your YouTube videos into your brand-owned assets like email newsletters, blog posts, and social media posts is a great way to optimize your multichannel marketing strategy. It can also be a great addition to your backlink-building strategy, which improves your website’s ranking and overall online reputation.
To successfully embed any YouTube video on another platform, you need the proper schema markup. Improperly formatted source code means that your video might not display correctly. Search engines won’t index it correctly, which means it won’t serve its main purpose of driving traffic to your brand.
Our team will ensure that your videos employ the correct schema markup so they appear flawlessly everywhere on the internet.
Get Comprehensive SEO Strategies for Your Business Goals
When you work with a full-service digital marketing agency like SEO Design Chicago, you’ll make the most of your advertising budget. Our team has helped hundreds of businesses of all sizes boost their rankings in search results and grow their brand recognition and revenue.
We start out with a comprehensive SEO audit of your entire web presence to determine where your strategy is already performing well and where it can be improved. Then, we create a personalized strategy that is customized for your niche and business goals. Working with a full-service SEO growth agency goes far beyond implementing a few SEO tips — we focus on your growth through holistic strategies designed to deliver more customers.
Turn YouTube into a growth engine for your business. Request your free consultation with SEO Design Chicago today to get a customized marketing plan.
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