I’m going to show you how to optimize a YouTube video using a plug-in called vidIQ, which I use for all my videos. In fact, I’ve got a client right now that I’m optimizing a video for, so I’ll show you how to do this so that eventually you can do it yourself.
How To Set Up vidIQ?
The first thing to do is to make sure you’re using Chrome. Then, you’re going search “vidIQ Vision” on Google, which will bring you to a link that says, “Add to Chrome.” Please note, this is a free plug-in. There is a paid version available, but there’s a ton of stuff you can do with the free version.
Let’s use a video from one of my clients who is a motorcycle accident attorney and doing a video on the number one cause of motorcycle accidents. He’s got the video up here, and one thing you’ll notice about vidIQ is that it puts this entire dashboard right here, giving you all kinds of stats.
How Can We Use Data From vidIQ?
First, this tells you information about your video, but then it also tells you information about other videos as well. If you want to rank for defensive motorcycle riding, you can look and see what types of tags the top ranking videos are using, all of which you can use to make your video even better.
To do this, click Edit video. What you’re going to see here is basically a blank canvas. What I typically do is start typing tags. For this example, we’ll choose “number one cause of motorcycle accidents.” As you can see, it gives you all kinds of suggestions.
What I typically do is make the first tag, the first phrase of the keyword, and the video title the same, and then, I also want to repeat the video title down below, because I think it ranks better that way. What’s cool about this is that it’ll give you an overall score.
Currently, I’ve got a 62.5/100. Anything over fifty is going to be difficult to rank for, but eventually, as your channel grows, you may be able to rank for some of these things.
Since there are 625,000 searches just for the term “motorcycle crash,” it’s obviously going to be a pretty competitive keyword, but this tool will give you some basic suggestions.
What Other Features Are Available On vidIQ?
After you get recommended tags, you’ll have an opportunity to “Boost this Video,” which gives you even more options. A motorcycle crash is kind of a loaded question, but what you’re going to find with this is a lot of people that are trying to find videos of people crashing the motorcycles, so make sure to check “motorcycle safety” or “cycle accidents.”
We’ll add “crash” “motorcycle accident attorney”, “motorcycle safety tips”, “motorcycle accident lawyer”, then we’ll do “Atlanta Georgia”. He also has locations in Alpharetta, Cumming, and Lawrenceville, Georgia.
What you can do is get all the keywords there, and see your number. For example, this video’s already ranking #4 for the causes of motorcycle accidents, all of which happens very quickly.
What I typically do for my videos is I have a standard list of things that I put in here. If you can see all of my videos have these same things in here, so basically from here to here, it’s standard in every video. I have this in a text document, and I just copy and paste in every single one, usually using these short links.
How To Create A Video Description
Now that we’ve got the tags and video title took care of. We’ve also got the main keyword in the description. Now here’s something else to think about, you typically want the description to be 300 characters. What I do is include all this info about my Facebook group and more, then I’ve got a brief synopsis of the video with keywords and more.
Next Step: Save Changes
One of the other cool things about vidIQ is that you can save this info as a template. Basically, these are the generic tags that I have used for all my videos. What’s cool about this info is that when you hit ‘save’ these are standard tags and you don’t have to do this over and over again.
Optimizing Your Videos Even Further With Your Thumbnail
Now, there are a couple of different ways you can do a thumbnail. You can hire a graphic designer, or you can use vidIQ.
To use vidIQ, you can click ‘Create Thumbnail,’ add a solid color, upload an image of something, or just take the current thumbnail that you’re using, hit ‘Next’ and add a phrase that’s going to catch the attention. I think it’s best to have a graphic designer do this, but if you don’t have a graphic designer and want to do this quickly, you can absolutely do it this way.
I like to use contrasting YouTube colors. Since YouTube’s colors are black, white and red, I don’t use black, white, and red in these videos. Use colors like blue or green, just to make it really pop. You can also add a border to your text to make it bold.
Now that you have a thumbnail, you can play around with the text. Let’s change the font to Impact or Tahoma, just so that it stands out a little bit more. Again, this is my last resort, because I prefer to have a graphic designer make it look much better.
Adding End Screens And Annotations
Now, next thing you need to do is add end screens and annotations. What I like about this is that it will add an end screen to the last twenty seconds of the video. On these end screens, you can add different elements, like ‘Subscribe’, ‘Most Recent Upload’, and more.
What this does is suggest things during the last twenty seconds of this video. You can add a subscribe link, and then two other related videos, which will look really good once you have thumbnails on them. These don’t automatically appear, but I like using these because I’ve found that my views, watch time, and overall visibility went way up once I started using end screens.
Another thing to do is cards, which appear on the side of a video. Cards aren’t quite as easy to set up as end screens. But, what you do is click ‘Add Card’, and you hit ‘Create’ and then enter the URLs of some of these other videos.
What this does is at the thirty-second mark, you’re going to see the card pop up right here. Sometimes I like to make these cards more of a teaser for the other videos in the cards. I believe you can do up to five cards,
The best thing about cards is that you can save them as templates and position them wherever you want. It just pre-loads your cards and then depending on how long the video is, you just move them around.
There are tons of cool things you can do with vidIQ, plus, it makes it really simple to optimize your YouTube videos while giving you a checklist of different tasks that need to be completed. The best part is the benefits of these optimizations can be visible quite quickly.