1. Titles
   Think of the video’s title as its “headline.” Titles help audiences understand the content.
   Be sure to pick the right keywords to help describe to the viewers what the video is about.

• Keep the titles concise. A good recommendation is to have less than 70 characters, since titles longer than that will get truncated in a Google search.
• Avoid titles that trick viewers into watching a video. This will cause a huge drop-off that will negatively impact the video’s watch-time performance, along with its ranking.
• Include descriptive and relevant keywords at the beginning of the title.

2. Thumbnails
   Along with the video title, thumbnails act as tiny marketing banners for the videos. The right thumbnail attracts greater audience numbers to the video, and you should always customize thumbnails in order to optimize the video for SEO purposes.

• Accurately represent the video content.
• With animated marketing videos, use the most colorful and attractive stills from the video to stand out.
• With live-action marketing videos, use close-ups of faces when possible. Human faces always draw more attention.
• Use high-resolution images. If the resolution is low, the video might be perceived as a low quality production, and people won’t click on it.
• Make the thumbnails look great at both small and large sizes. Check the thumbnails on different devices (such as TVs, iPads and desktop computers) to be sure that they look great everywhere. Remember that in search engines the thumbnail will appear quite smaller. If the tiny image is not appealing, people won’t click on it.
• Make sure that the foreground stands out from the background. Don’t use an image where the background competes with the foreground; the elements placed above should always stand out more. We will only have a few seconds to catch the audience’s attention, so make it simple.

3. Descriptions

The description is another important element. It describes what the video is about to the viewers. It’s also what appears below the title in any search. You need to make sure that you write the most important information in the first two sentences. Then, you can add further information and possibly add a transcript of the video script, which is a great spot for keywords.

• Accurately describe the basic information about the video.
• Include relevant keywords that will make the video easy to find on Google.
• Add a transcript of the video script if possible below the first lines on the description. This action gives us the opportunity to place more relevant keywords for the target audience.

4. Calls-to-Action (CTA)

A CTA is a clear action that you want your audience to perform. YouTube lets you include a CTA in the form of a clickable button in videos. It’s highly recommended to always include one as you can entice viewers to complete the action that you’re looking for.

• Ask viewers to subscribe, like, comment or share the video through the CTA.
• Measure the CTA performance to learn if the video campaign is effective.
• A/B testing different CTAs can help you understand what your audience wants and learn where your leads are coming from.

5. Engagement

There are many reasons why you want to make people watch your videos all the way through to the end. The most obvious reason is that we need them to get to the call-to-action, but probably the most important reason is that the amount of time people spend watching directly affects the video’s YouTube rank. In other words, if thousands of viewers play the videos but leave after a few seconds, YouTube will consider that the video isn’t interesting enough and your place in the search engine rankings will drop drastically. What’s the secret to getting a high audience retention rate? Make a great video. Your videos need to be attractive, engaging and awesomely crafted!

6. Tags

The tags are the keywords that people will use to find your videos in a video search engine. Therefore, they should be consistent and accurate.

• Put the most important keywords first.
• Add long-tail keywords (Long-tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases that are specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they want or need like “do I need to go to college”). If you choose your tags wisely, your YouTube ranking results will yield in your favor for your videos.