YouTube SEO For Lawyers

Optimizing videos on YouTube is a hidden treasure for law firms. YouTube is the second most used search engine, just behind Google. The content is highly engaging. Over 1 billion hours of video are consumed every day on YouTube. This is more than NetFlix and Facebook video combined!

So, now that you’re convinced and ready to tackle marketing your law firm with YouTube let’s jump into the nitty-gritty and learn what optimizations exist to help your videos gain exposure.

What Makes a Great Video?

If you’re getting into video marketing, your priority should be to create a great video. The video quality does carry over to the long-term ranking potential.

Authenticity

Whomever your target clients are, speak to them on that level. If your target audience is a business professional, talk to that. On the other hand, if you’re a personal injury attorney, be sure to substitute the legal jargon for layman’s terms.

Above all, be authentic. It is always best when you connect with your audience on a genuine level. A non-authentic video will quickly be discovered as so and exited out.

Authenticity will increase your watch-to-lead conversion rate and increase your long-term ranking.

Audio Quality

Your video’s audio doesn’t need to use a professional sound studio. You don’t need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars retouching all of the audio points. 

What you do need to do is make sure that your audio is neither too loud nor too quiet. If you have any video or audio software, it should have an audio display that will show you the decibel level of your audio.

Keep your audio around -6db. This is an excellent general rule of thumb for YouTube videos.

Stay on point

Get to the point and stay on point. Make sure that you explain your topic thoroughly and make sure that you’re not beating the issue to death.

There is a fine line between too much and not enough. Find that point, wrap up your video, and you’ll be doing better than most publishers out there.

These three points are all about creating a quality video. This is purposefully placed first in this section about optimizing your videos on YouTube. It’s because a quality video will increase your engagements, watch time, and shares.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the more technical optimizations.

Video Titles

The title is what will show up as the clickable link on YouTube’s search results. It will also be what is shown if the video is displayed on a search engine.

Your title tag can be up to 100 characters long. The downside is that it will be truncated. A truncated title tag will usually receive a low click-through rate. The ideal length for your video’s title is 40 to 60 characters. A more precise target is 47 to 48 characters.

It would help if you had an idea of a specific phrase for which you want your video to rank. Naturally, add that phrase to your title. Don’t just keyword stuff. You want to add the top phrase while confirming to the viewer that your video is a proper match for their search.

Video Description

Your video’s description is displayed under the title on the video’s page. When creating your description, keep in mind that only the first 100 characters will be visible.

Similar to your title, you should include your top phrases and keywords naturally in the description. If your video is several minutes long or longer, consider adding links to specific times in your video along with a title for that section.

Video Length

How long your video should be is yet another debatable topic by SEOs. I’m a subscriber to YouTube videos being longer. Now, I don’t believe that videos should be unnecessarily long. 

Now, a caveat that I must mention is that correlation does not imply causation. The stats that I will state are just correlations.

Video Likes and Dislikes

Liking and disliking a video does not act like how upvotes work on some websites. That is to say, likes do not increase your rank, and dislikes decrease your chances of top ranking. What is crucial is the interactions. Both likes and dislikes are equal interactions.

Videos that are 16 minutes in length or greater get more likes, and videos that are 2 minutes in length or less receive the lowest amount of likes.

This stat most likely speaks more to giving a thorough answer or explanation.

Watch Time

Cumulative watch time is a top metric in comparison to competitive videos. So, watch time is like getting links back to your website. The more people who watch a greater amount of your video will naturally increase your video’s rank.

Stats To Keep In Mind

On average, videos that are 4:26 get the most views but longer videos get more likes. Remember that the likes are interactions and will help your ranking. In general, longer videos will outperform shorter videos by 450%.

The top-ranked videos are, on average, 11:44 in length. This also gives greater weight to the stat that videos that are longer than 10 minutes are overall optimal with most metrics.

Video Content

It’s common knowledge that Google can read and interpret textual content. Google also can read the content of both images and videos.

Because Google owns YouTube, it’s a pretty safe assumption that YouTube is pretty intelligent in determining what is being said in a video. If there is any doubt, think about YouTube’s ability to apply captions to a video automatically.

Since relevance is a strong factor for ranking textual content, it makes sense that your video should be relevant to the term you want to rank for. Thus, be sure that your video’s primary points are relevant to the topic or phrase that you’re trying to achieve top ranking.

Adding Tags

Tags help to rank your video appropriately. The ranking benefits of tags diminish after the first few weeks until other metrics, such as watch time and interactions, have a more significant effect.

The simplest way to determine the appropriate tags is to look at correlating tags amongst the top-ranked videos for your target search term. The only problem is that your competitors’ tags are not easily viewable.

Fear not. We have a simple no-cost solution for you to view what tags your competitors are using on their videos. These instructions will work if you’re using Chrome or Firefox.

1. Open the video as if you were to watch it.
2. Right-click in an empty area and select “view source.
3. While looking at the source code, hold the “ctr” key and tap the “f” key.
4. Search for the word “keywords” in the search box.
5. The tags are comma separated and contained in the video’s meta keyword tag. It will looks something like this:
   <meta name=”keywords” content=”tag 1, tag 2, tag 3”>

As an alternative, you can also install a Google Chrome extension called “YouTube Tags.” This extension will append the video’s tags at the end of the description.