The description box attached to a video on YouTube tells viewers what they will be watching. On YouTube and other video-exclusive websites, viewers will often get lured in by a title and then read the accompanying description before deciding whether or not to watch the video. In today’s fast-paced world where attention spans are constantly shrinking, a video viewer may check just the first couple of lines of description before making a decision to view or not to view. So it’s very important to make your video’s description appealing that attract your potential viewers.
Why Is It Important?
If you want to grow your youtube channel or want to get more views on your videos you should always take time to create a quality description to add to each video. You make the experience better for your prospective viewer. In a side-by-side, head-to-head contest, identical videos with matching titles and thumbnails will see the video with a thorough description outperform its twin that lacks a revealing description. To keep your viewers and potential viewers happy, a video description is important.
How Long Is Long Enough?
You need to spend enough time, so your description tells potential viewers what they are getting in the video. You also need to add contact details and links to your web properties. Include links to your social media profiles as well. All in all, you should probably use at least 250 to 300 words in your video description. Again, if you have the time and energy, you should use the maximum number of characters available. This applies to other video sharing sites as well. Not only do you give the site in question more information and more opportunity to rank your video for multiple search terms, but you give Google more data as well. This means that simply adding a thorough, lengthy, and relevant description can boost your video SEO, and also your rank for your targeted keywords in internet search engines.
Use specific keywords
Choose 1-2 keywords in your video description that describe your content to maximize search traffic. Add them in your video’s description and title as well to increase its chances of ranking in front of potential viewers.
The same applies to your channel description. YouTube’s algorithm places a lot of importance on the keywords in the About page of your channel. Use them wisely.
Not sure what keywords to use for a particular video? Read our brief guide about it.
You could also find relevant keywords for your video. Simply type in the words that best describe what your channel or video is about and Google will suggest the closest related keywords.
Write like a human
Know your Subscriber! Use language that your audience will understand and relate to. Incorporate keywords in a natural way, not as a list.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be a wordsmith to write a great YouTube description. There are lots of writing resources to help you polish your description.
Add a Subscribe Link
Make sure to include a subscribe link to your channel somewhere near the top of your video’s description. Your audience could be on the edge of subscribing to your channel while watching your content, and they just need a little bit of push and seeing a subscribe call to action in your video description may persuade them to do just that.
Add Hashtags
If you want to include hashtags in your video above your title, you are required to add those hashtags in your video description. You can use three keywords maximum, and they will appear as blue words above your videos.
YouTube hashtags make it easier for your viewers to seek out related videos. YouTube allows you to add a maximum of 15 hashtags in the description. The first three hashtags you’ve entered will be displayed above the video’s title.
Include a call to action at the end
Always ensure to include a call to action to whatever you want your new audience to do. Do you want them to subscribe? Turn on notifications? Share your content? Or maybe sign up to receive newsletters? Whatever you want them to do, ask them to do it! Word it in a way they won’t be able to resist and put the CTA at the end of your channel description.
Use timestamps
Our attention spans are now shorter than ever. Some people are looking things up with a limited amount of time to learn it, so help them out with timestamps. Adding timestamps to your descriptions make it easy for your audience to navigate to specific points quickly.
Timestamps are especially useful when it comes to long videos, like multi-part tutorials or music albums, etc.
Links to Social Media Channels
Since YouTube most often is not your only social media platform to contact your audience you should also add links to other social profiles: i.e. your other social media channels or your website.
Use http:// or https://
Your video description is one of the few places where YouTube allows you to include links. Always make sure to add “HTTP://” to all URLs, as it’ll make them clickable.
Use Template
If you are willing to make more than a few videos, you might consider designing a default template for this purpose. This will help make sure you don’t forget anything, and always save much of your time
Here is an example of a YouTube description template.
Line 1: Description’s Intro
Line 2-3: 1st CTA (Call to action)
_________________________
Helpful text (Brief video summary, transcript, etc.)
Timestamps (If applicable)
Keywords
Few Hashtags
Relevant links
Affiliate links (If applicable)
2nd CTA
_________________________
Social media profile list with links
Website link
Contact information
________________________
Credits for other people’s work
Conclusion
The description of your video should never be an afterthought. Writing your YouTube description should be something you carefully entwine together. This way you end up with the right balance of your audience interest, properly used hashtags, keywords, and other SEO boosters.
