1. Keyword Research

If you know anything about SEO, you know how important it is to utilize keywords and phrases in your writing. The same applies to your video descriptions. You want your descriptions to utilize the same language as your audience when they do when they’re looking for videos.

To do this, make sure you’re researching popular keywords relevant to your content so that you can work them into your video descriptions. Finding and deploying these words will tell Google and YouTube that your videos are the ones people are looking for when they’re searching for similar keywords, making your content more likely to show up in these searches. There are a lot of resources online you can use for keyword research, but the Ahrefs keyword generator tool is one of our favorites.

It’s not enough to just research relevant keywords for your descriptions - you also need to know how to use those keywords once you find them. You want to utilize keywords wherever you can, but you also want to avoid keyword stuffing when writing your video descriptions. To successfully write an SEO-optimized video description, aim to use your keywords sparingly and write all your text in complete, informative sentences that utilize those keywords practically. 

In other words, don’t just shove a bunch of keywords into your description box and call it a day. Make sure you’re actually writing a well-thought-out description

2. Sync Your Description With Your Title

Obviously, you want your video description to make sense with what the video is about, but that should extend to the video title as well. Try to use the same language and keywords in the description you use in your title to clarify what the content is about.

3. Put The Good Stuff Up Top

You probably remember from your middle school English classes that you want to hook your readers early on in your writing to make sure they’re interested in where the rest of your writing goes. That philosophy applies to your YouTube video descriptions too - you want to put the information that will be most relevant and compelling to your audience on top so that you make sure it stands out and encourages your audience to keep reading.

When you write a YouTube video description, only the first 200 to 300 characters will appear in the blurb below the video - the rest will be hidden until the viewer clicks the “show more” tab. You want to ensure that those first few characters are interesting enough to make them want to see the rest of what you wrote.

But while you want to make the first bits of your video description interesting, you also don’t want to clickbait anyone. Every bit of your description should be informative to what the video is about - just make sure that information is interesting enough to hook the reader.

4. Utilize Calls to Action

First and foremost, your YouTube video description should be a way to explain the contents of your video to viewers. But the description box is a big space, and there’s a lot of useful information you can put in it that can help grow your channel and brand, including calls to action.

Calls to action are statements that encourage your audience to take some kind of action. For a YouTube video description, a call to action might urge viewers to subscribe, watch some of your other videos, follow your social media channels, or anything that compels them to continue engaging with your content. You can also include links in your calls to action to your various pages so people know where to find your content and social media accounts.

5. Don’t Feel Like You Need To Hit The Character Limit

YouTube’s video description box can be a little misleading. It gives you up to 5,000 characters to fill out the description field, and upon seeing that, your first instinct might be to use all 5,000 characters. However, you’ll find out quickly that it’s harder to come up with 5,000 characters worth of original content for your description and find out down the road that it's not even worth the effort in the first place.

We don’t want to say that video descriptions aren’t important after writing about how important they are. However, the reality is that a large chunk of your viewers won’t read the descriptions at all, and most of the ones that do won’t read past the first couple of paragraphs. So rather than wasting your energy writing something people won’t read, try to keep your video descriptions concise and filled with only information relevant to the content. This will encourage people to actually read through the description and save you time not having to write out 5,000 characters.

6. Make Your Videos More Accessible

One crucial, final touch you can put on your video descriptions is to give them purpose beyond just informing the viewer of what the video is about. You can also use your description box to make it easier for users to navigate through your videos

You can write time stamps in your descriptions that link your viewers to moments in the video where you change topics or make a relevant point. Timestamps won’t make a ton of sense for shorter videos or videos focused on a singular topic, but for longer content, timestamps can be helpful additions to your description. They’ll help your viewers find the parts of your content they’re looking for without having to scrub or wait through your entire video.

In addition to timestamps, which can make your videos more accessible, you can add external links to your descriptions to make your channel and brand more accessible. Links to your channel page, social media pages, and website (if you have one) will help interested audience members find your content beyond what makes it to your YouTube channel.

We hope that one thing you take away from this post is that there’s a lot that goes into writing a YouTube description - but none of it is particularly demanding. There isn’t any super secret technique or highly advanced process you need to learn and master. It’s just about understanding what you can do with the description box and giving it the information people are looking for.

Book a consultation with NAV Creative to learn more about how we can help grow your business.