How Much Does YouTube SEO Cost?

How much does YouTube SEO cost?

YouTube SEO costs vary depending on the service provided and proficiency of the person completing the work. Basic SEO is all you need, however, the more indepth your SEO strategy, the more likely your video will rank in search.

At the budget end, you can find cheap services for around £10 per video. The top SEO specalists however, charge around £150 per hour, and you can expect a full SEO strategy to take 2-3 hours per video, setting you back £450-500.

YouTube SEO

What is the benefit of YouTube SEO?

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and also the second most visited website in the world. A single video that ranks in search has the potential to generate serious amounts of revenue, channel growth and can even change the course of the authors life. For a business or brand with a good marketing strategy, videos will generate more traffic, leads and sales than most imagine.

What Affects the Cost of YouTube SEO?

There are a few considerations that affect the cost, they are:

  • The video frequency (do you post every day, once a week, once a month?)
  • The keywords you are targetting (a competitive keyword is harder to rank for and will take more time to get right)
  • What the CTA is in the video (if you are driving people away from YouTube, you will rank lower)
  • If you have any social campaigns directing traffic to the video (higher engagement is good for ranking YouTube videos)
  • How the specalist you have chosen charges (do they charge per video, hourly, monthly?)

You have full control over these factors when planning your video. Choose to implement SEO strategies BEFORE creating the video. This will give you the best results.

Who Needs Video SEO?

All YouTube videos need SEO. Especially if you are a small Youtuber or just starting out. Its common to find people thinking YouTube is over saturated and impossible to grow – they blame the algorithm for lack of views and subscribers. However, people are growing successful YouTube channels every day. There are 3 reasons why a channel may not be growing:

  • The content isn’t giving value (so no one wants to watch it – YouTube learns this quickly)
  • YouTube has not finished indexing your channel (only relevant for new channels)
  • No one knows the video exists (this is where SEO comes in)

You may find large channels do not bother doing any SEO. That is because they are popular and their subscribers watch their content regardless of its value. When a video gets that many views, it ranks in a different way (using social proof) but with the same results. This is commonly known as a trending or viral video. There is more than one way to rank a video but for most, the only way to actually achieve ranking, is to perform video SEO.

Budgeting for YouTube Search Engine Optimisation

If you are just starting out then you may not have a budget at all. You are able to do your own SEO and there are lots of free tools and advice to guide you. Experimenting with SEO is something I suggest you do when starting a YouTube channel, so you get to understand what is involved and how to plan it into your videos. Just remember, you might not get it right on every video, so you may need to keep going back to make adjustments every 3-4 days (it takes time for YouTube to re-position your video after a metadata change)

If you do have a budget then you have 2 options;

  • Outsource 
  • Learn it yourself using paid tools

Its likely that any video SEO specalist will use the same (or similar) tools that are available on the market. The only difference between you and them is experience, they have had time to hone the skill, but anyone can learn SEO to a competent degree, and probably faster than you think. People often imagine that SEO is this magic, technical, thing. But it’s actually quite simple: use the right keywords in the title, description and tags. When you know how to do this, you will start seeing results.

What’s Included in Video SEO Services?

  • Keyword Research – This is the most critical bit, finding keywords (or phrases) that people are searching for, related to your video.
  • Video Titles – Using the main keywords construct a title that sparks curiosity or makes the the user click
  • Thumbnail Image – Create an image that grabs viewers attention to make them click on the video
  • Video Description – Optimising the description, using the main keywords to tell viewers and the algorithm what the video is about
  • Tags – This is actually considered redundant by YouTube now, but something many still do. As a ‘best practice’ adding your keywords as tags improve the videos ranking. Most SEO specalists would still do this incase YouTube change their approach again.

Get Started with YouTube SEO

YouTube SEO will help you reach more people and grow your channel. If you have the strategy in place it will also increase your leads and sales in your business.

If you would like to fast-track your video SEO knowledge email [email protected]