How to do a YouTube SEO Audit for improved organic search visibility (step-by-step guide)

Forget the soul-crushing disappointment of unseen videos. In this blog post, I’ll share a YouTube SEO audit step-by-step guide, with which you will be able to shine a light on the hidden factors holding your channel back.

Ditch the band-aid approach. We will go beyond tweaking titles and tags. Think of it as a full-body scan, uncovering:

• Channel roadblocks: Identify technical issues hindering visibility.
• Audience blind spots: Understand what truly resonates with your viewers.
• Competitor insights: Steal winning strategies to outrank your rivals.
• Content gaps: Discover untapped opportunities to attract new audiences.

The result? A data-driven roadmap to transform your channel into a beacon of engagement and growth.

What is a YouTube SEO Audit?

Understanding how to do a YouTube SEO audit is vital for anyone aiming to enhance their channel’s performance, or any SEO professional, looking to incorporate video into their organic growth strategy. Essentially, the audit is a comprehensive review process where you scrutinise various aspects of your YouTube channel, videos, visuals, and written elements to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats related to your search visibility strategy.

During this audit, you’ll review several key areas:

• Channel Overview: You’ll start by examining your channel’s overall health. This includes looking at subscriber count, total views, and engagement metrics. It’s like taking your channel’s pulse to get an initial sense of how well it’s performing.
• Competitor Benchmarking: By comparing your channel to competitors, you’ll uncover insights on what they’re doing well and areas where you could improve. This can help you identify trends and content gaps in your niche.
• Content Analysis: Here, you analyze the quality of your content. Are your videos providing value to your audience? Are they optimized for both search engines and real viewers? You’ll look at titles, descriptions, tags, and the actual video content to ensure they’re all working together seamlessly.
• Audience Engagement: Understanding who watches your videos and how they interact with your content is crucial. You’ll review comments, likes, shares, and view duration to gauge what’s resonating with your audience—and what’s not.

Through each of these steps, you’re not just collecting data; you’re gathering actionable insights that will drive your YouTube channel forward.

Why is a YouTube SEO Audit Important?

Do a YouTube audit to understand what’s holding you back, or what’s helping your competitors thrive. Essentially, learn what you need to do to grow faster.

• Uncover hidden growth opportunities by analyzing video quality, engagement, and technical SEO.
• Decode audience behavior: Learn what keeps viewers hooked (and what makes them click away).
• Outsmart competitors: See their winning strategies and refine your content to outperform.
• Fix technical roadblocks: Identify issues like weak titles, tags, and descriptions that hurt visibility.
• Make data-driven decisions: Craft content aligned with audience preferences and YouTube best practices.

Regular audits will lead to strategic growth. YouTube SEO audits are an investment in the success of this channel.

Step 0: Before you begin the YouTube SEO audit: Establish Your Goals

Before starting your YouTube SEO audit, it’s crucial to set clear, measurable goals. Without establishing what success looks like for your channel, it would be difficult to understand which aspects to highlight throughout the analysis.

First, identify what you’re aiming to achieve with your YouTube channel. Goals can range from the tangible like increasing subscriber count, boosting video views, to improving user engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares. You could also set more intangible goals like ensuring that each blog post on your website also has a YouTube video or vice-versa, or attracting leads via YouTube. Below is a table with more examples for different YouTube channel goals you might set for yourself.

Tangible YouTube channel and video goals	Increase subscriber count
	Increase video views (set a monthly or quarterly target)
	Increase engagement (measured in likes, comments, or shares)
	Increase social comment likes (measured in likes and replies of the comments you leave on other channel’s videos)
	Increase watch time
	Increasing new or returning viewers
Intangible YouTube channel and video goals	Improve brand awareness on YouTube (can be broken down into a combination of tangible goals like increased engagement, video views, and comment likes)
	Improve brand omnipresence (can be broken down in measuring the reusability of your content assets, like making sure each blog post has an associated YouTube video, and posts on company socials, and vice versa)
	Improve lead generation from YouTube (while this is measurable, it’s less so when trying to determine the role YouTube played in converting an audience member to a lead but some tactics include – adding a form to determine touchpoints and last touchpoint when onboarding potential customers, and implementing tracking on YouTube videos, hosted on your website)
	Improve video reach (can be comprised of several goals like better video quality, better watch time, engagement, but also video features on other websites, and changes in views’ traffic source)

Once you’ve pinpointed your objectives, break them down into actionable targets.

For example, if your goal is to grow your subscriber base by 20% in the next six months, what steps will you take to get there? This might include optimizing your video titles and descriptions, improving the quality of your videos, or enhancing your engagement with viewers (see my checklist for YouTube SEO for kickstarting this process). Quantifying your goals not only makes them more realistic but also enables you to track your progress effectively.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are your best friend when it comes to measuring success. Here are a few you might consider:

• Subscriber Growth Rate: How quickly is your channel gaining new subscribers?
• Average View Duration: Are viewers watching your videos all the way through?
• Engagement Rate: How often are viewers liking, commenting, or sharing your videos?

Setting goals and identifying KPIs are essential steps in a YouTube SEO audit. They not only guide your strategy and efforts but also provide a benchmark to measure your channel’s growth. Keep your goals specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), especially important if you have intangible goals is to identify the metrics that would go into the achievement of these objectives.

This approach ensures your audit aligns with your channel’s vision and paves the way for strategic growth.

Step 1: Identify your competitor channels and benchmark performance against theirs

Identify the main channels, with which you compete for views, but also the ones with which you compete for potential customers (e.g. other affiliate businesses, e-commerce businesses, or other service providers).

Understand that audience time and attention is limited, and is unlikely (although possible in some niches, like commentary, news, or drama) for audience members to watch multiple videos with the same argument or premise from different creators. Therefore, you must ensure that you not only understand who you’re competing against, but also understand their competitive advantages and how you might be able to stand out (how to beat them).

Identify your business competitors with YouTube channels

Start by doing a SERP analysis, using a tool like DataforSEO, for your main keywords, or use the SERP analysis feature of Semrush. The goal here is to identify your main competitors that you’re up against from a business standpoint – meaning you compete with them not only for views or clicks but also for customers. Then using YouTube’s search function, or vidIQ, find which one of these competitors have or don’t have a YouTube channel or presence.

Identify other key organic competitors, with whom you compete on YouTube for visibility

Besides the business competitors, there will inevitably be channels on YouTube, with whom you will be competing in terms of views and watch time, even though these might not be defined as competitors in the business sense of the word (i.e. you’re not directly up against them in any monetary aspect, besides YouTube AdSense).

You can identify these competitors by using the Semrush’s SERP features trend for featured videos, or Semrush’s Keyword Magic tool for a given keyword, with the advanced filters for SERP features, enabled for video, video carousel, and featured video, as shown in the image below, though this analysis is a lot more manual in nature.

You can also use dataforSEO‘s bulk Google SERP analysis or YouTube analysis APIs to get the competitors for your selected keywords in seconds, either in Google Sheets, or in Python.

Of course, you can also just manually perform this analysis for a limited keyword list using YouTube Search bar.

Benchmark your performance against competitors based on an omnipresence 360-degree assessment

Once you have your business and search competitors list, you can move onto benchmarking. I suggest performing a 360-degree assessment, where you:

• benchmark yourself against each competitor’s social portfolio (including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube), mapped also as a % of total web traffic, whenever relevant

• Benchmark your YouTube channel performance against theirs, taking note of aspects of importance, based on the KPIs you set at the start of the audit. Noting things like:
  • Subscriber count
  • # of videos
  • Posting frequency
  • Average number of views per video
  • Average number of likes per video
  • Average number of comments per video
  • List of highest performing videos on their channel

All of this information (and more) is available via vidIQ.

Write a benchmark analysis with key observations

In this step, its important to identify and highlight the answers to the following questions:

• Who are your competitors?
• Which one of the business competitors are also investing in video? How many of them are actively pursuing both TikTok and YouTube? To what extent are they successful with their current strategies?
• Are any of your business competitors actively pursuing other social media channels, and to what degree has this worked in generating traffic to their websites?
• Are there any relationships that you can identify in terms of social media presence and YouTube channel success that are notable? E.g. are there any competitors that are dominating across the board, or such that are only dominating on YouTube and lacking in other areas.
• What notable insights can you gather about the relationships between the frequency of content posted on competitor channels, and its impact on quality, and metrics like engagement – views, likes, and comments?

There are also additional checks you are recommended to do, in order to deep-dive into channel performance, and truely understand the competitor landscape for your niche. Explore and analyse aspects like:

• How are competitors utilizing the community tab?
• How are competitors utilizing shorts?
• How are competitors utilizing playlists?
• Which competitors have a consistent thumbnail structure, and does this have a notable impact on views?
• Which competitors utilise key moments, and does this have a notable impact on views?
• Which competitors utilise content repurposing methods between their websites and their youtube channels?
• Which competitors have the best descriptions (for channels and videos)?
• Are competitors with presence on YouTube and TikTok building content synergies between long- and short-form content, and repurposing content?

Step 2: Assess Your Own YouTube Channel’s Health

Now that you have deep-dived into the competitive landscape, it’s time to thoroughly assess your own channel performance. In this step, you will assess your channel’s performance based on the use of features, and its performance performance, or otherwise – qualitative aspects of performance, and aspects you control

But before doing that, a quick word on how the YouTube algorithm works.

Understand how the YouTube algorithm works, and what you control

YouTube describes its algorithm as a “sophisticated real-time feedback loop that matches each viewer to the videos they’re most likely to watch.” How does it do that? 

For each video, the algorithm evaluates

• Title
• Thumbnails
• Descriptions
• Viewer interaction (like, dislike, comments)
• What they watch
• What they don’t watch
• How much time they spend watching
• ‘Not interested’ feedback

The algorithm’s goal is to show videos viewers want to watch. It also tries to get viewers to keep watching more of what they like (this is called audience retention). So, your goal is to get the algorithm to like your video by getting your audience to like your video—because YouTube picks up on that and shows it to more people, and watch it right through to the end. 

Ranking input factors
You Control	Your Audience Controls
Title Thumbnails Descriptions Video Tags Annotations Info Cards Channel authority # of playlists that feature the video	Viewer interactions (like, dislike, comments, subscribe) What they watch What they don’t watch How much time they spend watching (watch time) How quickly they click off the video (bounce rate) ‘Not interested’ feedback # of playlists that feature the video

Assess the qualitative aspects of your YouTube channel performance

Okay, so now that we know what’s in our control, we can move on to assessing how well we are setting our videos, and our overall channel for success. I won’t go into too much detail here, as I have a seperate blog post on optimizing YouTube videos and your YouTube channel, which includes a free checklist.

Here are the aspects you should review as part of your YouTube audit, and why they are important:

Aspect of video or channel	Why it’s important
Video titles	Titles carry significance for click-through-rates. Inserting keywords or keyword variations, or making the titles as descriptive or as enticing to click on as possible is a winning strategy. Avoid clickbait, as this can lead to user dissatisfaction. Incorporate intent matching, whenever possible.
Video thumbnails	Video thumbnails (especially custom ones) can help boost click-through-rates, as they are the largest visual element in search results. Best practices to consider: keep it relevant to the video, design for mobile-first, A/B test variations, aim for brand-relevant, consistent look and feel.
Video Descriptions	The main goal of the description is to get visitors to watch more of your video content and become your subscribers and customers. But YouTube also crawls your descriptions and uses that information to rank your video in search results. Writing video descriptions with keywords helps viewers to find your videos easily. This is also the place, where you can add links to other relevant videos, or external content. Most importantly, each description should have chapters indicated.
End Screens	End screens display similar information as cards, but as you may have guessed, they don’t display until a video is over, and are a bit more visually detailed in nature. While end screens can only be added to the last 20 seconds of a video, these useful graphics can be used to link out to everything from a video, website URL, YouTube channel, video playlist (such as another video in a series), or a subscribe prompt.
Info Cards	Cards are described by the Creator Academy as “preformatted notifications that appear on desktop and mobile which you can set up to promote your brand and other videos on your channel“, aimed at enhancing the viewer experience. Info cards can feature a video, playlist, channel, or link. A couple of the metrics that should be at the forefront of video engagement reporting are the info card clicks, as these when used for website promotion are what would be categorized as referral traffic.
Video Channel Meta Elements	The video channel landing page meta elements include: the channel description, the channel thumbnail, the profile picture, the YouTube URL, and additional linked assets. Ideally, these all should convey an organized, unified brand, and should be professional and insightful regarding the content of the channel, and should link to any brand websites or other important assets.
Playlists	Playlists are a great way to replicate topic clusters and internal links by bundling relevant content together. They help indicating topic authority and can help boost views and video discovery of associated videos.

Assess your utilisation of additional YouTube channel enhancement features

YouTube offers additional features that can help boost your performance, and of course, it’s recommended that you utilise all, to the degree that they align with your goals and brand. And, the good things is – with a skillful content consultant by your side, there’s always a way to utilize all of them to promote growth.

Like above, I won’t go into that much detail into each as this is covered by the YouTube SEO guide, but here’s a summary of the things you audit that might be holding your video and channel performance, and audience engagement back

Aspect of video or channel	Why it’s important
Community tab	Engaging your community through posts in the community tab is a fantastic way to share plans, news, get feedback, and so much more! Consider this a social function that is fully within your control, it’s proactive and visual.
In-video CTA overlay assets	CTAs should be placed in creative, varied, and strategic ways, with consistent reporting on performance of each placement. Youtube watch time studies have demonstrated that engagement significantly drops off between two and three minutes. This means you should not place your CTA at the end, and that is particularly true for longer videos.
Comment likes and superlikes (hearts)	Regularly engaging in the comments section by using the likes and superlikes might not directly impact rankings, but can have the power of converting non-subscribers to subscribers (you can non-subscribers, who commented in YouTube Studio), and indicating your commitment to your audience.
Comment replies	Same for comment replies – these don’t directly impact ranking or channel performance but can certainly boost video engagement (i.e. entice future commenters, spark discussions) and indicate your commitment to growing not only your channel and revenue but also your community on YouTube.
Polls	Created through the YouTube Community tab, polls are an easy way to gain knowledge and use it to your advantage. A YouTube poll can help creators bridge the gap between brands and customers without using an external page or survey. Poll feature is reserved for channels with certain growth milestones reached. Polls can be great for: promoting videos, providing insights into publishing schedule or upcoming videos, voting on new product developments or designs, and overall engagement of your subscribers.
Shorts (short-form videos)	Shorts are, and will continue to be a popular format. No two ways about that. There are multiple ways to utilise them for growth, in all aspects of YouTube growth, so find what works for you. Definitely don’t neglect them as a content format altogether!

Step 3: Understand Your Audience

At this stage of your YouTube SEO audit, you will know who your competitors are and how your perform against them, and you will have a pretty good understanding of what you can be doing to further amplify your reach on the platform. One critical element of the YouTube audit is understanding the latter part of the ranking factors table from before – the part of what your audience controls.

In the following section, we’ll cover how to analyse YouTube stats, and how to understand your audience’s preferences a bit better.

Analyze how your audience has responded to your content so far

You won’t be doing a YouTube SEO audit, unelss you have at least several videos under your belt. Meaning, you have also had the possibility of some interaction with your audience. To analyze interactions, you can use YouTube’s connector and move the data to an interactive Looker Studio dashboard, or you can just do an analysis in YouTube Creator Analytics. Look for trends in:

• Viewer engagement – videos with outstanding numbers in views, likes, comments, and shares.
• Subscriber growth – videos that have significantly impacted subscriber growth.
• Watch time – videos, that your audience has resonated with
• Like versus dislike ratio – highlighting videos that your audience did not resonate with
• Audience retention – how many of the viewers are watching until the end on average, and what percentage are there after 0:30. High retention rates are a strong signal to YouTube’s algorithm that your content is engaging, boosting your visibility on the platform.

These metrics offer a clear snapshot of your channel’s overall health and audience interest levels. A healthy channel shows consistent growth in these areas, signalling that your content is resonating with viewers.

If you find that you have several or even tens of successful videos, try to identify commonalities between them:

• have you used a consistent title structure?
• Do you have any commonalities between their descriptions?
• Do they all have a consistent thumbnail (with person? with text? colourful? all of the above?)?
• Do they have an exceptionally high CTR? This can be a combination of the thumbnail and title factors playing together.
• Have you done something different in those videos that you haven’t in others? Many video aspects can influence these metrics, but video and audio quality, information quality, delivery style, and editing style are amongst the most common reasons why someone would click away, so take note of these, whenever you’re auditing the content.

Essentially, look at the feedback loop your content creates. Pay attention to the videos that gain the most views, likes, and shares. Analyzing this feedback loop will help you identify content themes and formats that perform well, guiding your future content creation efforts.

Also evaluate the quality and relevance of your content. Ask yourself if your videos are catering to your intended audience and if they align with current trends within your niche. High-quality, relevant content is more likely to be shared and recommended by YouTube, boosting your SEO. See how many of your videos are getting traffic from YouTube search, and YouTube recommendations – meaning, they are indexed, ranking competitively, and are promoted by YouTube.

Identify key trends in audience demographics and compare against your ideal user, loyal customer, or website visitor profiles

Once you’ve assessed your channel’s health in step one, it’s time to dive deeper into understanding your audience. Knowing who watches your videos, their interests, and what they’re looking for on YouTube is critical for tailoring your content and SEO strategies effectively.

Start by analyzing your audience demographics available in YouTube Analytics. Look for age ranges, geographical locations, and viewing devices. This information paints a clearer picture of who your audience is and how they consume your content. It’s crucial to align your content with the preferences and behaviors of your audience to increase engagement and watch time.

Also, go a step deeper by getting insights on subtitles use, other formats of content that your subscribers watch (shorts, versus long form, versus live, etc.), and other channels your audience watches, as this can paint a clear picture of what they like and can influence your content strategy.

Step 4: Create a Video Content Strategy, based on your YouTube SEO audit insights

After gaining a deep understanding of your audience, it’s time to channel this insight into optimizing your content strategy for better SEO performance.

You now should have enough information not only on what your audience likes, but also:

• aspects of video and channel enhancement
• potential avenues for experimentation with content and audience engagement
• what content performs well with your competitors’ audiences, which you can mirror in terms of format and/or topics, and improve upon

The next step is organising all of these insights into a content strategy, but not before conducting keyword research.

Your content strategy would likely involve several content format plans:

• ways to improve the visibility of exsiting videos (updating title descriptions, titles, thumbnails, promotion in new videos, addition in playlists, linking to the videos from external sources)
• new content formats introduced – Shorts, Lives, Podcasts, Long-form, etc
• new videos, based on competitors’ performance
• new videos, based on keywords with video intent
• new videos, based on audience feedback and preferences
• new videos, based on brand goals and KPIs
• new content, being repurposed from web content

Building a content strategy isn’t a one-off task, and it certainly might not be completed at the same time as a YouTube SEO audit. It’s an ongoing process that requires regularly reviewing your channel’s performance, understanding changes in viewer behavior, and adapting accordingly. Your audit, however is the first step in organising your next steps and action items, many of which would likely involve creating new content.

Step 5: Create a prioritised list of recommendations and enforce systems for best practices

As a traditional SEO audit, the YouTube SEO audit will likely grow in size, and scope throughout. Let’s discuss some strategies on making sure your insights don’t get unnoticed.

Create a to do list with prioritised recommendations

While we as SEO consultants like to believe someone will read a 30 (or 100) page audit, others might just want a spreadsheet with action items and a bit of context. Make sure you provide a prioritised list of recommendations, based on each of the audit sections from above. This can help you get some of your recommendations implemented, and work with content creators (or relevant teams) to get your suggestions accrosss.

Provide tips for future video uploads

Be sure to include a list of suggestions on video optimization that can be implemented prior to future video uploads. This could include things like guidance on:

• video file titling and file enhancement
• video quality, audio, and filming
• video tags and how to use them
• video subtitles
• thumbnail design best practices per the audit

Each of these optimization strategies plays a vital role in enhancing your video’s visibility and engagement on YouTube.

Suggest A/B tests

Suggest a list of A/B tests that are based on the YouTube audit, that can yield significant improvements. Experiment with different thumbnails, titles, and descriptions to see what resonates most with the target audience.Even small tweaks can lead to big increases in viewer engagement and channel growth.

Share guidance on systems for boosting channel performance

Remember, growth is an ongoing process. An an audit once done would not help you grow forever. Regularly review your video analytics to identify what works and where there’s room for improvement. Engage with your community’s feedback and adapt your strategy to maintain alignment with audience preferences and viewing behaviors.

This step is also crucial to track the impact of the recommendations you’ve made after they’ve been implemented. Use YouTube Analytics and other third-party tools as needed, to map out and annotate key events to performance improvements.

Growth is also based on systems – be sure to share feedback on identified best practices that separate the winners in the category from the under-performers. Work together with the channel owner to implement systems in aspects like writing titles, creating thumbnails, writing video descriptions, promoting videos, adding videos into playlists, creating videos, and so on. Ideally create calendars and timeframes for when and how each of these key aspects of YouTube growth should happen.

Key Takeaways on doing a YouTube audit

• Conducting a YouTube SEO audit is essential for enhancing channel performance, examining areas like content quality, audience engagement, competitor benchmarking, and technical video set-up to optimize for YouTube’s search algorithms and viewer preferences.
• Understanding your audience is critical, with YouTube Analytics, and other third-party tools like vidIQ, offering insights into demographics, viewing behaviours, and content preferences, enabling content creators to tailor their videos more effectively to audience needs.
• The goal of the YouTube SEO audit is not only to inform about bad practices, but also to identify opportunistic areas for growth, be it new content formats or topics, better channel organization, or more compelling visual branding and elements
• Video optimization has been, and continues to be an important aspect of discoverability on YouTube, so don’t underestimate the impact of titles, descriptions, tags, engagement, thumbnail design, and video quality to make content more discoverable and appealing to viewers, thereby enhancing SEO performance.
• Analyzing and tracking results through tools like YouTube Analytics and A/B testing allows for data-driven decisions, helping creators refine their strategies, improve content engagement, and foster channel growth based on viewer feedback and performance metrics.

Bottom line?

In a time, where video is becoming ever-more important for search visibility and user engagement, sleeping on your video SEO is a mistake. Doing a YouTube SEO audit is a strategic move toward unlocking your content’s potential.

The key to a successful YouTube presence lies in understanding your audience and delivering content that resonates, as simple as that might sound. With the insights gained from a comprehensive audit, you’re well-equipped to refine your strategy, captivate your viewers, and climb the ranks in YouTube’s search results.

Frequently Asked Questions on YouTube SEO audits