The 5 Most Frequent YouTube SEO Mistakes That Seasoned Video Creators Make

Even when video creators think they have YouTube SEO down, most still make several mistakes that limit their visibility and cost them viewers. 

At Tasty Edits, a video editing company and YouTube channel management service, part of our job is to help creators optimize their existing content to win over both audiences and the YouTube algorithm. 

Here are five of the most frequent errors we see among seasoned YouTubers.  

Key Facts: 

• Many seasoned creators over-rely on tags. 
• Few refine their video descriptions with text formatting, structure or emojis. 
• Even fewer use functionalities like cards, end screens and quizzes. 
• Most creators now put keywords in titles and descriptions.
• But few creators know that keywords should also systematically appear in video scripts. 
• Optical character recognition (OCR) means that creators also need to SEO-optimize the text that appears in their videos. 

1. Overdoing tags

Let’s kick off with one of the most frequent video SEO mistakes we see even among seasoned creators. And that’s a tendency to over-rely on tags, including hashtags. 

Yes, tags are useful for situating your content and highlighting its main themes for the algorithm and viewers.

But we see many creators who overdo it. They’ll use too many tags — up to 20! — or too diverse ones, diluting the content’s focus. At the same time, these creators typically underutilize their video descriptions. 

To avoid this, it’s critical to be selective about tags. It’s generally far more important to focus on SEO-optimizing the video’s title and description.

This is important for another reason: Too many barely relevant tags on your video can also register as spam to the algorithm.

2. Slacking on video description formatting

A second common issue we see is that they’ll type out video descriptions and leave it at that. 

Many of them are actually pretty good in terms of content. They have the necessary keywords. They are descriptive and give a good summary of the content. They include links to external resources and affiliate products. Sometimes, they even have custom chapters. 

But they’re atrocious to read. 

Think single blocks of uniform text that could have come straight out of Dickens. 

Instead, creators need to make descriptions easy on the eye – and instantly accessible to readers. 

Think structuring text into clearly labelled sections (FAQs, affiliate links, related videos, etc.), using bullet points and numbered lists, adding bold, italicized or strikethrough text and adding the occasional emoji for visual variety. 

How is this connected to video SEO? A well-structured video description increases viewer retention and overall watch time. Someone who clicks on your video will get an immediate overview of what your content is about and what related resources there are. This makes them much more likely to stick around and offers them easier navigation through your content. 

3. Neglecting cards, end screens and quizzes

Another common YouTube SEO mistake even seasoned creators make is to neglect additional features that have been added to boost viewer engagement. These include cards, end screens and quizzes. 

Cards are interactive elements that appear in the top right corner of your video and expand if your viewer clicks on them. Strategically placed, they let you link resources, products and related content at the times in the video when you mention them. 

End screens appear after your main content. They allow you to curate a selection of videos your viewers should watch next and incentivize them to stay on your channel. Plus, YouTube now allows you to make end-screens interactive, letting you decide in the last seconds of your video where cards can appear. This makes it possible to actually shout out related videos by pointing to where the card will appear on the screen. 

Quizzes, finally, allow you to engage your audience during your video, especially if your content is didactic, like coding tutorials. They provide instant feedback to learners and can help you build a closer connection with viewers. 

4. Failing to place keywords in their video scripts

These days, most creators we work with at Tasty Edits know that using the right keywords in their video titles and descriptions is important for YouTube SEO. 

Few, however, know that it’s also critical to place them in their video scripts. 

Thanks to YouTube’s extensive natural language processing (NLP) capabilities — which also allow for the auto-generation of subtitles — what creators say in their videos is just as important as what they put in their descriptions and titles. 

YouTube generates automatic transcripts of videos and parses them for information on your content. As a result, well-placed keywords and keyphrases in your video script will help you appear in search results and recommendations. 

5. Not leveraging optical character recognition (OCR)

Finally, many experienced creators also fail to account for the fact that their visuals now also have an impact on video SEO. 

Recently, YouTube introduced optical character recognition (OCR), a type of computer vision technology that allows its algorithms to parse what appears on-screen during a video. 

This means that visually integrating keywords and keyphrases is now a notable strategic advantage for creators. It reinforces your content focus in a third dimension – beyond what you write in YouTube Studio and what you say out loud. 

Working with a variety of creators, our channel managers at Tasty Edits have seen significant impact in performance metrics by optimizing visuals alongside scripts and traditional video packaging (thumbnails, titles and descriptions).

The bottom line? YouTube video SEO has evolved considerably, and even seasoned creators frequently make critical mistakes. By harnessing new engagement features, streamlining descriptions and tags and integrating keywords into scripts and visuals, they can stay ahead of the curve.