Channel Description Box

The YouTube description box might be the most undervalued player on your video marketing team. Many brands, vloggers, business channels, and other less-formally produced channels will skip the description box as unnecessary or simply not worth the energy… so wrong!

Truth is, the description box is a crucial player in your YouTube marketing strategy because its contents (along with your titles, tags, and captions) help YouTube to determine if and where your videos rank on search or as related videos.

The description box is shown in the following screenshot.

Your channel description is shown on the above tab and gives viewers a short overview of what they can expect from your channel. It also shows up when users mouse over your channel icon on a watch page. You can include up to one thousand characters and add links too.

On the upload page, you’ll have your first opportunity to add a description box to a new video. You can always add this later but ideally, your description should be written before the video is made public.

The first 5 lines are essential for two reasons. They are −

• The first two lines of the description box are displayed next to your video in search and when posted on social media.

• The first 5 lines of the description are included beneath your video but above the “read more” tab.

Always include a link to your website in the first two lines. Beyond that, the description box should be an index to related content, but not a dump for every web link where you’ve ever had an affiliate account with.

Use all of those 1000 characters you are allowed! Write 100- 200 words in addition to your first 5 lines and your social media & related links. That will easily bring your word count up to 300 and show Google that you have a meaty product.

Descriptions should be optimized for search so be sure to place your main keywords in the description box at 1-2% saturation. You can also use related keywords in the description to try and rank for more terms.