Making a good explainer video is half the job. The other half is making sure people find it.
Search optimisation and social distribution are what separate a video that gets 200 views from one that keeps generating leads a year later. Here are six steps that make the difference.
1. Choose the Right Keywords
Keywords are how people describe what they’re looking for. To surface in results, your video’s title, description, and tags need to use the same language your audience does.
How to find them:
- Think like your audience. What would they actually type into Google or YouTube? Use plain language, not your internal product vocabulary.
- Use research tools. Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and SEMrush will show you volume and variations you wouldn’t guess.
- Check the competition. Look at what similar videos rank for. It tells you which phrasings are already working in your category.
Where to use them:
- Title. Lead with the primary keyword, and make the title describe the video honestly.
- Description. Explain what the video covers and work secondary keywords in naturally. Forced repetition reads badly to humans and no longer helps with ranking.
- Tags. Tag the key terms so platforms can categorise the video correctly.
2. Design a Strong Thumbnail
The thumbnail is the first thing anyone sees — in search results, in a feed, in a suggested sidebar. It decides whether the video gets a click at all.
What works:
- Strong colour. Bright, high-contrast frames pull the eye better than dark or muted ones.
- Simple composition. One clear subject. A thumbnail crowded with elements reads as noise at feed size.
- Minimal text. A few large words, legible on a phone screen. Anything longer won’t be read.
- Faces. Human faces, especially expressive ones, outperform abstract imagery consistently.
A good thumbnail lifts click-through rate, and click-through rate feeds directly back into how the platform ranks you.
3. Write an Engaging Title
The title works for two audiences at once: the search algorithm and the person deciding whether to watch.
How to write one:
- Be specific. The title should tell someone exactly what they’ll get.
- Lead with the keyword. Front-loading the main term helps in results and in truncated displays.
- Keep it under 60 characters. Longer titles get cut off in search results, and the cut-off part is usually your differentiator.
- Make it worth clicking. “How to Create an Explainer Video in 5 Steps” beats “Explainer Video Tutorial” because it promises a specific outcome.
4. Add Captions and Transcripts
Captions and transcripts serve accessibility and search at the same time.
Search engines can’t watch a video. They can read a transcript. Providing one gives Google and YouTube actual text to index, which is often the difference between ranking for a topic and being invisible on it.
Why they matter:
- Search visibility. A transcript is indexable content covering every term the video mentions.
- Wider reach. Most social video is watched muted. Captions make the video work in that context instead of being scrolled past.
- Higher engagement. Captioned videos hold viewers longer, particularly on mobile.
5. Distribute Properly on Social
Once the video is search-ready, get it in front of people. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X all work — differently.
What to get right:
- Post when your audience is there. Timing changes reach substantially. For B2B, weekday mornings and lunch hours consistently outperform evenings.
- Cut for each platform. A short, punchy edit suits Instagram; a longer, more substantive version does better on LinkedIn. Aspect ratio and opening seconds should change per platform too.
- Ask for the share. A clear closing call to action — comment, share, follow — measurably increases how far a post travels.
6. Track and Improve Performance
Publishing is the start of the work, not the end. The data tells you what to fix.
Metrics worth watching:
- Views. Reach — the top-line number, and the least informative on its own.
- Watch time. Where people drop off. This is the most useful metric you have.
- Engagement. Likes, comments, and shares, which drive further distribution.
- Traffic sources. Whether people arrive from search, social, or an embed tells you where to invest next.
Act on what you see. If viewers consistently leave at the forty-second mark, something at forty seconds needs cutting or fixing. Titles, descriptions, and thumbnails can all be revised after publishing — and often should be.
Conclusion
Optimising an explainer video for search and social changes how many people ever see it. Keywords, a strong title and thumbnail, captions, deliberate distribution, and honest performance tracking are the whole checklist.
It’s also continuous. The videos that keep performing are the ones somebody keeps improving.
Want a video built with distribution in mind from the start? Let’s talk about the brief.