How to Edit YouTube Videos for High Engagement

Making a good video for YouTube isn't about flashy special effects or custom animations. In fact, no fancy camera, software, or trick is going to make you the next YouTube star. But if you're a beginner and you want to learn how to edit videos for YouTube, I'm going to show you the exact workflow we use to drive what really matters to gain traction on this platform. Engagement. Stay tuned. What's up creators, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors, and dominate your niche. Now, if you came here to learn fancy tricks, that's not what this video is about. YouTube's entire platform is built on how well you can engage your audience. And editing your YouTube videos properly is a proxy to higher engagement. Here's a quick overview of the video editing, production, and collaboration tools we use. Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Audition, QuickTime Player, and Dropbox. Now, you can obviously use alternative tools like Final Cut Pro instead of Premiere, or Filmora instead of QuickTime. I just find that these tools work really well together. With that said, let's jump into the 10-step process we use at Ahrefs to create engaging videos for YouTube. The first step is to add all audio and visual assets to your Premiere project. So I've already recorded the video here and edited it to a separate Dropbox folder. So as we work on the project, it'll start syncing to the cloud since there are two people who work on each of our projects. Next, I'll set up a new project in Premiere called 1, and I'll just enter in the name of the video. Now, I'll create a new bin and drop in the raw footage as well as a new folder called Assets, which has sound effects and visual assets we use for nearly every video. Step 2 is to clean and enhance your audio. Bad audio equals a bad video. For example, if you listen carefully, you'll hear buzzing in the background. That's my desktop. But remove the noise, and you have cleaner audio. To do this with your video, right-click on the video file in Premiere, hover over Edit in Adobe Audition, and select Clip. This will create a new audio file in Premiere and open up Audition with just the extracted audio. Now zoom in and select a portion of the audio where the noise is constant and isolated. Then select Effects, Noise Reduction, and Capture Noise Point. Next, click on Effects, Noise Reduction, and select Noise Reduction Process. By confirming this effect, you'll remove any noise that sounds similar to the point you captured. So in my case, my desktop fan. You can create this same effect in a free audio tool called Audacity, but I prefer to work in Audition since it integrates with Premiere. Finally, we add a little effect to my voice because it sounds dull without it. I have a preset with some parametric equalizer and hard limit effects added, so I'll apply the settings, and now I sound like Asian Barry White. There's no use in going through these exact settings because it'll depend on your voice. Play around with the settings and see what sounds best for your video. Cool, so we'll save this, and the final step for audio is to merge the original video file with the new edited audio. Just click both files, right-click, and select Merge Clips. Now you'll want to make sure that you synchronize from the endpoints and remove the audio from the original audio-visual clip. This will replace the old audio with the new, and you should now have a nice sounding video. Let's move on to step 3, which is to cut out all mistakes from the video. For our videos, the raw video is usually double the length of the final video. Oftentimes, it's because I repeat lines in a different tone. So if you're as picky as I am, then you'll have to cut out a lot from your raw video clips, which can be time consuming and frustrating. Alright, so I need to remove all of the mistakes that I made or choose the best versions of certain sentences spoken. So I'll usually look at the audio waves to get an idea of where these mistakes are. If there are big gaps with no audio, then it's easy to identify that as a place to cut. So I'll select this part and cut it using a Premiere shortcut. You can just Google for Premiere shortcuts because it'll differ between Mac and PC. Now, what I see a lot of people do when they edit videos is they don't pay attention to the audio gap between the last sentence and the next sentence. For example, you'll see that there's a bit of a gap here. We want the video to flow naturally, but we don't want there to be an awkward pause between the two cuts. So I'll actually cut a bit of the part where I'm taking a breather, which creates better flow and keeps the video moving. Clean up all cuts for your entire video and by the end, you should have a raw version of what your video will look and sound like. Alright, step 4 is to record the screencast or for vloggers, that might be to record B-roll. Since we create how-to videos specifically on SEO and digital marketing, I use screencasts to better illustrate concepts and strategies. At this stage, the only thing we're doing is recording a screencast over the audio and we'll deal with effects and cuts in the next few steps. The point is that having a screencast, as well as a talking head, lets you select between two different types of footages. So you can choose which one is most appropriate for your final product. Now, if you're vlogging, it might not make sense to use screencasts, but I highly recommend using B-roll. Now, rather than recording completely random B-roll clips after you've created your video, you'll want to plan these ahead of time. Since our videos are mostly scripted, I use Google Docs and add comments where I think B-roll will be effective. Like in this video, I'm talking about how I hack golf, life, and traffic. More footage gives you more options when editing your videos. Use screencasts to make concepts super clear. Add B-roll as a way to connect with your audience through relatable, real-life visuals. Best of all, these work well even if you're in a so-called boring industry like SEO. Step 5 is to sync your other footage with your talking head. There's not much to say here. Since I record the audio on top of the screencasts, I basically just match up the audio waves from the screencast with the talking head. There's some tips and tricks to do this using syncing features, but I find it easiest to just compare the two audio wave tracks and then match them up until they sound similar. From here, it's just a matter of showing the screencast when it's most effective and to show the talking head where it doesn't make sense to show the screencast. Let's move on to step 6, which I think is one of the most important steps in the editing process. And that's to close the gaps. After you've edited your talking head with a screencast or additional footage, your project is going to have gaps. When the gap is too large, it might be a sign that you're talking too much or staying on the same screen for an unnecessarily long time. And unless you're an engaging speaker, people will often get bored. For example, in this video, I have nearly a one-minute long conclusion recapping everything that I talked about. So this is something that should have been condensed. Other drop-off points were mostly my voice talking over a screencast where nothing was really going on. So I created the gap system. Here's how it works. As you can see, I've already gone through all of step 4 and 5 and made the necessary cuts to my screencast and talking head. Now pay attention to the gaps. It seems like there's quite a bit of talking head action going on and to me, it doesn't make sense to throw in a screencast clip just to fill in these gaps. So I'll fill it with other elements that make sense. So that might be a text screen, b-roll, or sometimes a custom animation. There isn't a general rule of how small these gaps should be, but the key takeaway is that you want to keep the flow of the video moving. Alright, we're just about done the main parts of the video, so let's polish it off with step 7, which is to add jump cuts. A jump cut is a transition between two shots from the same position. It creates the effect of the scene jumping, hence the name jump cut. It's a simple way to add dynamics to a video and help make mistakes look polished. For example, before every video begins, I say stay tuned and twirl my finger. A jump cut is used to create a sense of movement or beginningness to the video. Or if I were to say something like, but there's one thing that you have to do when making a peanut butter sandwich. Add bananas. Adding the jump cut adds emphasis to the point that I'm making. To add a jump cut in Premiere, just increase the scale of the clip. Since our original video is in 4K and downscaled to 1080p, I'll change it to 53.5 and then I'll adjust the position by moving the horizontal and vertical positions until it's in a good place. The last thing that I'll do before I hand this off to our awesome animator is step 8, which is to add production notes for the real expert. Our animator is awesome. He can literally make any idea that I have come to life. But he's not a marketer by trade, so adding production notes is a great way to create an intersect between design and marketing. Now, at this point, I've already reviewed the video in full at least two times. Once for editing the talking head and another for the screencast. But I'm actually going to watch the video now, and anytime I want to show something on the screen, I'm going to make a note for our animator. For example, I think it would make sense to put brackets around the gaps or fill it in with some other color. So I'll add a marker and say, add a rectangle or fill in the gaps with a color to show that the gap exists. And I'll change the marker color to orange, since we've created a color-coded system for different types of animations. Then I'll do that for the entire video. And here's what the final project will look like with markers, cuts, and all. Step 9 is to add all of your effects and animations. And I really wish I could give you more details on this, but our animator literally just gets down to business and sends me back a polished video, which is a huge reason why I get messages and comments like this. His tool of choice is Adobe After Effects. So if you like some of the effects we use, search for videos related to After Effects or watch the one that I have linked up here to dig deeper. Let's move on to step 10, which is to review the final video and add the finishing touches. So at this point, I watch the video and make sure that all of the notes were done correctly, look for inaccuracies, typos, or sloppy transitions. But as I do this, I'm not looking at the marker notes that I made. And the reason for this is because what I originally visioned isn't always going to be the best result. As I go through the video, I'll review every second of it and see if my eyes gravitate to the places that I want our viewers to look. If I start getting bored, then I pause and consider things we can add, remove, or change to the video to enhance engagement. Now, if something seems confusing to me, then how confusing is it going to be for someone who's never heard of SEO or our toolset? And we recently started using Dropbox's awesome integration for videos and comments. It basically adds a timecode at each place and lets us feed off each other. The point of this step is to clean up any loose ends and make sure that the video is the best that it can be. After he's made the revisions, I'll review it one last time to ensure everything is on point and that we're both happy with the video we'll be publishing. Now, you might be thinking that our video editing process is overkill. But at Ahrefs, we prefer to focus on the quality of our content and production over quantity. Now, if you enjoyed this video, then make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And I highly recommend digging through some of our videos if you want to learn more about SEO, video marketing, and digital marketing. So until the next video, keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next tutorial.