Ranking Your YouTube Videos: 7 Actionable Tips
Want to rank your YouTube video on the first three results for a keyword, then this guide is for you. This is one of my favorite topics to write about, I am on YouTube, not just for watching videos, but doing work from the past three years. This article is more than 1500 words so bear with me and read the whole stuff.
Why Ranking Your videos on the First page is important? This is a question you may ask, that why I need to rank my videos? so, the reason is that people come to YouTube for either getting entertain or to get some information about something. Ranking your videos is important because you want to grow your channel, get more clients, reach your message to a larger audience and to get a high following on Your YouTube channel, then you need to be rank on YouTube.
The ranking you videos means more organic views, more reach to potential customers and more people will subscribe to you which has a compounding effect.
Here are some of the tips that you need to do before making a video:
- When making a video please shoot in a place where there is sunlight, it looks natural.
- Have a script. Write a script for your video.
- Use Powerful editing software. Remove time lapses where you used “Ah” “Umm” or any other such blocking terms.
- Have an objective, if you are explaining something about a business plan, try to be focused on just content that is related to the buisnes plan.
You can get views through Three possible ways:
A. YouTube Search
B. YouTube recommending Your videos on the right side of the video you are playing.
C. Through Google search.
For all the three ways you need to optimize your video for the search engine. The search engine uses a Robot that crawls all the data available on a specific keyword and then presents you the most relevant data.
Understanding YouTube Algorithm: What does YouTube want? YouTube wants that user stay on the site for as long as possible, the user watches maximum videos. So, in this whole process, YouTube ranks those videos that are highly engaging. But, if users are coming to your videos then YouTube can understand about your videos, so, they launch a new Metrics called “Watch Time”
A. YouTube Search
1. Keyword Optimization:
The keyword is a combination of words that most of the people are searching for you. You should use the keyword in your video otherwise your videos will not perform that well.
Where to put your keyword?
You need to put your keywords in the Title of the videos, Description of the video and in the tags. Keep in mind that Tag is an important part of your video, and always put relevant tags in your video otherwise, YouTube will take you as scum and this is affecting your Channel too, in some cases, they may terminate you.
You can use tools like Semrush or Ahref to find out how many people are searching for a keyword on YouTube or Google. You can also use Google Ad Planner to find the searches of a keyword on Google search.
Look at the following Title:
This title checks ✅✅✅ a lot of YouTube Search Engine Optimization metrics:
The First thing is that they use the keyword at the very beginning of the title, Then they write about the problem they are solving, how to rank your videos #1, you can see that video is 18:03 Minutes long which is another indicator that this video is going to be №1 On search Result. This video is currently №2 On YouTube Search engine result page.
2. Attractive Thumbnail for Your Videos
Thumbnail is a very important part of the video. YouTube rank a video based on Views and according to a research Thumbnail attract more clicks then the Title, title helps you to rank in SERP but an optimized title and a great thumbnail will end you on the no.1 spot on the YouTube search.
The Keyword “YouTube SEO” is one of the competitive keywords on YouTube as to rank on that keyword means you are competing with people who already have a bunch of knowledge about how YouTube System works. Here are some of the result found for the YouTube SEO Keyword.
You see one of the videos is upload 2 Years ago while the video at position 2 is upload just three days ago. So, what are the reasons? The reason is listed below.
3. Long-form Videos:
Long form videos rank better than those of short videos. The same thing is to apply to longer content as well. The reason behind this is “Watch Time” which is a YouTube Invented Metrics for measuring how many people watching videos for how much time?
Watch time is one of the major factors behind the ranking of videos on YouTube and so longer videos have higher watch time this led YouTube to rank those videos that have higher Length.
The science behind this is, let say you uploaded a video of 10 Minutes and your competitor uploaded a video of 8 minutes. You both got 100 views and 100 of the people watch the full video then your video will be got 1000 Watch time while your competitor got 800 Watch time, So YouTube will rank your video on a higher position then your competitor.
Look at the keyword, a random keyword we selected and look at the first three videos:
The First video is 15 Minutes long, the second video is 14:24 Minutes while the third video is 26:24 Minutes long, the third video is longer than any of the video but it is published just four months ago while the other two videos are much older.
4. Number of Comments, Likes and A Subscribing Gaining Video:
Dislikes reduce the reach of your video, more likes means people are liking the video so video give “Like” a vote too but the bigger and the most effective votes go to the Comments. The more comments you have the better you are going to be rank.
Look at one of my Video, I rank №1 On this High traffic keyword, what I did is to tell people to comment, but I don’t stop them, I reply to each and everyone comment.
I have three times more comments than the Video that is ranked no.2, why? Because comment matters a lot when it comes to YouTube ranking.
B. YouTube recommending Your videos on the right side of the video you are playing.
5. How Many People Are watching Your video Full Time:
YouTube recently develop an Algorithm that will reward those videos that has the highest number of watch time, means YouTube is going to recommend your video(s) on the Right side of the Video you are playing. YouTube has now understood your facial features and can understand what times you are using certain keywords in your videos and what times your facial expressions are changing, based on all these things YouTube will decide which Video should be recommended and which video needs to go viral.
Sometimes a Video goes viral because either a famous personality shares the video or more people are sharing the video or either more people are engaging with the video.
Most of the organic views come from either:
- Targeting a high traffic keyword and getting rank.
- YouTube Continuously Recommend your video.
C. Ranking Your YouTube Video Through Google search.
Do You know, Ranking on YouTube SERP (Search engine Result page) doesn’t mean or guarantee that you will be rank for the same keyword on Google SERP.
So, what are some of the factors that can rank your video on Google?
6. Embedding Video on Blog Posts:
Embed your videos on Blog posts, Quora answers, Medium Posts and Twitter tweets. YouTube considers the views and the watch time coming from the Embedded videos the same as other videos and if your blog post ranked then you are going to getting more views.
If You embed your video on a blog post then there are high chances that your Video will also be ranked in Google SERP.
But, one thing that we miss the most is adding keywords in the description of the video. Add a whole 400–500 words description of your video. YouTube will understand the video mode, the more information you put about your video the better it will rank.
7. High-Quality Videos:
High-Quality Videos perform well, but if your competitor has high-quality content then that will be odd. My Competitor is using “4K” Quality while I am just on 1080P, so yeah, he is ranked higher than me but still, I am doing well.
That’s all.
I hope this article will help you.
