Marketing
How to Make Your Videos Rank Better on YouTube
7 min read
Marketing
Almost 5 billion videos on YouTube are watched every day. And in an average month, 8 out of 10, 18-49 year olds watch YouTube at some point. That’s an incredible set of YouTube statistics, and certainly one that business owners cannot, and often don’t, ignore.
YouTube videos are a powerful form of marketing, enabling businesses (and anyone!) to show off products, services, skills, opinions, and advice to a monumental number of viewers.
Not to mention that Google Search loves YouTube videos in their ranking algorithms too. If someone Google’s a query that your video answers, it’s possible your YouTube video could rank on the first page. So, even if the other websites that rank for that query are popular sites, a YouTube video can give you the edge.
So, what are the ingredients of a great YouTube video? How can be sure that your video is SEEN?
To get your YouTube video ranking higher in the feed, you need to improve your introduction, your content, your title, and your engagement.
There are strong correlations between videos that rank on the first page of the YouTube search results and video lengths of over 14 minutes, a high number of comments, views and shares, and the number of subscribers a channel has, and video watch time. So, there’s no surprise that the more popular your video, the more likely your video is to reach the first page.
But that’s easier said than done.
We want to cover the things YOU can do with your YouTube videos to make sure your video becomes popular.
First, let’s look at the video itself.
The intro is probably the most important part of your video. With 20% of people likely to leave your video before 10 seconds, you need to capture the audience’s attention. This doesn’t mean fancy graphics of your logo dancing around, fading in and out of the screen as your favourite drum and bass track plays. It means giving the audience what they want to hear.
Is your video a How-To? Start by telling the user a snippet of info on the benefits of learning what they want to know, then cover an overview of what they will learn.
Providing an opinion on something? Throw something which might be more controversial at the audience within those first 10 seconds to really engage them.
Product or Service demonstration? Again, start with a benefit or two, an attention-grabbing stat (where appropriate), and then a sentence on what will be shown or learnt.
It really pays to get the introduction to YouTube video right, so have a look at what your competition is doing, and see what you can learn in terms of what’s good, and what’s not.
First off, make sure your keywords are in your video title. YouTube gives heavy weight to the keywords in your video title.
Although the limit is 100 characters, try to keep your YouTube title to around 70 characters long (including spaces) to avoid titles being truncated.
One trick is to write your title twice, in a slightly different way to capture more keywords. This is the secret of the colon. For example, “How to use a washing machine: Washing Machines for Beginners”. This captures two potential keywords of the “how to” and the “for beginners”.
Not sure what keywords to include? Here’s a guide to keyword research.
Next up, your video description. YouTube allows you to write a hell of a lot of content for your video descriptions. Here are a few tips:
Use as many Tags as you can. Here are a few ideas on what tags to use.
Be sure to stick in a few branded terms so people looking for you are more likely to find your videos.
Look at what other competitors and similar videos are using. If people are using those tags, they are likely popular already and you can jump on that bandwagon.
Annotation are used as in a variety of ways to increase your views, watch time, and sent traffic to other videos, products, and your website. They are clickable links which can be placed anywhere in your video at specific time intervals.
You can use annotations in a variety of ways, including:
We won’t delve too much into exactly how to use them, but if you want to learn more, our friends over at ViewBix have you covered – 7 creative ways to use annotation.
For our final piece of advice, don’t forget to share your YouTube video. Embed it on a blog or services page on your website and be sure to post it on social media. You may even want to perform an outreach campaign and send your video to other websites, bloggers, and influencers in your field to get their opinions. They may share your video and link to it!
There are going to be a tonne of other tricks and tips to optimise your YouTube videos, so if I’ve missed anything or your have any questions, give me a shout in the comments below. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see your YouTube videos ranking soon!
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<p><strong>Please include attribution to Watb.co.uk with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
<p><a href=’https://watb.co.uk/how-to-make-your-videos-rank-better-on-youtube’><img src=’https://watb.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/YouTube2017.jpg’ alt=’YouTube 2017 Statistics’ width=’1000px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
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