YouTube is one of the essential and valuable tools for every online marketer, small businesses included. According to research, YouTube receives a little more than 30 million visits in a day, with most audiences watching not less than three video clips per visit. In addition to this, at least 6 billion worth of video hours are watched each month. This makes YouTube the second largest search engine, and the most used video hosting directory online today. The directory also allows users to upload videos at no cost, one of the reasons why it has gained popularity.
Small businesses and entrepreneurs use YouTube as a means to boost their visibility as well as attract organic traffic their way. Some of the great ways to attract audiences and visibility on the channel include uploading explainer videos, how-to videos, and holding video contents as well. With millions of videos uploaded to the channel each day, getting your video clicked or views takes more than just the upload. You need to ensure the video is not of the highest quality possible, but also informative, engaging, easy to understand, and most importantly, optimized for both the internal and external search engines. Discussed below are a few tips and tricks on how to get your video rank higher on YouTube.
1. Know Your Niche.
With thousands of other people using the channel for marketing purposes, it would be wise to narrow down your competition by choosing a specific, but relevant, niche. This is important unless you only wish to reach out to the masses. Identifying your niche, and capitalizing on just that reduces competition, which also increases chances of your clips gaining more exposure and possibly higher ranks by search engines.
Choosing a specific niche also narrows down your focus, which makes reaching target audience easier and much quicker. You, however, shouldn’t upload a crammed up video simply because you wish to reduce competition. You can always create several videos, then upload them accordingly to get more views and exposure. These should do just fine as long as they are properly optimized and engaging.
2. Keywords.
According to Buysocialmediamarketing.com keywords play a crucial role in making content online visible to search engines and audiences. You will need to do a keyword research and analysis to identify the most converting keyword to use with the videos. There are plenty of tools that can help you achieve this. The keywords are to be used on the video descriptors, title, tags, and such. You’ll also need to pick a nice, relevant, and catching title for the video to attract the right audience.
Experts recommend putting your keyword at the beginning of each video title. If the video involves promoting a particular product, say gadgets, you then need to ensure the optimized keyword appears in the first part of the video title to attract the right audience and search engine crawlers.
3. Meta Tags.
With the niche and keywords ready, you then need to find just the right words to help you reach the target audience. Meta tags are purposely used to help target audience find your product, or rather video fast. You therefore need to include some of the keywords in the Meta tags as well.
One of the best ways to do this is looking at your competitions video clips that are already doing well online. Check their top-ranked videos, see how they crafted the title, descriptions, and tags to attract audience hence higher ranks. You can borrow several ideas from these to generate unique tags for your clips. Some innovativeness and creativity are needed here.
4. Use Meta Descriptions.
In addition to shooting a good quality video clip with a well thought of script, you’ll need to add text descriptors of the video to help target audience know what it is about even before clicking on it. Search engines too use these descriptors for indexing, hence essential for the video’s performance and visibility online. You therefore need to come up with catchy and relevant descriptions for the video clips before they can be uploaded. Be sure to include a keyword or two in the descriptions as well. This should help search engine bots view and index the clip for faster retrieval. Target audience will also see the description on search engines too.
You might also want to add your website URL just under the descriptions to help audiences navigate to your site.
5. Playlists.
Although many people overlook this, YouTube’s playlist feature enables viewers to add existing videos to their playlist alongside other videos for easy access. Each video clip added to a playlist is translated as a positive gesture towards the same, hence earns your clip a few more points in the ranking criteria. This works in an almost similar way as link building for web pages and articles. The more people add your clips to their playlist, the more popular the clips become, thus increased visibility. While there’s not much you can do to encourage people to ‘favorite’ your clip, simply enabling the feature, can do wonders.
6. Build A Following.
Building a following on YouTube can be a somewhat challenging task for many people. Just as it is with most social platforms, you need more followers for your content to get the attention it deserves, and possibly higher ranks by the search engine. More followers translate to higher video rankings as per your channel. The first step to building a following is ensuring uploaded videos are not only of the highest quality, but also informative, unique, and engaging. It also entails playing the long game to gain an adequate number of followers.
Aside from the video quality, you need to focus on the comments section on the channel. This section allows audiences engage with the content creator with ease. Be keen to respond to actions on the channels, and particularly the comments. Consider responding to both the positive and negative comments to boost your rankings. How fast you respond to some of the comments, receive recommendations, as well as react to negative comments will influence your following in the long run.
Asking audiences to subscribe to your channel can also help build a following too. Annotations come quite in handy for this section. The social media is your friend when in need of more subscriptions.
7. Promote Your YouTube Channel And Videos.
Promoting your channel and video clips is another way to boost views and rankings on YouTube. This particularly works best if the videos are worth the audience’s time. Uploading the video alone may not be enough to help it gain popularity online. Embedding the clips on web pages, and sharing the same on social media can boost the amounts of traffic streaking to the same. Don’t just let the videos to be visible on YouTube and the Social media alone, add them to your website and especially the blog. Allow people to share the clips with their friends for more impressions.
You could also use analytics to identify performing and non-performing videos on your channel. There are plenty of video analytics tools that can provide you with a detailed report on each clip’s performance, and possible recommendations. Use the generated report to make the videos better and even add optimizations to it.
Just because people click on the video doesn’t mean they watch it till the end. High Definition and informative videos receive better reception as compared to low-quality ones. For this reason, you might want to invest in a good quality camera, good graphics, and also ensure the content has a punch. People love exciting videos too – be sure to create some.
8. Encourage Social Signals.
Ask your audience and followers to share clips they find interesting to their social networks, blogs, forums, and websites. Having your video clip embedded on multiple pages on the web creates easy to catch links for search engine bots. Encouraging social signals will also work in your favor if most of these followers and audiences have a huge following on their pages as well.
As more and more people view and share your video on Facebook and Twitter, lots of social signals will be sent out from the same. Search engines will translate it to increased popularity hence higher rankings. You may also want to encourage your audience to watch the clip to the end to gain more time play. The more actions these clips get, the better the chance of showing up in the top pages of search results, and higher conversions as well.