How Do You Maximise YouTube Views With Video SEO?

How do you maximise your YouTube views?

It takes time, and it will not happen overnight, so the biggest problem is that people get disheartened after their first video only gets a handful of views.

The best bit of advice for generating views and getting people to watch your content is to know your audience. Do not try to be everything to everybody. When somebody lands on your content, it needs to feel like exactly the piece of content they were looking for, and other viewers will come off the back of that. It is like rolling a snowball: you need views to get views, but you do not actually need a whole channel of content to start getting some. You need one video, and if you promote it with ads into the right audience, you will get traction. You do not want people bouncing, you want engagement, and once you have done some YouTube SEO on the video and got engagement, you will start to rank and appear in suggestions and in discovery on the right hand side. In YouTube Studio's analytics you can see where people are finding you, paid, suggested, organic, and all the rest.

As a YouTube buying agency, we find targeting is everything. You can spin up different fronts to different videos to get the hook right, because there is no one-size-fits-all: you would be far better making four or five videos with a different opening but similar core content, each fitted to its audience, than one video trying to fit a broad audience.

How do you rank keywords on YouTube?

It is very much like old school SEO: keyword density in your title, and a description that actually gets used properly rather than left as a lazy template.

Put the keyword in the title a couple of times. YouTube gives you a five thousand character limit on the description, and it is very rarely used properly: most people put up the same seventy or eighty percent boilerplate, a link to the website, some social links, a description of the business, every single time. If you treat that description section like a blog and talk about the topic and what you want to rank for, using keywords around the subject rather than repeating the same phrase, that works far better. If I was trying to rank for best barbecue, I would not just repeat "best barbecue" five times in a two thousand character blog. I would talk about the best gas barbecues, the best barbecue on a budget, and the barbecue that is best for smoking fish, spreading the terms naturally rather than keyword stuffing, because the algorithm can spot stuffing and will mark you down for it.

How many tags should you use on YouTube?

More than you might think, starting with your golden term, the exact phrase you are trying to rank for, followed by tags that talk around that subject.

In the best barbecue example, you would use variations like best barbecue under a hundred pounds and best barbecue for smoking. Use Google Ads Keyword Planner to find what people are actually searching, or go onto normal Google, type in your topic, and scroll down to the "people also ask" section, which shows you all the related questions people have. Read other people's articles for ideas but do not copy and paste: pull chunks out onto a document or spreadsheet and then write it in your own words, because a lot of copy online has gone wrong exactly this way, it feels lazy and robotic rather than like it is telling a story.

Does using text-to-speech or the auto-generated subtitles affect ranking?

Yes, because Google reads the subtitle file created when you upload your video, so it is worth checking the transcription is accurate, especially where it carries your keywords.

There has been a phase, and it is still happening to an extent, of channels using robot voices reading out text pasted into a slideshow, purely because Google picks up that text through the subtitle file and ranks it. We are thankfully moving past that, but it does show that using your keywords correctly and getting the subtitles right is something Google rewards. That said, if people are not sticking with the video and the retention rate is poor, none of that saves you, so it always comes back to doing the content properly.

Does ranking on YouTube help you rank on Google?

Not automatically, only if you know what you are doing: you can rank a video on YouTube within twenty four to forty eight hours, but getting it to stick is the hard part.

If you are answering people's questions, videos start to appear in the "people also ask" style results, but that tends to favour authority sites. If a site already comes up naturally in search for those terms, it is a lot easier to get a video from that site to the top, because Google already trusts it. Use a rank tracking tool, I use one called Agency Analytics, to see where you rank for particular terms, and build up a picture from there.

On whether social media contributes to SEO ranking: a lot of SEO agencies have disagreed with me on this, mainly because they do not do social media themselves and do not want to see budget move away from SEO. Social is your friend. If you can get a video or a piece of content onto social, get it engaged with and watched, you are sending good signals. Time-coding a video, sectioning it so that a particular question is answered at a specific point, lets someone click straight to the bit they want, and that is another signal to Google about exactly what part of the content held attention. Google is profiling that behaviour constantly, in the same way it profiles conversations picked up elsewhere: it is listening to what is in videos, reading subtitles, and watching where people click and where they leave.

How do you rank up faster on YouTube?

Through engagement, likes, comments, shares and people sticking to watch, which sometimes needs investment to get started.

If you have a channel with a million-plus subscribers you can stick a video up and get views easily, though that does not guarantee engagement. Video length matters too: at the moment the best length for an advert is about two to three minutes, a bit shorter than it was last year, because if people skip an ad that is a poor signal for the channel's engagement rate. Before you have distilled your targeting, you might put a video up as unlisted and only show it to ad views, so it does not damage your main channel's engagement rate while you refine it.

If you are a new channel, you probably need to pay for ads to get things going and get the audience right, and your subscribers will grow from there. Placements can help too: if we were running for a dog groomer, we might place the ad into videos about dogs as a pattern interrupt, though a lot of people take a spray and pray approach, running ads to a broad group like women aged thirty to forty with a dog, on the basis that a skip costs nothing anyway. The real difference is between intent and engagement: someone already watching content on a topic is far more likely to keep watching something related to it than someone who happens to be watching something else entirely when the ad appears.