10 Growth Hacks that will rank you #1 on YouTube

According to Alexa Rankings, YouTube is the world’s most visited video search engine and the second most visited website in the world. Currently, YouTube stands second (in popularity) only to its parent company, Google. With providing the ability to upload a video for free and instantly reaching out to millions of people worldwide, YouTube is any modern-day marketer’s/company’s dream outreach platform. However, with thousands of videos being uploaded on YouTube everyday, ranking high on YouTube can be quite a challenging task.

Google’s ranking factors have been an object of much discussion and scrutiny over the last decade and a half. With YouTube’s massive rise in popularity over the last couple of years, marketers and SEO experts have been trying to decode the secrets to attaining a high rank on YouTube search results pages. In this article, I will be walking you through the top 10 things that will give your videos a boost in ranking on YouTube. So let’s get started.

YouTube Ranking Factors:

First, let’s quickly go through some of the most important factors that determine your video’s rank amongst organic search results listings.

Determining the video rank on YouTube is probably not as complex as determining ad rank on a regular Google SERP but YouTube Rankings is no joke either. The most important ranking factors are:

• Title tag information
• Audience retention
• Keywords in description tag
• Tags
• Video length
• Number of subscribers after watching
• Comments
• Likes and dislikes

With these ranking factors in mind, let me tell you what are the top 10 things you can do to get a high YouTube rank:

Top 10 Things To Do To Get A High YouTube Rank:

1: Optimize Around “Video Keywords”:

While deciding a ‘focus keyword’ for your video, you should check to see if there are video results appearing on the first page. If so, you should consider using that keyword as your focus keyword because you can get your video to rank on both Google and YouTube for this keyword. While I am telling you about this, it is good to keep in mind that even though Google provides YouTube videos a default advantage in search engine rankings, it does so for select keywords only. These keywords are called “Video Keywords” because they tend to have video results on Google’s first page. For example, a keyword such as “cute cats” would trigger at least a couple of video results on Google. This is because Google’s intelligent algorithm understands that someone searching for the keyword “cute cats” probably does not want to read articles on why cats are cute but instead wants to probably see cute kittens or cats playing or sleeping. On the other hand, Google is more likely to return a set of text articles and posts for keywords such as “ankle sprain”.

2: Write Keyword Optimized Title & Description:

Google and YouTube still rely heavily on the text surrounding your video to understand its topic and content. That’s why you must optimize your titles and description. To do so, you must always keep you focus keyword(s) in mind. These Focus Keywords should correspond with a) what describes your video accurately, and b) the words and phrases that users enter in search engines to find content like yours. Consider using Google Trends and the good old Google Adwords Keyword Planner to get a sense of search volume, related popular keywords and competition. Also, while writing descriptions, please remember that search engines can now catch “keyword-stuffing”. Writing super-long, explanatory and relevant descriptions (at least 200 characters long) is the most effective way of letting the Google bots know about your content.

3: Use The Right Tags:

Using the most relevant tags is very important because this can be the make it or break it factor for any video on YouTube. It is important to choose very relevant, unique and direct tags for your videos. Enter at least 8-10 relevant tags on each video.

4: Use Compelling Thumbnail:

Choosing the right video thumbnail image makes a drastic difference in click-through rate. Use high quality, high contrast images that have a 16:9 aspect ratio. Facial close-ups work best.

5: Audio Content is King on YouTube:

You must have often heard the phrase “Content is King” with respect to website SEO. Well with YouTube SEO the Audio content is king. That is why it is very important to actually “say the focus keywords” right in the beginning of the video. For example, if you are creating a video on “Italian Food” then your video should have keywords like “Best Italian Food”, “Italian food recipe”, “delicious Italian food” right in the beginning of the video. YouTube has a smart audio analyzer to figure out what’s being said in the video, so let’s make it easier for the analyzer to understand what your video is all about.

6: Add Closed Captions To YouTube Videos:

If your videos contain relevant audio or speech, you should always try to add closed captions. Closed captions not only make videos understandable for the deaf and hard of hearing, they also make your videos better for those foreign-language speakers and viewers who are watching your video on a device that does not have sound. Google definitely rewards videos with this kind of a universal design as well as an enhanced user experience.

7: Don’t Use YouTube’s Automatic Captions:

You must have seen automatic captioning feature in YouTube lately. While it seems that using auto-captions can be a great time saver, I want to warn you against using auto captions at all. This is because auto-captions include so many mistakes that they can completely confuse the Google bots about your video’s focus keywords, topic and content. YouTube speech recognition software is not yet perfect and cannot yet capture the accurate words because of difference in verbal accents, background noise, multiple speakers and complex vocabulary. This is the reason why auto-captions do not get indexed by Google or YouTube, and therefore do not help SEO. Google only indexes your uploaded captions because it considers them to be higher quality and more trustworthy than auto captions. As a matter of fact, downloading and then uploading auto captions, can seriously hurt your video SEO, because Google can index your inaccurate captions as gibberish and penalize your video accordingly.

8: Get More Video Views From Online Communities:

Share your video liberally on online communities. This can help you attract quality, high-retention views which can help with YouTube seo. Topic threads on online communities, forums and message boards attract people with shared interests. Sharing your YouTube videos on such platforms can help you get relevant traffic to your YouTube video which can in turn work wonders for your video’s SEO. Because the number and quality of your video views is one of the most important YouTube ranking factors, getting views from these targeted audiences works wonders.

9: Create Keyword Rich Playlists:

Once you have around ten videos in your YouTube channel, organize them into tightly themed playlists. Don’t leave your YouTube channel an unorganized mess. One of the easiest ways to get more YouTube search traffic to your videos is to organize your videos into playlists. A keyword-rich playlist gives YouTube deeper information about your video’s topic.

10: Encourage Subscribing & Liking:

Ask people to like, comment, and subscribe in every single video. Subscribing and liking are two of the most important user experience signals that YouTube uses. Subscribes, likes and comments reflect high levels of engagement and tell YouTube ranking algorithms that your video is extremely relevant for most viewers. Therefore, as the tenth and final suggestion, I’ll recommend that towards the end of your video, you give your viewers a strong call to action that encourages them to subscribe, like and comment.

Carrying out these 10 steps correctly can help you give a massive boost to not only the popularity and quality of your videos and channel but also help your videos appear in higher ranks on YouTube. 

About the Author:

Samir Patel, President & CEO of GrowthMachines & Growth Mentor at 500Startups has optimized $1B+ in Media. In the last decade, he has pioneered the use of Predictive and Data Science in Marketing and accelerated Growth for Fortune 500's such as Salesforce.com, Priceline, Experian, Oracle, AT&T, Progressive and Scottrade. As Founder of SearchForce, he delivered tens of millions in revenue to brands, raised $10M+ in financing and developed a Cross-Channel SaaS Marketing Optimization Platform Based on Wall Street Trading Algorithms.

He is an international keynote speaker, author and trainer on Growth Hacking. He has been on CNN, Forbes, BusinessWeek, NBC and teaches Growth Workshops at 500Startups, General Assembly, UC Berkeley & the top Venture Capital funds around the globe. He attended Stanford University and has an MBA in Brand Marketing from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Business. Connect with him at www.dhirubhai.net/in/growthmaster/ and Twitter @MeetSamir