8 Tips to Rank YouTube Videos in Search Engines

After Google, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine and also the second most visited site after Google with over 1.9 billion users. 

Over 30,000 hours of new content per hour is uploaded on this social media giant, and people watch over 1 billion hours of YouTube videos a day, greater than the combined watch time of Facebook and Netflix. The majority, around 70% of YouTube views come from mobile devices and the average mobile viewing session lasts around 40 minutes.

Needless to say, YouTube is an immensely powerful platform that you can utilize to grow your business, your brand, or even if you just want to be a famous YouTuber. 

How to Rank YouTube Videos in Search Engines

Now, if you have searched something and landed on this article, chances are that you have an account already, but unfortunately, you aren’t able to achieve much there. You might have posted a couple of videos and there has been some traction but not nearly enough. And because of this you may have lost your motivation and stopped posting videos. 

A common trend across YouTube is people who create fantastic YouTube content, lose motivation and give up on the platform, as their channel doesn’t gain followers. 

The key to YouTube marketing is getting videos ranked in not only YouTube’s search but also Google’s searches. Getting ranked in Google’s searches leads to an automated flow of people who stumble upon your videos with valuable keywords related to your organization/channel.

YouTube can be considered as a complex machine with its algorithm working to categorize and provide relevant content. Thereby, it becomes imperative to understand how the Youtube algorithm works. 

This post will provide you with 8 tips that will help you rank your videos higher on Google and YouTube. 

Video Length/content

When YouTube was launched, the algorithm worked mainly based on views. Greater the views, the higher your video would rank. Some time ago the algorithm changed, now besides video length, factors like comments, likes, social shares and amount of video watched are also included.

This measure was introduced to counter the rise of click farms which were giving a false impression that a video is popular when it was just being propped up by click farms.

The previous formula was to churn out videos daily and focus little on content. Now, with comments, likes and social media engagement, people are forced to deliver quality content or risk losing engagement. 

A good part of delivering quality YouTube content is the length of the video itself and the data supports this claim. Just search for tutorials like ‘WordPress‘ or ‘Tutorial’ and the top 2 videos out of 3 are almost always more than an hour long. When it comes to YouTube SEO, longer videos have a clear edge over shorter videos. 

While YouTube doesn’t give any guidelines on how long your ideal video should be, a good rule of thumb is to simply create quality content. If the length of your video crosses the 20+ minute mark then, by all means, go for it. Don’t worry too much about your video being too long, if the video has quality content then people will watch it. 

Another good rule of thumb for short videos is to keep the length of your video at least 1 minute or more than 1 minute. Keeping your video more than a minute long is a good idea as the more lengthy your video is the more people will watch, provided your content is worth watching.

The more the number of seconds watched on your video will climb, the higher the visibility of your video will have on the search engines.

According to YouTube, the longer your video, i.e the more content it has, the better the user experience will be. Summing it up, focusing on quality content is one of the best things you can do to improve search engine rankings.

Keyword Research

One of the most common errors people make is by not naming a video properly. It is by customising its name you can maximise the potential of the content that has been created.  

Keyword research on YouTube is extremely simple and requires little effort. Unlike the more traditional SEO, no tools like Ahrefs are required to show search difficulty, volume or competing for content. 

All we have are YouTube and Google interfaces which fortunately, give us a reasonable amount of data quite easily and in a simple to understand format. An effective way to come up with topics for your video is to utilize the Search Suggest feature of YouTube.

What’s more interesting is that this powerful tool at your disposal is based on the user activity of the population. Like SEO, which takes a significant amount of time and effort, you don’t have to guess whether people are searching for these terms.

One of the lesser-known approaches for keyword research is to look for popular video channels in your niche category, identify their most-watched videos and use the keywords used in them.

When you do this, it’s quite important to remember that a high view count doesn’t mean that you should strongly copy the video title style used. A high video count can be the reason for paid promotion, advertising channels or the video being online for a long time. 

Video Description

Videos on YouTube have a description, usually the text below your video. It helps people find your content and decide whether they should invest their time watching it or not. If done right, you can use the YouTube descriptions to boost SEO, view counts, watch time and subscriptions. Video description can also help rank your videos in YouTube’s “suggested search” function.

Here are a few useful tips to write a good YouTube video description:

• Use specific keywords, use google trends or google AdWords to help get started. 
• Keep repeating these keywords, do this 3-4 times as any more than that the video will be labeled as keyword stuffing. 
• Tell viewers what to expect, write accurate descriptions that don’t mislead the viewers. Misleading the viewers only leads to dislikes and that destroys your engagement.
• Add any links that you have, for example, links to your merchandise store or website.
• Use timestamps for medium to long length videos to help those users with a shorter attention span. 
• Make your video description unique for all your videos, uniqueness is loved by algorithms and humans alike.
• A good length for the video description is around 200 words or longer.

Promote your video

We have talked extensively about why creating quality content matters. Irrespective of your good SEO skills, you won’t be able to build a following if you don’t create quality content. Audience Retention and user experience signal to YouTube that this channel is good and we should rank it’s videos higher. 

However, for Google and YouTube to read these signals, you need to get views on your video too! Here comes ‘cross-platform video promotion‘; now this can be done using sites like Reddit, Quora, Facebook, etc. 

A good example is Q&A sites like Quora to generate interest. Quora is one of the most popular sites on the internet. Don’t just go spamming your YouTube channel that is a sure-fire way to get banned from the website.

Instead, use a keyword that describes your video’s content & then find a related question to answer. Try your best to answer the question and at the end of the answer link your video. 

Interesting read: 20 Tips To Grow Your YouTube Channel Fast

Optimize Your Channel Page

Many people who create great content and optimize their videos, don’t recognize the value of optimizing their YouTube channels or simply think that it matters too little. Your YouTube channel can be used to a great extent to promote the rankings of your videos. 

You can optimize your channel in several ways- 

• Good channel art: In case of YouTube channel art, it refers to the banner that stretches across the top of the page in-between the search bar and your channel’s title and your photo/avatar.Good creative channel art is great, but it can be so much more than that like giving out information on video upload schedules and the links to your social media accounts like Twitter, Instagram. Doing this will help you drive traffic to these pages and expand your online presence.

• Putting your best foot forward: You can put your trending videos right on the front page, a channel trailer that explains the basic details about your channel is a good idea. 
• About the page: Fill out the general description of your channel and explain what it’s about. You can be as wordy as you want to be in this section of your channel, and while users don’t visit this section of a channel be sure to leave an impression on those who do. Many famous channels on YouTube have an extensive ‘About’ section which is both brilliant and humorous. 

Custom Thumbnails

Let’s be honest, a custom thumbnail will generate far more attention when compared to the YouTube generated thumbnail. When you upload a new video on YouTube the platform will give you 3 random screenshots from anywhere in the video that you have uploaded.

You can choose from any 3 of these. Now sometimes they may turn out to be good, but for the majority of times, there won’t be any good video to select.

To create a customized thumbnail you first need to have your YouTube channel verified. In order to do so, simply enter your mobile number and confirm the verification code sent by Youtube. This gives you access to a number of photo editing tools to create spectacular, eye-catching thumbnails that may be used in a video. 

You should use bright colours like Red, Blue, Yellow or Orange as these help your thumbnail stand apart from the usual black and white backgrounds of YouTube videos and Google searches. 

A good thumbnail will give a boost to the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your video, CTR is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view the page, advertisement or email on which the link has been posted.

Create a Playlist

If you look at the statistics provided by YouTube, it will show that the top-performing brands on the platform build and promote twice as many playlists as the bottom 25% of brands.

Why does the YouTube playlist system work so well? 

The simple answer is ‘human laziness’ as it takes effort on your part to switch to another video which is much more difficult than the auto-play feature. It’s also much harder for you to pull your attention away from the videos which are already playing. 

A prominent principle in the domain of economics explains this perfectly. It’s called loss aversion and it states that the pain of losing something is twice as bad as the pleasure received from gaining something equivalent. 

Now, the question isn’t about scrolling down to watch something else. It is whether you want to stop a video and click on something else. 

When someone asks you this question, you may consider it to be irrelevant. Though while watching a video in your playlist your subconscious mind might be thinking on the same lines.  

On top of this, YouTube playlists also help you improve your search rankings, as playlist titles are another opportunity to target keywords and your videos getting added in other people’s playlist is another good way to attract views and subscribers.

Creating a YouTube playlist is easy, just navigate to your channel dashboard, go to the ‘playlists’ section and click in ‘create playlists’. Create a variety of playlists to maximise the potential of this feature. 

Relevancy factor

Both Google and YouTube push up extremely relevant search results. These search engines never push search results about topics/videos which are, either not up to date or aren’t being talked about on the internet.

If people are talking about a topic that you are talking about, it can be considered relevant. In case people are not talking about what you’re posting then it’s not relevant. 

Do you want to get your videos to the top of the search rankings? Try to post about things that are either relevant or incorporate elements of things that are relevant.

Wrapping it up

Search engines like Google & YouTube are immensely powerful platforms if you utilize them properly. Over the years, the list of things that you can do on YouTube has massively grown.

You can pursue anything from marketing your business to building a personal brand to influencing people. The possibilities are endless and will only grow from here. To harness the power of these platforms, getting your content to the right people at the right time is critical. The steps mentioned above will help you achieve this goal.