Optimized for YouTube
YouTube is the most second popular search engine, just behind Google. For video content marketing, this effectively marks YouTube at the top importance of video search engine optimization. The audience opportunities which YouTube offers alone are enough to not only make investing into custom videos and YouTube optimization worth it, but also to build entire businesses off of.
Businesses that have already been launched and haven’t yet begun taking advantage of video marketing boosted with YouTube optimization are missing out on accessing their target audience. In addition to reaching a larger audience, YouTube optimization will also improve brand awareness, increase conversion rates, provide potential customers with value and trust, create social engagement and sharing, and show your business in Google’s web search.
In this article we’re going to look at a few of the easiest ways to optimize your YouTube videos and channel to increase your rankings, views, and overall results.
Optimizing YouTube Videos Through Better Watch and Session Times
YouTube tracks the amount of time your viewers spend watching a video. This means that if your audience regularly opens one of your videos and leaves after watching a few seconds of it, YouTube will determine that your content isn’t that great. Solving this problem is simple: produce epic content that not only educates and entices the viewer to make a purchasing decision, or to become interested in your brand, but which also delivers value and is not likely to be turned off.
A video which starts off with a short and not-long winded introduction, and one which also remains focused throughout the story, is likely to engage a viewer much more than one that isn’t. Luckily for business owners, YouTube offers an audience retention analytics graph which makes it easy to see where the most amount of viewers leave during. This makes it easy to identify when the attention of a viewer is lost, and what can be improved in future videos.
In addition to YouTube tracking the time spent on individual videos, they also track the time a viewer spends across various videos of a channel. This metric is referred to as a session time and can be increased with a few different techniques. One of which is playlists, which is a feature of channels. YouTube playlists are an effective way to group similar videos and give audiences a place to start watching your content: not with just one video, but multiple ones deliberately.
A YouTube video that is utilizing content marketing for example will benefit from clear endings which encourage viewers to continue watching more valuable and related content. This can be done with burned in graphical call to actions, YouTube video commenting, and other methods. The goal, regardless, is to make sure that the viewer has something to do going forward and not become distracted with related videos that are not from your channel.
If there’s an effective and easy way to boost session times on a channel, it’s by creating engaging titles. When a viewer is watching one of your videos, other videos which you’ve created will appear in the related column. Great titles for those videos will entice them to click through further and watch more of your content, especially if they didn’t have a reason to leave the current video they watched and if it was value-full.
Optimizing a Channel Page
Although channel art doesn’t necessarily boost YouTube ranking directly, it does effectively brand your business and make your channel more memorable and likely for viewers to return. Returning viewers and channel subscribes does directly influence YouTube’s ranking of your videos and channel, therefore channel art itself is an important aspect of channel optimization. That is why we offer layout editing as well as channel banner design.
Also, as individual videos are a great way to drive traffic to a destination (such as to your website or a business phone number), channel pages are also a great way to drive traffic to your website through the custom link settings of a page.
Another important technique to optimize your YouTube channel is to turn on auto suggested channels. This effectively will show popular and related channels on YouTube on your channel, but it will also show your own channel on related channel pages. Although this small change is not necessarily going to become your biggest source of traffic on YouTube, it is a source of traffic non-the-less and any boost should be utilized if available and effective.