YouTube Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday

YouTube Ranking Factors - Whiteboard Friday
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Posted by mybinding1

This week for Whiteboard Friday we are taking a look at how to get a video to rank on YouTube. Each month YouTube receives over 800 million unique visitors who watch more than 3 billion hours of video, traffic we can't afford to ignore. So how do you get videos to rank for competitive terms on YouTube? By paying close attention to these 12 important ranking factors.

Do you agree with these? Disagree? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Jeff McRitchie from MyBinding.com, and today we're going to be talking about how to get your videos to rank better on YouTube and specifically YouTube ranking factors. We're going to cover 12 specific YouTube ranking factors, kind of in 2 different categories.

The first category would be the content that you create. These are things that are really in your control. Not everything about ranking on YouTube is in your control, and yet you have the ability to affect it all by the content that you create. So that's really the place to start is by creating awesome content and then uploading that content in a way that is going to put your best foot forward on YouTube.

So let's talk about the first six ranking factors that fall under the category of content. The first is title. You want a title that is going to be awesome. You want a great click through rate. You want people to want to watch your video. So when they're doing a search on YouTube for a specific topic, you want to pop up, and you want someone to say, "That's exactly what I'm looking for." So not only do you need to do the keyword research ahead of time to understand what someone needs, but you also need to deliver on that concept, so that they know that that is what I want, and then when they watch the video, it's not something totally different.

So, when you are setting out to create a video for YouTube, the title is probably the most important thing. You want a title that's going to draw people in, but then you also want to make sure that you deliver on that title. If you are going to say that you have the best video on SEO ever, you better make it the best video on SEO ever. Otherwise, people are going to say, "That's lame." They're not going to click through. They're not going to respond. They're not going to do anything. So title is your first and most powerful tool. You're going to want to do the keyword research and make sure you have a call to action in your title.

Second is description. You want to write a real description for your videos. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a video, and it's like a link to your website is the only description in there. Or, "This is a great video on . . ." and it has like one keyword in it. Write a description. Talk about what your video is all about, what makes it unique. Put some keywords in there, but write it from a real perspective. Make sure you put a link in there to whatever you want, fully qualified URL, and it will light up so that people can click on it. But the real purpose of the description is to make sure that you describe it.

Content is king, and this is a place for you to make sure that you have content. For us, I make sure that my writers write the descriptions. They take time. We write 300 to 400 to 500 words in a lot of cases. Maybe we'll do 200 or 300 words, and then we'll add the transcription below. But you want to make sure that you have something unique that's really about the video. Take the time to write it. It's really worth it.

The third ranking factor on the content side is your tags. You want at least 10 tags. You want them to be keywords, you want to do your keyword research, and you want to make sure that they're relevant for the video. Something that's weird about YouTube that's a little different than Google is that you can have a video that's all about something, and if you don't use that keyword in there, it doesn't really do the semantic matching for you. So, you could have a video that's all about something, but if you don't spell it the right way or if you don't use the plural version versus the singular version, then YouTube won't even rank it. So you need to make sure, at least until Google gets better at it, that you put those tags in there that have both plural and singular. Do your keyword research. Again, make sure that you understand, what are people looking for that are going to need to watch this video.

The fourth YouTube ranking factor on the content side is transcription. This is something that most people don't know about. I'm going to tell you about it today. That is that YouTube has a feature where it's going to try to transcribe your video for you, and it is horrible at transcribing your video. If you've ever tried to read the transcription that it does by machine, it is awful. However, something else that they don't tell you is that they use those transcriptions to rank your video for keywords.

So, if you were to slip something, and there's actually been some tests done on this, where someone transcribes a video and throws in a word that isn't mentioned anywhere in the description, anywhere in the title, and then you type that in a search in YouTube and up comes that video. They are indexing the transcriptions. So take the time to go ahead and transcribe your video word for word. Upload the text file. It will match up the words. It will then make your video closed caption, which will increase your click through rate, and it will also allow you to rank better for that video. Just a quick tip on that. Definitely worth doing. If you're going to take all the time to make the video, take a few extra minutes and transcribe it and make it happen.

Number five, I put this under the content side of it, and that is your channel authority. You control your content, which means you control your authority. Google is looking for channels that have authority, and it's going to use that as a basis for your ranking. It's going to be easier for someone who consistently creates awesome video to rank for terms versus somebody who just throws up a random video. Now, it's a little bit controversial just in that YouTube also has the power to let any person with a cell phone rank really well for a video if they have enough engagement, which is what we're going to talk about in a minute. But all else equal, if you have a good channel that you have great content on and good engagement on your other videos, that's going to flow over i