12 Overlooked Ways to Help Your Video Rank Higher on YouTube

In today's blog at Target Marketing Magazine, we’ll discuss what YouTube looks for in your video, as well as tips you can use to give your video a better shot at ranking higher in search results. With YouTube currently as the second largest search engine on the internet, with 1 billion unique monthly visitors watching YouTube videos, enabling your marketing videos to rank higher can lead to more people discovering you.

Using these tools, you can …

Drive traffic to your website or landing page

Build your mailing list

And sell your products or services

It’s also important to point out that YouTube is the primary place you need upload your videos since the other players are small, and shrinking in their ability to attract organic search.

Here are a dozen steps that marketers sometimes overlook that can enhance your video’s ranking on YouTube.

1. YouTube has a feature called Playlists that allows users to group videos into a single list or collection. If your video is added to someone’s Playlist, it can increase the power of your video to rank higher. Playlists can be interpreted as social signals about videos that are popular or valuable to YouTube users. Google is integrating social signals into its search algorithms, making it even more important to encourage interaction.

2. Build an authoritative YouTube channel. If your channel is new, don’t expect to have good rankings to start. But once you have an established channel with several videos and a growing list of subscribers, your videos will rank more highly in the search results.

3. Upload videos regularly. Videos in your channel which are updated regularly will help all of your videos rank higher. If you don’t upload videos regularly, your videos will lose rankings. Frequent uploading is seen to indicate relevance.

4. Respond to comments on YouTube in the first few hours after you publish a video. These first viewers are your core audience and building comments early helps increase the video’s ranking in search.

5. Total video views are another factor in your video ranking high. How do you get views for a new video you’ve posted? Announce it to your list or on social media. If you can, embed it on high traffic websites, or consider starting an inexpensive pay-per-click campaign to boost views.

6. Time watched on your video is important. Quality content will lengthen the time viewers watch your video.. Within YouTube analytics you can see bar charts that indicate at what point in your video your viewers drop off. Watch for that point on the analytics report to see what was said on your video that would result in a drop-off.

7. Annotations are another way to keep viewers on your video. You can include hyperlinks to other videos that are related to your topic, or playlists or your channel.

8. A new feature called “in video programming” enables you to showcase a thumbnail hyperlink to your most popular video. This helps extend time watched. Insert it just before the point where you lose your average viewer in your top videos.

9. A “like” on your video is a good thing. Consider asking viewers to “like,” it, and don’t forget to encourage likes in the text of your video’s description.

10. The number of places your video is embedded can enhance your ranking. Embed your video on your website, in a blog, an article, or even a press release.

11. Ask your viewers to share your video. That adds to social signals. If you email a link to your list, ask your readers to share it. If you post your video on social media, again, ask your followers to share it.

12. Ask viewers to become subscribers to your channel. One way to do that is to use annotations in your video asking viewers to subscribe.

As a reminder, help your videos rank higher on YouTube using keywords, closed-captioning, incoming links and social signals. It's in this video, YouTube Video Search Rankings - 10 tips to improve results.

Finally, if you have additional tips to add to this list of strategies to make videos rank higher on YouTube, please share them in the comments section below.