Are you involved in YouTube optimization? Let’s talk about what you should track in your YouTube account to improve your video discovery and consumption.
Hello! And thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
There are two ways to get more views of your video. You can work to rank in Google search or the video tab, or you can get more traffic from YouTube itself – from your subscribers, people searching, browsing, or having the algorithm suggest your video to the user.
This tip is going to be focused on the YouTube bits.
And to set that up, keep in mind this quote from YouTube:
“Our goal is to get people to watch more videos that they enjoy so that they come back to YouTube regularly.” – YouTube
So First –Let’s talk about subscribers. You need to ask your viewers to subscribe, and now that YouTube has mentioned that they are going to stop emailing your subscribers and are now solely relying on web notifications. You really need to nudge your viewers to hit the “notification” button. You should also add a call to action to subscribe and click the notification button on your end cards.
While you might think that all of your subscribers get your notifications, it’s important to know that notifications to your users are impacted by YouTube’s algorithm. YouTube employees recently posted an explainer video on Creator Inside explaining:
“We don’t notify all of your subscribers….We notify all of your subscribers who have rung the bell and then your most active subscribers after that … If they don’t ring the bell and they’re just subscribers, then we put them in an ‘occasional notification’ state, so that means they get algorithmically determined notifications. Your most active subscribers, users who are watching your channel and your livestreams, are going to get notifications as soon as you go live.
To receive all notifications from a channel, users need to click on the bell icon to opt in to receive all notifications.”
So having a regular publishing schedule and going live on Youtube – those types of activities to encourage your viewers to anticipate new information from your channel will help them see your notifications.
You can also measure all of this activity inside YouTube Analytics, but a lot of these metrics are under the Advanced Mode in your YouTube studio account.
So you can (in the advanced mode) check to see what videos are driving subscribers and notification clicks.
Let’s talk about discovery and a few areas to check.
You want to ask yourself these types of questions:
- Where are your videos appearing and do you see any differences in click-through rate based on the traffic source?
- Can you promote more consistently?
- And what are your impressions vs CTR for those sources and how can you improve those?
Improving your CTR would involve improving your labeling or your thumbnails. And if you’re looking to discover the topics searched for on YouTube related to your video, Ahrefs provides YouTube keyword research, as does keyword.io.
And that thumbnail? At Wistia, they found that videos with custom human thumbnails receive a 30% higher play rate than those without.
“Your video thumbnail is more important than your title because it determines whether or not people will click,” says Nottingham.
To increase your discovery by users that are browsing, you should look at your video labeling and tags in relation to your competitors for the same topic on YouTube. TubeBuddy has some great tools to help with this analysis.
A piece of getting more YouTube traffic based on the algorithm is how much of each video people watch and whether they stay on YouTube to watch another video.
Inside the Advanced Analytics, you’re going to want to look at the average view duration per video. Any video below 50% is one you’re going to want to look at. YouTube provides a view duration graph with timestamps so you can see at what point of the video people dropped off – allowing you to edit the video and improve the retention rate.
Your goal is to keep your video retention as close to 100% as you can as videos with high retention and watch time have the potential to show up more frequently in search and suggested locations on YouTube.
Ok. So those are your tips for today related to improving the organic discovery of your videos using some of the metrics in YouTube’s Advanced Mode.
Thanks for listening.
Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous episode: Do you need a voice search plan?
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