YouTube Search Ranking and Its Impact On Your YouTube Marketing Campaign

YouTube made a new update on its Video Discovery by rewarding videos that keep viewers fully engaged as measured by watch time. After a series of split-tests and experiments, YouTube have proven that videos that cause viewers to spend more viewing time will be duly rewarded over videos with shorter viewing times.

This is a bit confusing and many people have misunderstood this update. This doesn’t mean that longer videos will be favored over shorter ones. The focus of this update is not the video length but on the overall watch time of the users.

For a better understanding of the YouTube video update, take for instance there are two videos; one has a length of one hour while the other is short with a length of only 5 minutes. The one-hour video is somehow boring and most people watched it for an average of only 10 minutes and then leave to watch another video.

The 5-minute video, on the other hand, was professionally made with interesting and valuable content that most viewers watched the entire file to the end. Which of the two files that YouTube will reward with higher ranking position? Obviously, the 5-minute video even if it is watched only for 5 minutes.

The whole point of the update is that videos should be greatly appreciated by the viewers, causing them to watch the entire show, to socially engage by sharing the file to their friends in different social networks, to like the video, and to embed the video in their blogs. These are signs of good quality, which is actually the main essence of the update. So the next time that you create a video for upload in YouTube, make sure to do it professionally, not only in terms of video resolution quality but also with retrospect to content.

With this update, YouTube projected that channels will greatly benefit from having more viewing time and less distraction. This will potentially increase the engagement among viewers in the comment section and boost likes and shares.

Also included in the update is the enhanced YouTube Analytics with addition of Time Watched reporting. This feature allows you to effectively monitor the performance of each video and channel. With this tool, you can see the estimated watching time of video files. You can compare different metrics, as well, using the Compare Metrics tool that allows you to simultaneously monitor the progress and performances of two metrics.

You can now also use the Annotation report beta version if you would like to track your videos’ performance in terms of close rates and clicks. Take note that annotations are very useful in driving your audience to engage in YouTube. You can also use this in engaging online customer if your file is about your brand or your company.

Marketing with YouTube

If you are optimizing your blog for Google then you must also do the same for your YouTube files, considering that YouTube is now dubbed as the second largest search engine. Aside from that, it has amassed about the same huge size of user-base with Facebook, now numbering at more than 800 million worldwide subscribers. This makes YouTube a pot of gold of prospects, which you must tap onto improve your business online.

Therefore, you must also begin to treat YouTube like Google. So when you upload a video file, the next steps to make are to directly promote your file to your target audience, as well as start optimizing your video so that it will show up in front page of YouTube’s internal search engine.

Just like in Google, files that show up in the front pages get the bigger slice of the page views for certain search query phrase. If your videos are nowhere to be found in the top pages, you will find it hard to increase the number of views to your videos unless you are doing direct advertising and direct marketing.

YouTube is now owned by Google after its acquisition in 2006. But the ranking algorithm is quite different from the ones Google is using today. Optimizing your video files still poses a challenge especially for marketers who have just ventured into video marketing.

How YouTube Ranks Videos

Unlike Google that has very intricate ranking algorithms, YouTube’s system of ranking files is simpler. The features of its internal search engine, also called as video discovery, gives more focused on the watch time and video popularity as measured by the number of page views, votes, likes and comments, among others.Thus, your optimization process should focus more on these parameters to quickly achieve success.

Tips on Optimizing Videos for Higher Ranking in YouTube Search Engine

Insert the Keywords You Are Targeting in the Title and Description

To properly position your videos to your target audience, it is advisable to include the keyword phrase in the title and in the description. This works the same way as search engine optimization. Hence, you can use your SEO skills and techniques in this aspect.

The description is similarly important. This must be reflective of the content and it should provide users an overview on what the video is all about. This is also important when optimizing your YouTube file for the search engines like Google. The description helps in attracting search engine users to choose your YouTube file over the other blogs in the same page.

Create an Eye-Catching Title

Your title greatly influences the number of page views. You must, therefore, make it unique and interesting to ensure that it grabs the attention of the users. Always remember that there are about 4 billion videos being watched every day. This means that it is relatively very competitive inside YouTube.

Due to the vast amount of files, your video upload is like a single grain of sand on the seashore. It is quite hard to distinguish it from the rest, unless it has some uniqueness that grabs the attention of the users.

Thus, make it stand out among the crowd in order to be recognized, and one way of doing that is to have a stunning headline that attracts viewers to check your file. Your title is in-charge of capturing more viewers once it is shown or featured at the top of the result pages.

Ask Your Viewers to Like and Share Your Video

Getting to the top pages of YouTube search results is more of a numbers’ game in terms of likes and shares. A single like is equivalent to a vote of popularity. It is like a single backlink to a web page in SEO world, and it is one of the parameters used by the video discovery to rank video files. Therefore, get more likes and ask your viewers to share your videos with their fans and followers.

YouTube Update and Your Video Marketing

The impact of the most recent YouTube update on your video marketing is insignificant if your video files have good quality with excellent watch time. But if they were poorly-made that viewers barely watched the entire file, the effect may be substantial since poor-quality videos are pushed down to the farther pages of the search results. This may affect your targeted website visitors from YouTube, but you can easily recover the lost page views by simply uploading more high-grade quality videos.