YouTube SEO: How To Rank Higher On YouTube
Posted on December 12, 2024
Learn how to optimize your videos for better ranking on YouTube. Drive brand awareness, engage your audience, and unlock new revenue streams with an effective video strategy.
Although YouTube is owned by Google, it’s a unique platform with a different approach to algorithms and discovery to Google Search.
YouTube’s systems take a viewer-first approach, evaluating a user’s preferences and interests based on the data it has about their viewing habits and pulling lists of videos unique to that user.
It also prioritizes signs of video quality, especially user engagement and user satisfaction, much more than metadata.
YouTube search is one of several systems that deliver videos, and while you can rank for specific keywords and search terms, it’s also weighted heavily toward personalization and user satisfaction.
Many videos may not perform well in search but will draw traffic from other discovery systems on the platform – and user journeys don’t include YouTube Search much of the time.
Ranking on YouTube is only one part of a complex relationship between you, your content, and your audience. If you want to build a successful YouTube strategy, then you must expand your thinking beyond ranking.
How YouTube Can Benefit SEO
YouTube has two key benefits for SEO.
YouTube is the second-biggest social media platform, with 2.5 billion monthly active users. An effective video strategy can drive brand awareness and engage your audience. It can also create a unique revenue stream through advertising and channel memberships.
YouTube videos can also appear in organic Google search results, and there is a tab for “videos” in Google Search. A video strategy can be critical to user experience, depending on the audiences you serve and how they prefer to interact.
I feel strongly that you should learn about YouTube’s algorithms even if you’re not committed to a YouTube strategy.
YouTube is a Google property, and even though there’s unlikely cross-pollination between YouTube’s and Google’s algorithms, YouTube is an excellent look at what Google prioritizes when it has access to every data metric and every user journey.
It’s a closed environment that it controls, which does not describe Search (despite its best efforts). Learning to succeed on YouTube can absolutely make you a better SEO.
How Do Videos Rank On YouTube?
To understand SEO on YouTube, you need to understand how the algorithm works and what its different systems prioritize. YouTube has multiple systems that deliver videos to users.
Each system acts using different sets of signals. There are general algorithmic priorities and then specific functions of systems that weigh different signals in different ways .
Generally, the different signals the YouTube uses fall under two categories:
Personalization.
Performance.
Under these categories, there are hundreds of individual signals.
Signals that fall under personalization include:
A user’s activity history tied to their account or browser.
A user’s activity history in the current session.
A user’s subscriptions, liked videos, notification preferences, and other interaction signals.
Search terms that users input.
Device type.
Time of day.
Signals that fall under performance include:
Total hours of watch time.
Average view duration/percentage of video viewed.
User satisfaction surveys.
Whether users ignore a video or click “not interested.”
Comments, likes, and subscriptions that a video generates.
User behavior while watching a video (skipping forward or back).
User behavior after watching a video (going back to their search, clicking on a new video, etc.).
Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/youtube-seo-video-optimization/260757/
