YouTube is a great site for businesses to utilize. What makes it great is that you can find success without dumping money into the platform itself. You can put money into the production of the videos, but plenty of YouTube channels from individuals and companies get lots of views without spending anything more than their time.
Time is the most important resource for making a video on YouTube and it’s just as important to the success of a YouTube channel. If you have time, you can get the YouTube views you want, the brand recognition you want, and potentially a new source of revenue that you should always want.
But getting those views isn’t easy, so we can walk you through the most important goals you need to get YouTube views.
How Does YouTube’s Search Algorithm Work?
To understand how you get YouTube views, you need to understand how the algorithm works. It takes two things into consideration first:
- The current performance of a video
- The search history of the viewer
The performance of a video is used to decide if these videos are something worth pushing in front of YouTube users; the search history of the viewer is used to create a social profile of sorts that helps to decide what videos to recommend to the viewer’s home page.
These qualifiers are also used in other various ways. The current performance of a video decides whether or not it’ll be recommended among trending videos. Only the best-performing videos match these. The profile of the viewer is then used to decide what is suggested to them as they watch a video.
Beware of Exceptions
There are exceptions to every rule. For instance, when you type in the search bar, YouTube uses a keyword system to decide whether it’s a good idea to recommend a video. If your video’s title, title tags, or descriptions match the searched term, your video can come up. If it matches the search term more than a more popular video, your video can be recommended first in the search results. It is a system that’s incredibly similar to SEO.
Exceptions are a part of the process, so don’t be discouraged or confused if other channels find success in ways that don’t seem to work for you. There are YouTube channels that have found success doing the opposite of what we’re about to suggest. That doesn’t mean it will work for you, but we can make educated guesses on how likely your success will be compared to someone else.
Strategies to Get YouTube Views
The content of the video isn’t as important to getting views, strangely. A terribly made video can get millions of views, and a well-made video can be seen by no one. Make what you think feels appropriate and accomplish a goal. This can be brand recognition, lead capture, or client retention. Then work on getting people to watch it.
Don’t Launch Your Channel Without Videos
This is important for businesses that haven’t made YouTube channels yet. If you have and haven’t posted many or any videos, consider making a new one and transferring videos over to it if you went a long period of time without posting videos.
From the moment your channel launches, YouTube is calculating and weighing your channel’s success. You want to get some interaction rather than nothing because that will ruin your YouTube metrics in the long term. If you go a month without videos, you go a month without views, and YouTube will take that as a sign that you make content no one wants to see. That sounds unfair because you have no content for anyone to see yet, so why would YouTube think that? We agree it doesn’t make sense, but that’s how it works.
So make sure you have at least one video finished and made before you try to upload it. Preferably, you want to have 3-4 on your channel when it launches. They don’t have to be the same length or have the same goal, but have more than just one video for people to watch. That way, people can jump from one video to another, which also looks good on YouTube. If you start with one video, it looks like your channel doesn’t retain viewers. YouTube doesn’t properly take into account the fact that you can’t retain viewers with one video. Again, unfair, but that’s how it works.
Target Keywords With Your Titles and Thumbnails
Don’t forget that Google has owned YouTube for over 15 years now. They have fully integrated with each other, which means they use many similar systems. The most obvious is the keyword system. When you’re considering what to title your video, check the performance of keywords beforehand. You want to take note of:
- How many videos YouTube has shown you before YouTube needs to change your search term to find more results.
- How many views do the videos have in your search results.
If you don’t receive many search results before YouTube has to alter your search terms, you can target that keyword without getting a lot of competition. Remember, though, that low competition doesn’t mean high traffic. YouTube video titles can be long, so you can fit more than one good keyword in them, so a keyword with these results shouldn’t be the main target.
If you’re getting many videos and with a lot of views, they have a lot of traffic and competition too. You may not want to focus on that keyword, because your effort is not likely to be rewarded.
The best case scenario when researching keywords is to get a lot of search results with inconsistent view counts, or few search results with a lot of views. The former is a good scenario because it means that there is likely an audience for it. With a good thumbnail, you can capture the traffic others aren’t. The latter is usually a better scenario, but rarer. In this scenario, your keyword gets a lot of traffic and has little competition.
Important to remember that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes highly viewed videos hit for long-hanging keywords that don’t bring them much traffic. Note the titles and thumbnails of the videos as well to see if they’re only tangentially related. The closer they are to what your video is, the more you’ll know about your keyword.
Post Consistently and Semi-Often
This is where time becomes more important than ever in getting YouTube views. If you don’t post consistently, whether that’s once a week or once a month, the YouTube algorithm will potentially stop suggesting your content.
People’s attention spans are short, and on YouTube, this is especially true. If you go on a break, people may unsubscribe and/or miss your videos when you come back. It’s hard to say if this happens and YouTube’s algorithm hurts your channel’s traffic, or if YouTube’s algorithm anticipates a drop in views after a drop in output and throttles your channel’s traffic.
Regardless, figure out what kind of schedule you can maintain. Being consistent will help you retain viewers, and keep YouTube’s algorithm from throttling your views if you’re late.
Contact a Marketing Firm That Understands YouTube Views
With video marketing, TikTok, and TikTok-like features coming to social media platforms all the time, YouTube is only going to get bigger. You can always dump video content you make on other platforms onto YouTube, but with careful planning, consideration, and dedication, you can make a YouTube channel that will stick around.
No one knows for years where social media platforms will settle after their big boom, but YouTube is eternal. Like Google, YouTube has become a verb in the English language with how much we use it. When it’s free to use, you’d be foolish to not consider using it for your business.
If you’re worried about the work and the time you’d have to put in, contact the experts at ENX2 Marketing. We can handle the video marketing for you.