I am often surprised at how organizations take the time and effort to create high-quality videos yet give little thought to optimizing them so they rank well in YouTube search results. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, so the potential payoff is huge.
YouTube’s Algorithm
YouTube’s algorithm uses a variety of criteria to rank videos, with large channels receiving preferential treatment. Note that YouTube determines a channel’s size based on its number of subscribers, views, and likes/comments it receives.
When creating a video, you signal to YouTube what your video is about through tags (i.e. search terms) and including them in the title and description of the video. It doesn’t mean you will necessarily rank well for that term but it does put you in the running. When a large channel chooses tags for its video, it’s likely that it will rank well for that term and many related ones it didn’t choose because it’s seen as having a lot of authority. Smaller channels need to be more strategic. They can do this by choosing tags that aren’t being targeted by too many large channels.
A Tool Worth Using
Morningfame is a tool I’ve been using lately that does a great job of revealing these golden opportunities. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you are thinking of making a video about helping refugees. If you enter “helping refugees” into their search box, it will show how your channel stacks up against competing channels already ranking for that term.
It does this by assigning separate letter grades for subscribers, views, and likes/comments as shown below. The more competition you face for each of the those categories the lower your grade. The fourth column – relevance – indicates how many competing channels are targeting that exact term. Ideally, you would receive a score of D or better for the three metrics and an A for relevance.
Of particular importance is how your channel compares to what Morningfame calls a gateway video. Simply put, this is a video you are competing against that was released by a channel smaller than yours and for which you stand a good chance of ranking higher. As long as the gateway video shows up fairly high in the search results you have a good chance of ranking high for your chosen tags.
What I really like is that the tool also indicates how much search volume a term is getting on a scale of 1-100 so you can decide if it’s worth it. If you find that the term isn’t a good fit, the search box suggests other terms to check out as well.
And the best part? It costs less than $5 a month with no long term commitment. Use this link to get the first month for free and let me know what you think.
Please note that this blog post is not promotional and I have not been paid by Morningfame.