This article is for Youtube SEO, mostly. It talks about how to plan video content, what factors are considered by the YouTube Algorithm in how it ranks videos, how to optimise our video content, and what can kill your videos and channel. Mostly this article is meant to blow your mind, so hold onto your butts.
Understanding Youtube
Youtube prefers channels that are based on a particular niche. Lets say your niche is plumbing. So your main keyword is going to be something like:
Plumbing
Easy right, but not everyone gets this. When a channel produces consistent videos around a particular topic, the channel will start to rank organically for these keywords. Using a site like www.answerthepublic.com and www.keywordseverywhere.com/ we can see some potential places to start for the word plumbing, and its associated keyword search volume in Google.
From a very quick look over the keyword volume, the keyword “why plumbing is so expensive” seems like an obvious video to start on. A video like this helps you persuade your potential client why they should be spending the right amount on you or your staff. You can show off your expertise quite easily in a simple 5 min video of you on camera. When filming obviously get someone into film you, we could for sure help you.
Here are some section you could use in your video.
1. Expertise
2. Time
3. Materials
4. Payment Model
5. Experience Level
6. Repair Service Or Replace Service
7. Distance
8. Trade School
9. Licensing And Certification
10. Insurance
Rankings factors for YouTube videos
No one factor alone is what drives a video’s success, while Google, YouTube’s owners doesn’t give this information out freely. From the testing I’ve done I can conclude consistent ranking factors are:
Views
The more views the more favored in the algo. You can pay for views.
Watch time
The amount of time people watch a video, the more watch time the more favored in the algo. You can pay for watch time.
Comments
Both negative and positive comments on a video, 10 to 20 comments on a video is enough, you can pay for comments.
Likes
Both negative and positive reactions on a video. You can pay for likes.
Favourites
When someone clicks favourite on a video. You can pay for people to list your video as a favourite.
Channel Subscribes, after a view
When someone watched a video then becomes a subscriber.
Embedding a video
When someone embeds a video on a website or web 2.0.
Video & Channel optimisation
I’ll get onto this later.
Click through rate
This is when someone searches for the example keyword: Why plumbing is so expensive, and they click on the first video this is called a click through.
People who keep clicking on the 3rd video down can eventually make that video position 1 above the Texas Beard adventures video.
Click through rate is ranked probably highest amongst the ranking signals that YouTube will use. It’s very difficult for a bot to have this behaviour and still be recorded as human behaviour, but we know a way around using bots. We have access to a network of over 2 million world wide workers that will do all of this behaviour that youtube likes manually without using bots.
Interaction velocity
The best way to time interaction on a video is right at the start. The minute you have posted it… The minute you post your content.
The more concentrated the interactions on a video during the moment a video goes live the more important it is. If you leave your interaction to months down the line, this has significantly less effect on the virality of the video. Once a video is ranked there isn’t much more you can do apart from re-uploading the video, which is a common practice.
For any given video to start getting ranked we need about 100
interactions on each video, this means views, likes, comments etc all from one user. It’s unfair to ask your staff to do this, asking your staff to do this long term will be like herding cats. We offer this as a service. We can find the people to do work manually.
Day 1 to 2
1 set of interactions from 30 people
Day 3 to 4
1 set of interactions from 30 people
Day 5 to 6
1 set of interactions from 10 people
These workers will do the following activity.
Views
Watch time
Comments
Likes
Favourites
Click another videos on the channel to watch
etc…
These workers have to provide evidence that they have done this work. Which is something you would want your staff, family and friends to do, but this is a big ask to do this over a long period of time.
If you do go the path of asking your staff to do this, they can’t be using the same IP, it’s
important that people do this on their mobile phones, off wifi. They do this on a mobile phone after searching for the thumbnail we show the staff. If we send a link in an email YouTube can track this is happening, and can have a negative impact on rankings. Ideally your staff would use their own gmail account, which has been aged for years hopefully. Aged accounts are a ranking factor.
Optimisation
Optimization channel / Video
Keyword at the start of the video title
Keyword at the start of the description
Keyword verbally mentioned in the first 20 seconds of a video
Keyword mentioned throughout the video
Keyword written in the thumbnail
Keyword in the video’s filename you upload
Keyword in the video’s metadata that you upload
Keyword in the thumbnail file name you upload
Keyword in the thumbnail metadata you upload
Placement of keyword at the start of a video title, but right at the start so something like:
Plumbing and why it is so expensive
What I wrote is a better title than what they wrote,see below. So i suspect getting to the No.1 spot is easier than you think. They don’t seem to be optimising their video. If you look at the numbers my tool gives me it says SEO 8/10 so they done a bad job. They probably didn’t optimise the video and got that score by luck.
Roger Wakefield got his spot genuinely without optimising their video, this is probably all organic work. The channel has focused on plumbing from the quick look I gave it, plus he is a provider so his site most likely links to the video giving it more SEO juice. Given that Roger Wakefield’s site has the same keyword mentioned many times, this is also a ranking factor, when the site embeds the video, or links back to the video.
Description
So just like an article on a website, you need to have a good amount of rich keywords and supporting keyword text. These articles can be automated and created by a number of tools such as: Jasper.ai, Article Forge, but this is spammy. You can use tools like this to save time, it depends on your strategy.
Tags
7 tags that have been keyword researched, these will be easy to find as these will be in your keyword research spread sheet. Don’t ask me why 7 tags work the best, perhaps 10 seems too spammy, and 1 doesn’t give Youtube enough metadata to understand what the video is about, to place it in search results.
End cards
A graphic ending that can have space for 2 videos and a subscribe button. Most recent video uploaded, this is either updated by Youtube or a tool that is automating this process.
Regular videos
So just like an article on a website, you need to have a good amount of rich keywords and supporting keyword text. These articles can be automated and created by a number of tools such as: Jasper.ai, Article Forge, but this is spammy. You can use tools like this to save time, it depends on your strategy.
Misc
Techniques that don’t work anymore:
Proxies will kill your account
The same IP over and over again having activity on a video
Watching
Liking
Etc…
Having the same video in a playlist listed a few times over, then playing over and over again on shuffle on the same IP
Too many inauthentic backlinks to a video, like buying 1million links from fiverr for $5 will kick the video out of the rankings.
Some bot behaviour, bots are risky but do work, how how long through this depends on how good the engineers at Google are at spotting bots.
Using the same IP or even proxy and the PC to login to different accounts and leave comments , views, shares etc Google can see right through a proxy, as it’s keeping a log of known non domestic IP’s and proxies.
A group of people only watching from the same IP but on different PC’s / mobile phones connected to the same IP.
Negeative SEO
So there are ways to get videos and website out of the search results, this is known as negative SEO, I’ve not done enough research to work out if this is happening in our niche but it does happen, I’ve seen it happening in:
Crypto currency
Legal
Psychotherapy
Automotive
etc…
Pretty much any niche that has high profits will attract negative SEO. Any of the previous things that don’t work can be tried on an opponent’s video, and it’s hard to tell if it happened even to our own videos.
Monetisation.
Obviously, you can monetise your channel. You might already meet the criteria for making money on the YouTube channel. For example for every 1 million views we get we make about $3500 just from ad revenue alone on the videos.
Affiliate commision.
This is where you can leave links in the description for people to click on. Think click on our sponsored link from Glasswire, if people sign up with our link you make money.