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How To Get More Views On Your YouTube Videos

Videos are a great way to engage with your users. More and more people are turning to video content as their favourite type of content, because it is the easiest to consume. If you haven’t already, you should certainly be considering putting together a video strategy.

Creating videos for your business and website can seem a little bit daunting, especially when you think you don’t have the time or proper equipment to make a quality video. Well, the good news is that you don’t actually need to spend a lot of money on fancy equipment, and it doesn’t actually take that long to create.

You only have to take a look at Google’s search engine results page to see just how much real estate video is taking. Google is placing more and more emphasis on videos, so if you don’t have any, you are missing out completely on getting more valuable results page real estate for your website.

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Google knows just how much users love video these days, which is why they are putting more and more weight on this type of content. You’ll see that pretty much all of the videos displayed on the results page come from YouTube; this is because Google owns YouTube.

So, while it is a good idea to hold any videos on your own website, you should also consider setting up a YouTube channel and uploading your videos there as well. YouTube is probably one of the most popular video sharing platforms, so if you want to get eyeballs to your videos, then here is a good place to start.

Many businesses try to get the ball rolling on their YouTube channel but they struggle with getting subscribers and video views. This is because you can’t just upload a video and hope that people will see it, you have to ensure you have a proper video strategy and plan, as well as that your channel and videos are optimised.

You are probably thinking how do you do all this? Well, have a read on below to find out how you can get more views for your YouTube videos:

Add YouTube Tags

While some believe that YouTube tags aren’t really that important, it only takes a couple of minutes to fill out and it could give you that slight edge over other videos. In your videos you should always have a set of keywords that you are looking to target, so adding tags shouldn’t be that difficult.

In best practice, you should start with the main keyword of your video as your first tag. Then other relevant keywords that are included in your video could follow after. It is then a good idea to look for any high volume keywords that your video relates to and include those additional tags as well.

By adding a tag to your YouTube video, it makes it that much easier for a user to find your videos. While tags aren’t necessarily the most important aspect to consider with your YouTube videos, it is still worthwhile adding them in for each of your videos.

Choose Your Topics Wisely

It sounds so simple, but sometimes people forget about the basics – you need to create videos on topics that people are actually searching for. If you create a video and no one is searching for or cares about the topic, then that is a sure fire way to get little to no video views.

So, when choosing your topics, it is important to have a look at keyword search volume. There are a number of online keyword research tools available (that are free) which can help you find the right keywords to target in your videos.

You need to think about your video topics from a users perspective, and not just your own. How will the user search for terms in YouTube? This is the way you need to phase your keywords and choose the topics.

It could also be a good idea to see what others are doing in the topic you are thinking about creating a video for. See what videos in this topic area have a high number of views and which ones don’t. You can then see the type of videos that people searching for this topic tend to engage with the best.

Keywords are an essential component, as it will determine the topics you cover in your videos. Make sure you undertake proper keyword research because you don’t want to use resources on a keyword that isn’t that popular at all.

Include Videos on Website

This was touched on in the introduction, it is a good idea to ensure that you have videos on your website as well as on your YouTube channel. A great place to include videos on your website is on your blog (if you have one).

No one really likes to read paragraph after paragraph of content, so having video will help break things up for you. As well as this, you would know just how much traffic your site gets and how many people visit certain pages. By including videos here, it is another place and another chance for users to watch (and increase your video views).

You don’t even have to create a new video for every new blog post you create. All you need to do is use common sense and find the most relevant video you have that matches up with your blog content.

Not only will this work to improve your video views, but also you may actually find that it also improves engagement data on your blog. This is data that Google looks for when ranking sites, so if you have good engagement on a certain page, you are more likely to see an uplift in rankings.

Publish at the Right Time

Like a lot of other things in life, timing is everything! Now you may be thinking, well when is the right time to publish? Good news for you is that YouTube provide that data on your users, so you can see the most popular times where a majority of your users are active. This type of reporting is very new from YouTube, so take the data with a grain of salt.

Obviously, it makes sense to upload a video when more users are online. But you can also find a lot of research online about when the best time is to post. You may find a bit of conflicting information online though. This is because different types of users have different patterns. Also if you are targeting an international audience, this is something you need to consider as well.

It is a good idea to try not to post right in the peak, because that’s probably the time that everyone else is posting their videos as well. Look to post around one hour before the peak, that way your video has a little bit more time to get established and more views.

Get Your Videos to Rank on Google

Also touched on in the introduction was Google’s increasing emphasis on videos and YouTube. There is now more space then ever solely dedicated to videos. So, you need to ensure that you are properly optimising your videos for Google because it can certainly work wonders for your video views.

If you are looking to get your videos ranking on Google, the first place you should start is other videos that are ranking in Google for your targeted keyword. They are obviously doing something right! Have a look at all the videos and find the common threads, you should then go apply this to your own videos.

This is where having a proper headline, description, tags etc. are really important. And you can’t forget about keyword research as well! All the typical SEO optimisation tactics that you would use to rank your own website can and should be transferred to ensure your videos have the best chance of a higher rank.

Optimised Title

This is one of the aspects you need to consider when trying to improve your ranks on Google, but it is pretty important for video views as well so it deserves its own little section! Your title is one of the big factors that will help users make the decision if that want to watch your video or not.

We always say “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” but the fact of the matter is that people still do, so you need to get creative with the title of your video to hopefully boost views. If you want to increase your click through rate of your videos, then you need to think about what is the most compelling title, and how it will stand out from other similar videos.

The biggest piece of advice is to keep the title as short as possible, you do not want a massive title or the “…” to appear and cut off your title. Here it is all about compromise, you want to be descriptive, but as short as possible. A never-ending balancing act!

Also, like with titles on your blog or your meta title, you need to include your keyword in your title on your YouTube video. YouTube works in a similar way to Google in that people type keywords in and it spits out a heap of results. Your title is an important place for keywords to live, you should include your most important one here.

Find Your Niche

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If you have ever been on YouTube before (which you probably have), you would know just how many videos there are on this platform. No matter what type of business or website you run, there is bound to be competition, the wider your audience, the harder and more competition there seems to be.

So, this is why it is a good idea to narrow down and find your SEO niche. If you find something that not a lot of other people are doing then you can dominate in that space and get a large majority of the video views. But remember you still have to choose topics that people are actually searching for!

Final Thoughts

Videos are awesome for a number of different reasons, users love them and search engines love them as well. If you haven’t already you should look to include videos either on your website or on YouTube (or both!). YouTube is one of the biggest video sharing platforms so if you want eyeballs, this is the place to go.

One of the things you should be aiming for on your YouTube channel is to increase the number of video views. Now, this is certainly a lot easier said than done. But the good news is that there are a lot of different tactics you can deploy in order to get views ticking along.