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As the most-viewed site globally, YouTube is a must-visit destination for marketers and content creators looking to increase audience reach.
While it is possible to optimize YouTube SEO to score top results, without an understanding of the YouTube algorithm, SEO alone won’t manifest videos on a potential viewer’s suggested video list.
YouTube’s product chief underlined the reality of the impact of suggested-to-watch videos in an interview, noting 70% of a user’s time spent on the platform was dictated by the company’s suggested video algorithm.
70%. That number is huge.
To truly execute a successful YouTube marketing strategy, improve organic reach, and take advantage of that massive percentage, you need in-depth familiarity with the unique YouTube algorithm. Here are nine ways to increase your organic reach on YouTube.
What began as a venture capital-funded technology startup in 2006 is now our go-to spot for all things video.
Although YouTube itself has undergone significant changes over the past fifteen years, its algorithm has, by far, been its most dynamic feature.
Before 2012, YouTube charted video success by the number of views alone, regardless of the length of viewing. This singular YouTube algorithm led to a profusion of clickbait videos that relied upon misrepresentative headlines and thumbnails to earn views, with most audience members jumping ship immediately.
Later the same year, YouTube began measuring success through view duration, a metric that rewarded longer-viewed videos with increased search promotion.
Today, we still see the roots of the platform’s infancy in the current YouTube algorithm, which draws heavily on view duration as a component of a video’s ranking.
While YouTube’s stated mission is to give everyone a voice and a window to explore the world, one of YouTube’s lower-ranking goals is to engage viewers for extended amounts of time, maximizing the number of advertisement interactions.
Why does this secondary goal matter? Because YouTube suggests videos that satisfy this goal of increased exposure to advertiser content.
YouTube uses an algorithm based on three main qualifiers: relevance, engagement, and quality.
To benchmark relevance, YouTube explores the pairing of title, description, tags, and content with an individualized search query.
Engagement aggregates the number of responses from users, including watch time, engagement, and frequency.
Quality rating is determined by a channel’s ability to demonstrate trustable authority.
In addition to these three qualifiers, YouTube’s algorithm also draws on a user’s historical views and a video-specific assigned score, one that weighs both novelty and frequency of channel uploads, among other attributes.
This combination of statistics allows YouTube to recommend videos that speak directly to a viewer’s interests, continuing a narratively static viewing material chain.
These videos will appear in six different locations on the YouTube platform:
Much like any search algorithm, YouTube’s ranking system is in constant flux, evolving and adapting in an ongoing attempt to better define and satisfy user engagement.
Armed with a concrete understanding of how the YouTube algorithm works, it’s time to break down how you can harness your newfound knowledge to increase your organic reach.
YouTube made it explicitly clear in their algorithm explanation that content-relevant keywords, descriptions, captions, and tags all matter when you’re optimizing videos for search. Make sure you do your keyword researching using a tool like Ubersuggest to make sure you’re mentioning terms users are looking for.
By writing compelling, keyword-rich titles and descriptions, you increase your chances of attracting audience members’ attention and increasing your video’s search visibility.
Check out this post if you need to brush up on SEO basics.
The quote “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” is true of YouTube just as much as life.
Ensure audience engagement by crafting attention-getting copy that not only attracts your potential audience but also harnesses your keywords’ power.
YouTube slants toward the verbose, advocating long descriptions, so don’t be afraid to go the extra wordy mile with them.
Although your prospective viewer will only interact with the first few lines of the description unless they select the “show more” option, those few short lines are valuable real estate when it comes to attracting your audience.
Closed captions not only help those with accessibility needs, but allows users to watch videos in silence.
To make the most of closed captions, upload self-created subtitles. By uploading these yourself, you ensure that, when these captions are indexed for search, they are more accurate than automatically-generated ones, in many cases.
Because YouTube ranks videos by engagement, longer watch times mean more opportunities to earn the coveted suggested video inclusion.
If you’re struggling with viewer attrition rates, you’re going to want to tighten focus on your videos’ first few seconds and ensure you:
Don’t forget to study your audience retention graphs and pay attention to what those metrics are telling you.
These quick fixes help you further engage your audience, extending watch time, and earning your video a higher score via the YouTube algorithm.
Rather than simply ending your video, use various tactics to influence your audience’s next view.
By directing viewers to another video on your channel, you increase interaction and likelihood that they’ll return to interact with future content, both of which satisfy the YouTube algorithm’s engagement portion.
To direct your audience, use watermarks, end screens, and cards, all of which can be clicked and linked to your next video, ensuring continued viewing of your channel and content.
When viewers subscribe to your channel, you automatically increase your organic reach. To increase your number of subscribers, consistently create great content, videos viewers are dying to see.
While consistently creating great content may be easier said than done, it’s essential to building your channel. Create a channel trailer, reach out to influencers, and engage with all comments left on your videos.
If you’re looking for additional strategies to increase your subscribers, check out our YouTube Marketing Guide.
By crafting videos that continue a conversation, viewers are helpless to resist watching the next in the series.
To keep viewers on your channel, you can create playlists of videos with similar content: these are collections that will attract and sustain viewership.
Social channels are free advertising for your YouTube channel. Promote your videos on all your social accounts, website, and in your email marketing—anywhere you have an audience.
You can also publish a blog post with the video and a summary or transcription.
These numbers don’t just exist to make you feel good; they tell you what’s working well and when, and to identify who is watching what and when.
Conversely, these numbers also tell you what isn’t working, which is inarguably the more influential insight. By identifying what isn’t working, you can try new strategies and content, attempting to delight your audience and improve your reach through different approaches.
By digging deep into YouTube analytics, you can unearth realities about your videos and your audience, allowing you to tailor your creation process to suit the needs of the audience you’re trying to reach.
With over one billion hours of video watched per day on YouTube, it’s undeniable content creators and marketers need to take advantage of the platform to curate and grow their audiences.
By understanding how YouTube suggests videos, content creators and marketers can make their videos work harder and use its nuances to your benefit.
How you changed how you upload videos to satisfy the YouTube algorithm?
The post 9 Ways to Improve Organic Reach and Beat the YouTube Algorithm appeared first on Neil Patel.
Don’t worry… your traffic hasn’t gone down (or up) because of the Page Experience algorithm update hasn’t rolled out yet.
But it will in 2021 according to Google.
Due to the coronavirus, they decided to give us all a heads up on the future algorithm update and what it entails… that way you can adjust your website so your traffic doesn’t tank.
So, what’s the Page Experience update and how can you prepare for it?
In Google’s own words, here is what it means…
The page experience signal measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. Optimizing for these factors makes the web more delightful for users across all web browsers and surfaces, and helps sites evolve towards user expectations on mobile. We believe this will contribute to business success on the web as users grow more engaged and can transact with less friction.
In other words, they are looking for how usable your website is.
Here’s an example of what they don’t want…
As you can see from the graphic above, the user was trying to click on “No, go back”, but because an install bar popup up at the top, it pushed the whole page down and caused the user to accidentally click on “Yes, place my order.”
The purpose of this update is to make sure that sites that rank at the top aren’t creating experiences that users hate.
The simplest way to think about this update is that user-friendly sites will rank higher than sites that aren’t user friendly.
But this change is the start of a big shift in SEO.
What sites do you think that Google wants to rank at the top?
Take a guess…
Maybe sites with the best backlinks?
Or sites with the buttoned up on page code?
It’s actually none of those.
Google wants to rank the sites at the top that users love the most.
Here’s what I mean…
When you want to buy athletic shoes, what brand comes to mind?
If I had to guess, I bet you’ll say Nike.
And if you were to get a credit card… I bet Visa, American Express, or Mastercard will come to mind.
This is why brand queries (the number of users who search for your brand name on Google and click on your website) impact rankings, which I’ve broken down as one of the most important SEO lessons I learned.
Just look at how the Neil Patel brand has grown over time… the graph below shows the number of people searching for my name over time:
And here is my SEO traffic over time:
As your brand grows so will your SEO traffic.
But that is old news, that’s been part of Google’s algorithm for years now.
Here is the thing though, most sites don’t have large brands and Google knows that. So, if you don’t have one, you can still rank.
At my ad agency, when we look at our clients and their growth over time, only 4% have large well-known brands. The other 96% are still seeing traffic growth.
What Google is doing is adapting its algorithm to more closely align with the mission of showing the sites first that users love the most.
And yes, brand queries are one of the ways they can do this, but user experience is another metric.
Over the next few years, I bet you will see many algorithm updates focusing on user experience.
So how do you optimize your user experience?
If you look at the original article Google posted about the future algorithm change, they emphasize “page experience” or “website experience.”
It doesn’t mean that your whole website shouldn’t have a good user experience, but instead, I bet they are going to focus on their algorithm from a page-level basis.
Because if you have a few pages on your websites that have a poor experience, but the rest are good, it wouldn’t make sense for Google to reduce the rankings of your whole site, especially if many of your pages provide a much better experience than your competition.
Here’s how you optimize your user experience:
The faster your website loads, the better experience you’ll have.
Go to this page and enter in your URL.
You’ll then see a report that looks like this:
You’ll notice two important aspects of that report that impact user experience that I’ve highlighted in the screenshot above.
In the health checkbox, you’ll want to make sure there are no broken pages. Broken pages create bad experiences.
In the site speed box, you’ll see the load time of your site. The faster your site loads the better. Try to get your website load time for both desktop and mobile under 3 seconds.
Ideally you should be in the 1-second range if possible.
You may think you have an amazing user experience, but how does it stake up to your competition?
So go here and type in your biggest competitor.
I want you to go into the navigation and click on “Top Pages.”
You should see a report like this:
The Top Pages report shows the most popular pages on your competition’s site from an SEO perspective. The pages at the top are the ones with the most SEO traffic, which means they are doing something right.
I want you to go through their top 50 pages. Seriously, their top 50 pages, and look at the user experience of each of those pages.
What is it that they are doing? How does their content quality compare to yours? What are the differences between their website compared to yours?
For each page that ranks, I also want you to click on “View All” under the “Est. Visits” heading. This will show you all of the keywords each page ranks for.
When evaluating your competition’s user experience, keep in mind how they are delighting people who search for any of those keywords. This will give you an idea of what you need to do as well.
But your goal shouldn’t be to match your competition, it should be to beat your competition.
Remember the graphic I showed above of what Google doesn’t want? Where the user tried to click on “No, go back” instead of “Yes, place my order” due to design issues.
In most cases you won’t have that issue, but you will have other usability issues.
The way you find usability issues is through heatmaps. Just like this one:
What you can do to find usability issues is run a Crazy Egg test on your site.
Once you log into Crazy Egg, you’ll see a dashboard that looks like this:
On the top right, I want you to click on “Create New” and select “Snapshot.”
Then select “Multiple Snapshots.”
From there, you’ll want to add at least 3 popular URLs on your site. Over time you’ll want to do this with all of your popular pages.
Then you’ll see settings like the image below, you don’t need to do anything here. Just click “Next.”
You’ll then be able to review everything. If it looks good, you can click the “Create Snapshots” button in the bottom right.
Last but not least, you’ll have to install your tracking script.
So, click on “Install Tracking Script.”
Select the option that works for you and then you are off and to the races. For example, for NeilPatel.com I use WordPress so I would select the WordPress option.
Once you are setup, it will take at least a day to see results, if not a bit longer. It depends on your traffic.
If you get thousands of visitors to your site each day you’ll see results within a few hours.
After you set up your test and it has been a few days, log back into Crazy Egg and click on Snapshots in the sidebar.
Once you are there you will see a list of snapshots you have created.
Click on any of your snapshots and you’ll see a heatmap of how people are engaging with your web page.
What’s cool about snapshots is they show you every single click, or even scroll that people take. Just look at this example from the NeilPatel.com site.
As you can see, people are clicking on those images above the text. But there is an issue… can you guess what it is?
If you click those images, nothing happens. But for all of those people to click on those images, it means that they believe they are clickable and that something should happen when they click on them.
An easy fix for me is to make them clickable and when a user clicks maybe I would take them to a page that goes into detail on each of those features. Or maybe I could expand upon each feature right there on that page.
Once you make the fixes to your page, you will want to re-run a new Crazy Egg snapshot on the same page to see if the changes helped improve the user experience.
If you haven’t already, install the Ubersuggest Chrome extension.
Here’s why…
When you do a Google search, you’ll see data on each ranking URL.
When you are naturally using Google throughout your day and searching for keywords related to your industry, I want you to look at 2 main metrics in Ubersuggest:
So, when you are doing searches, look for sites that have a lower domain score and fewer backlinks than the competition, but yet still rank high.
Chances are, they rank high because of things like user experience. Maybe their text is more appealing than the competition, maybe their bounce rate is lower… it could be a wide variety of reasons, but these are the sites you want to look at and analyze.
In the image above, you see that the result from the AMA ranks higher than Hubspot yet they have fewer links and a lower domain score. So, if you were trying to rank for that keyword, you would want to spend more time analyzing AMA because they are doing something right.
User experience is going to be more and more important over time.
If you love a site and everyone else loves that site, Google will eventually want to make sure that the site ranks high.
On the flip side, if everyone feels a website has a terrible user experience, then Google won’t rank that website as high in the long run.
Just like any algorithm update Google does, expect to see multiple revisions over time. As they learn, they adapt to make their algorithms more effective over time.
But what is unique about this update is you have advanced notice, which is nice. So, take the opportunity and fix any usability issues you may have.
What other ways can you make your website more usable?
The post Google’s New Algorithm: Page Experience appeared first on Neil Patel.
We’re trying out something new! Our SEO scouts have always been on the lookout for Google announcements and SEO updates. Before this, it was something we shared between the team, but then one day someone asked, why not share it with our audience and it clicked! That’s why we are kickstarting this new SEO updates …
In case you missed it, Google just published advice for SEOs on how to continually do well throughout their algorithm changes.
Now, what most people don’t know is Google doesn’t just push out a handful of algorithm changes per year.
They publish substantially more.
Just to give you an idea of how often Google changes, they had 3,200 algorithm changes in just 1 year.
You heard me right, 3,200 changes.
That’s a lot!
So instead of focusing on one algorithm update that you may read about, you need to focus on making your site compatible with Google’s core goal.
First I’ll go over the advice they are telling us all to follow… and then I’ll break down what it really means.
Just like most of their announcements, Google tends to be vague. But of course, they did mention that you should focus on content.
What’s interesting, though, is they did give a list of questions that you should ask yourself with your existing and new content.
But as I mentioned they are vague… so I decided to do something a bit unique. Next to each question that Google provides (in the color black), you’ll find my thoughts on what I think Google is trying to tell you (in the color orange).
Here goes:
There were a few other things Google mentioned, such as their quality guidelines, but there was one really important thing that they mentioned.
It’s also important to understand that search engines like Google do not understand content the way human beings do. Instead, we look for signals we can gather about content and understand how those correlate with how humans assess relevance.
Google’s wants to please you, not the version of you that is a marketer or an entrepreneur, but the version of you that uses Google on a daily basis.
When you perform a Google search, are you happy with the results?
If you aren’t, you aren’t going to tell Google with your words as there isn’t an easy way to do that. That’s why they look at signals, such as click-through-rates or how many people hit the back button so they can go back to Google and click on the next listing.
Instead of focusing on SEO, the real trick to winning is to focus on the user.
Go above and beyond and do what is best for them even if you feel it will hurt your rankings in the short run. Because in the long run, Google will figure it out and you should rank better if you are genuinely putting the user first and doing a better job than your competition.
So, what do you think of Google’s advice to SEOs?
The post Google’s Advice for Surviving Algorithm Changes appeared first on Neil Patel.