Simple YouTube Marketing
- Find a great video SEO keyword.
- Create a video optimized around that keyword.
- Strategically promote that video.
YouTube Ranking Factors
Like Google, YouTube wants to show users the best content – period. However, unlike Google, YouTube’s content is evaluated differently.
As part of Google’s ranking factor, it examines backlinks pointing to a webpage – the more relevant backlinks pointing to a page, the higher it ranks.
YouTube on the other hand, measures how visitors interact with your video. Here are YouTube’s four most important ranking factors:
1 – Audience Retention
Audience retention is the percentage of your video that people watch. The higher this number – the better.
Example:Your audience views a video published on your channel 50% of the way through. This means your audience retention on that video is 50%.
YouTube uses this metric because it gives them an accurate indicator of the video quality.
2 – Total Watch Time
Total watch time is the total amount of time visitors have spent watching your video over its lifetime. The higher this number – the better.
The most important ranking metric because it represents the actual amount of time that people have spent watching your video.
Example: You publish a video that is 30 seconds long and people watch 20 seconds of it. Your audience retention rate would be 66.67%, but you are total watch time would only be 20 seconds before the average viewer clicked away.
Compare that to a 20 minute video that is watched 10 minutes – the audience retention rate would be 50%, however, the total watch time would be 10 minutes.
YouTube rewards videos that have a higher total watch time because these videos benefit YouTube. The more time a user spends watching videos, the more potential YouTube has to make money from advertising revenue.
As you can see, YouTube would prefer to promote the video with 10 minutes of viewing time (even though audience retention is low) versus the video with 20 seconds of watch time.
In summary, when you create videos that receive a high total watch time, you are giving YouTube the content they want. And reward, YouTube will promote your video without you having to do anything else.
3 – Engagement Signals
Engagement signals is the measurement of how many visitors like like, comment, subscribe, share, and add your video to a playlist.
YouTube wants its visitors to be actively engaged – that way, they are more likely to click on advertising. The more engagement signals your videos create, the more likely YouTube will reward your videos.
4 – Keyword Optimization
Keyword optimization is the process of organizing and optimizing your video titles, descriptions, and tags.
YouTube needs to understand what your content is about. By properly optimizing your video content, you’ll increase your chances of YouTube promoting your content through search, recommendation, and “Up Next” locations.
There are a lot of other YouTube metrics that are important like audience retention and re-watches but the four above are the most critical.
To understand more about YouTube metrics, I recommend you read this HubSpot article by Clifford Chi: YouTube Analytics: The 15 Metrics That Actually Matter.