YouTube SEO: Rank and Compete in Search.

1. Introduction.: Youtube is the second biggest search engine with over 3 billion searches done every single month. Which is why if you can get your content to rank in the top search results, it can have a huge impact on your channel and your business. Hey, my name is Collin Michael. I'm a content creator with over a 100 thousand subscribers on YouTube. And I also have generated over a million views from just YouTube search alone. And I'm going to be sharing with you everything I've learned on that journey from ranking my content to how do I compete with other people sitting next to me in the search results, I'm going to share with you how YouTube decides which videos rank above others. How to research and find topic ideas in your niche that have lots of viewer traffic. And how to stand out and compete with hundreds of videos on the same topic. Now, to be clear, this isn't some get tons of views super easily scheme. It takes a lot of skill and hard work in order to get content to rank in search. But once you've finished this course and you've learned the skills needed to get content to rank. The results are astounding. I have content from 345 years ago that are still bringing in views, subscribers, and revenue to my channel. Whether you are a business owner looking to just build a lead funnel with video to get people to convert over into purchase from you. Or whether you're just a YouTube creator who's trying to get views and grow their channel. I'm gonna be giving you actionable strategies and systems to help you rank your content in search. If you're ready, let's jump into this. 2. How YouTube Search Works.: Probably the first place that we need to start is understanding how YouTube search algorithm works, which you do actually just tells us how it works. You can go to the Google support and help forums and they have pages where they just tell you, this is how our algorithm works. So that's a good place to start. And then we'll get deeper and deeper into competing and actually getting content to rank. But starting with the basics here, this is what YouTube says on how our videos ranked and search. Like Google search engine, YouTube search strives to surface the most relevant results according to keyword searches. Videos are ranked based on the following factors. How well the title, description and video content match the viewers search. What videos drive the most engagement for Search, Note, search results are not a list of the most viewed videos for a given search. So we can see there are four things that's looking at. It's looking at your title, what you put in there, how relevant it is, what someone searched your description. So that can also play a role as well, your video content, how long your video content matches that search. Something a lot of people don't know is that YouTube's AI actually goes through your video frame-by-frame. Paying attention to what you say, paying attention to how you react to things, what you show on screen it like analyse sizes every single frame of your video to figure out what your content is actually about. So you can't like clickbait people basically, but yeah, it's identifying, making sure, yeah, this person is actually talking about this topic. They're looking at your video. But then the fourth thing they're looking at here is what videos drive the most engagement for a search. So engagement is how viewers interact with your content. Does your video get people to click on it? Does it get them to like it or dislike it? Do they share your video? Do they comment? Do they watch it till the end? Those are all viewer engagement signs that YouTube is looking at to determine whether your video should rank above someone else's video. And when it actually comes down to it, there's only one of these metrics you should really be concerned about. And that is the viewer engagement. Because here's the thing. If we have, let's say, a video on how to tie a shoe. If you search that, there are hundreds, thousands of videos on how to tie a shoe. They all have how to tie a shoe in their title. They all talk about probably in their description about this video is about how to tie a shoe. I'll show you, et cetera, et cetera, and how to do this kind of not, alright, that'll have that in the description there. Content. If YouTube goes through if the AI, they can tell that yes, this person is talking about shoes and tying. We can see them physically tying the shoe on here. I can figure that out. Yes. This video is about how to tie a shoe. Okay. So out of hundreds of videos, thousands of videos, what is YouTube using then if all those, all those match the criteria, what does YouTube determining which is going to rank above another? And that is how viewers interact with your content. So what we need to focus on, how do I make viewers engaged with my content more than the next person? Alright, how do I make my titles and my thumbnails more clickable for people? How do I keep the viewer engaged right at the beginning and hook them through till the end. Do I encourage them to comment or like or share the video? You know, different things like that we can do to increase viewer engagement. And that's where a lot of our focus is going to be, is how do we make viewers more engaged? And what we're going to learn in the next lesson is some of the common misconceptions about YouTube search and the misconceptions that are around getting content to rank. 3. YouTube SEO Misconceptions.: If you've watched content in the past on how to get stuff to rank in search and SEO and different things like that. I'm sure you've come across people telling you to use keywords and tags and metadata in different things like that to try and make the algorithm like your video and promoted in rank it in search, and that's false. It's all false. We went to the source itself, YouTube, and looked at what YouTube told us how they rank content in search. And nowhere in there is it mentioning stuffing keywords in your title, stuffing keywords and tags, putting keywords into description and doing all this weird stuff like that. Yes, we saw that the title matters description the content, but viewer engagement is what really matters when it comes to ranking content and search. Again, there are, when we go back to that tying a shoe example, there's hundreds and thousands of videos on how to tie a shoe. Youtube is not going to put one above another because you stuffed a few more keywords in your tags are stuck, too few more keywords in your title. Youtube's goal is to have satisfied viewers. Their goal is to have viewers find the content that they want to watch. Youtube watches what viewers interact with and that's how the whole, entire platform works. Youtube is paying attention. Reviewer likes what they dislike. Youtube is paying attention to what videos they click on and what videos they scroll past. They even send surveys to viewers. And we're like, was this a good recommendation for you? Is this relevant? And it's also paying attention to what interests that person has to better recommend content. So let's say someone makes a video on seven problems with the MacBook Pro that you should know before buying, okay? Not very searchable. People aren't searching for problems with the MacBook Pro. But let's say someone wants you to review on the MacBook Pro, and next to it pops up a video that's seven problems with the MacBook Pro. They click on it, they watch it through till the end. They like they comment, they share it with a friend that tells YouTube that people who are interested in this topic about MacBook Pro reviews enjoy this video and so then YouTube takes that video in, recommends it to similar viewers, similar behavior viewers. So when other people are watching these MacBook Pro reviews, that video is gonna be recommended to them. Youtube search works similarly, where when someone searches for something and then YouTube knows who that person is and sees how they interact with content that is, in the search results. And sees that, Oh, when we serve this video on top, people watch it till the end. They like, and they end up staying on the platform longer and are more satisfied. They are then going to rank that content higher up in the search results. Now, I will say with some keywords that people use, you're actually speaking the language of your audience. For example, as a filmmaker, I know the film look is something that a lot of filmmakers try to achieve. It's making the video look cinematic and like a Hollywood movie. So when I use that in my title and I do like how to make the film look with filmic pro. It works out really well. Not because this keyword is making the robots like my video, but that's the viewers know I'm speaking their language and dare like yes, that's what I'm trying to achieve because there's no real name to the film look. But we all know that the film look rivers to Hollywood style and rivers to cinematic. And so when I use that lingo of my audience, they respond better to my content, which YouTube pays attention to and recommends it to more people, whether that's been suggested or in YouTube search integers. Wrap it all up here just to finish this lesson. Youtube is after the viewer. So we should be thinking in our heads, not how do I please the algorithm, but rather how do I please my audience and make them happy? Because if you make the viewer happy and satisfied, YouTube is going to promote your content and get it seen because that's YouTube's goals. So when you focus on YouTube's goal, which is happy viewers, making videos clickable for viewers and engaging for viewers and encouraged them to interact with your content. That is going to help you to achieve their goal. And so they're going to promote your video out and help you achieve your goal. But with that, let's hop on to the next parts of this course. 4. Know Your Audience.: Now that we understand that the goal is to make happy viewers and satisfied viewers, we need to know who these viewers are, who is searching for our content, and what are their intentions, what are their goals, what are their pain points? And what we wanna do is you want to open up a document or a note on your phone or on your computer. And what we want to create something called a customer persona. Often in business, you will want to figure out who your ideal customer is so you can better serve them. So things we want to know is like a name, give them a name. How old are they? What income bracket or they usually in? We want to know their their pain points. We want to know their goals, their end goal, why they're searching for whatever problem or topic of video we're going to make. Why are they searching for it? How do they describe their problems? We want to get into groups that this viewer is in Facebook groups or on Reddit. Or if they're on discord and are having discussions and have groups and discord Join those discords. Learn about this person because the more you know your audience, the more you can create content that solves their problems and make videos that they are interested in. So the more detailed you can get. And there could be an entire lawn course that could be dedicated to this and we're not going to cover that today. But understanding who our customer is and creating that persona and writing it down is vital. It is so important because we can use that as fuel for making clickable thumbnails, for making clickable titles if we understand their problems and end goals. And we mentioned those in the beginning hook of our video. They're like, Yes, this person understands me. I'm trying to solve this problem because I'm trying to get this end result and I can understand they understand me and my pain that I'm going through and they understand the struggles I'm going through. And because of that, they're going to connect with you a lot more too, which might cause them to subscribe or to like your content. So just understanding the viewer is super important. And I don't know, I personally don't believe you need to have this written down in order to rank in search. But it is darn useful because you can better craft your content around that. So take some time and try to really understand who your viewer is, why they're coming to YouTube, why they're watching content, what other channels they watch on YouTube? Videos today is respond to really well. We're checking the comments of some of those channels that they might watch frequently. We want to learn as much as we can about that viewer so we can better serve them. And you want to be very niche-specific if possible. Because if we can serve a community of people and get them to our channel, then we just have this community of constant viewership consuming your content because we're just constantly helping them. We're solving the problems that they have. So take some time. Don't just skip over this as like I've got it in my head, who my viewer is and I'm just going to go on. I know for me personally, when I took the time to write down who I was targeting, what they are interested in, what videos they like and have responded too well and what the common and being a part of their Facebook groups, it helped me realize, okay, this is all they're really after and this is not what thereafter. And I can better make a content strategy that's going to appeal to them. So definitely take some time there and let's hop on to the next section. 5. Short And Long Tail Keywords.: Now in the YouTube SEO world, There's something called short tail keywords and long tail keywords. But for the sake of simplicity, short tail keywords are basically very broad topics. And long tail keywords are very specific topics. For example, if I was to do a video on how to edit on iPhone, and that was my title. That is super broad. We don't know for editing videos or photos. We don't know what app we're using. We don't know what specific tasks we're learning. It's so broad and there's going to be so many videos that pop up that could potentially have that in their title or their content could be around it, that it's just not going to get found. It's way too broad, especially if we're a brand new creator with not a big following, it's not going to work out too well. If instead we got more specific and maybe my title and the topic of my video is how to add music to cap cut on iPhone. Now I'm talking about iPhone, a very specific app on an iPhone, and then adding music, doing a very specific task within that app on an iPhone that is a lot more narrow. And as a result, there's not gonna be as much competition for answering that specific topic. There might be some competition still. There might be a few videos, a dozen, maybe potentially a 100. But the more specific we are, the less competition there is. And we're also being very clear to our viewer about what our contents about and what value they're going to get if they click on this video and what they're gonna learn or what entertainment they're going to enjoy. Getting more specific and detailed or aka, doing long tail keywords that works better for new creators because it's less competition. It gives you time to learn and master things before you target things that are a little bit broader. Where there could be a lot of competition. And the other side of it too is if you get specific and let's say there's only like a few 100 searches per month or maybe a few thousand. You're still getting viewers to your channel, which might prompt them to watch more of your content if they enjoyed the content you made for that specific answer. And that's what we're really after. We want Traffic brought to our channel, even if it's a couple of 100 people, a couple of thousand people, that's going to ultimately grow our channel because we're attracting our audience, we're attracting our community. So even though we might be solving something very specific and it might not get a million views right out the gate or, or wherever. We're still getting our audience to our channel where they're subscribing. And YouTube is learning. This channel really only talks about this topic in this niche. And we found these viewers that respond really well to this content. So we should promote it out to similar viewers. And that's what we want to achieve. We want YouTube to know that yes, this is our ideal viewer. These are the people who performed really, really well if this content we're helping YouTube achieve their goals of satisfying viewers by getting that first, initial traffic. I trust YouTube to always get the video to the right person if it's a good video. But it doesn't hurt to get that first, initial traffic by targeting those very specific niche areas. But before we get set in our ways on one of these specific niche ideas that we have. We first want to make sure that there is actually traffic going regularly to this content. And in the next part we're going to be going into how to find out if traffic is actually going to these search results. 6. Find The Traffic.: You might already have some ideas of specific content that you can make for your audience. But let's first find out if there's actually traffic going to these search results. So what we can do, and this is a easy free way of figuring this out is something called the Incognito research method, or at least I'd title it that because that's basically what we're gonna do. We're gonna sign out of YouTube or open incognito mode and go through YouTube that way. Because what we wanna do, and the reason we're doing it that way is because YouTube knows who we are. And so oftentimes you'll search for something and YouTube will recommend content that isn't even related to the search results. Because YouTube knows who you are and is trying to recommend content that you might be interested in. So by going into incognito mode or just signing out of YouTube, YouTube doesn't know, we haven't clicked on anything yet. And so we get the actual search results that we want to see. So that's how we want to do this. For this, I'm actually on my iPad right now. What I'll do is I'll switch to my iPad screen here. What I'm gonna do, I just clicked on my profile photo and I'm going to click on turn on incognito. And that puts me into this Incognito Mode. Now at the top, I'm going to click the search bar. Here we can start trying to figure out what our viewers are searching for. So what I might do is how to add music. And you can see YouTube's already filling out some of the blanks for me in trying to guess what I'm searching for. And oftentimes, these are things people are searching for on a regular basis. So how to add music to Instagram story, some other ones on here, how to add music to iMovie, how to add music to your YouTube video. How to add music bot to Discord server. We add music to Google Slides, cap cut, PowerPoint. Okay, so these are all things we could target. So let's say cap, couple of go with how to add music to cap cut. And then there's from YouTube, from TikTok without screen recording on Chromebook. Whole bunch of different search results here. But let's just try how to add music to cap cut. Just because cap cut is a phone app or any very specific that we're talking about phones. But let's just search for this and see what comes up. When we click Search, we have an add on top. And then obviously I'm right there because I targeted this search result. But let's go under me and take a look at some of the other videos here. So we have this one. How to add YouTube songs on cap cut tutorial. This is what we're looking for. We're trying to find videos that have a large amount of views from channels with subscribers less than the views, if that makes sense. So what we're really after is trying to find content that went outside the core audience of that YouTuber, for example, which we'll actually use me as an example here. I'm just going to click on this and click pause real quick. If you take a look at my channel here, you can see that this video has 775 thousand views from a channel with only a 117 case subscribers. That is more views than a channel has subscribers. So this is obviously a hot topic. It wasn't my subscribers that made this video get to 700 thousand views. It was because this content had a lot of search for it. Let's go to the next video here. We'll pause it real quick. This channel only has 18 thousand subscribers yet gotten 157 thousand views. And the other thing we want to look at is how long ago they posted. So one year ago they probably had less than 18 thousand because channels are always constantly growing. People are putting more content out. So technically probably had less than 18 thousand subscribers when they made this. This video is still got 157 thousand views. That's more views than the channel has subscribers, which means this is a good topic and you could go through a few of these if you wanted to. I'm not gonna do that now. Just, but you can do that kind of research and find those topics where if more views on the channel, then the channel has subscribers. And that is the topics you want to choose because that means it's not because of the subscribers, It's just because there is people searching for that and that's been my strategy. I'll find those areas and I'll create content in those areas. So that way, my videos are getting the traffic. I'm usually doing those in areas that my core audiences in. Now once you've clicked on a few videos and you're ready to check out another search term, I recommend going out of Incognito mode back to your regular channel or resigning in and then signing out again and do it all over again. Just because we've clicked on a few of those videos, it might screw up our search results. So I always start with a blank slate for just one topic I'm choosing. Looking at a bunch of continent there, exit out and go right back into incognito mode and do another topic and do my research that way. And in the next section, you'll actually have a chance to practice this for our class project. 7. Class Project.: Alright, It's class project time. It's time to put the skills you've just learned to the test. And what I want you to do is use the Incognito search method that we just demonstrated. And what I want you to do is try and find two topics where the top videos in the search results have more views than a channel has subscribers. Now, not all the videos need to be that, but I'd say at least two or three of those top videos should have more views than the channel has subscribers. And you want to work this skill and get used to finding content that is performing well. So that way we can make videos similar to those that serve the audience better so we can rank above other people. So take some time, find two of those topics, uh, preferably in your niche, but if you're not finding anything that way to step outside your niche and just tried to find a few topics just to work those muscles and get used to it. And once you do that, step number two of this class project is to go to the notes on your phone or on your computer. And I want you to type out those topics that performed well. I want you to screenshot them and upload the photo to the class project section. So that way you can kinda see that you performed a task that you've actually researched it. So definitely do that and we'll come back to this course. 8. Study Your Competitors.: So hopefully you found some topics that have search traffic going towards them. And I don't know if I mentioned this previously, but what we want to do is not create search traffic. We want to channel search traffic. It's kind of a good mindset to be in. We want to channel wherever our viewers are already at, wherever they're consuming on YouTube, we want to channel those viewers to our content. The best way to do that is to find where are those views going, where are they being channeled to? The next step past that is, studying those competitors on top who are ranking for those videos to find out two things. Number one, what did they do right? And number two, what did they do wrong? Here are some things we want to look at. We want to look at their titles. Are they titling their video? What are they putting in there? And are they using persuasive language for humans or are they just titling the video the exact tutorial? We also want to look at their thumbnail. Are there thumbnails designed? Are they super high-quality or in your opinion, do they look pretty poor quality and you're like, kinda surprised that they're there, even ranking and getting results. Then we want to click on that video. We want to pay attention to their hook or they hooking the viewer in, or are they, Do they have like a 30-second intro and it takes forever to get to the content. How are they engaging the viewers all the way until the end? Are they doing things in the video that using text, using B-roll, using different effects to keep people engaged. How are they? What is that pacing of that video look like? We want to look at the comments of the video. How are people these viewers are reacting to the content? Are they positive? Are they watch? The video actually starts at one minute where they're complaining about the intro. Are they asking questions as if I didn't get all the answers I needed from this video and it wasn't enough to where I have to go in the comment section to get further information? Or are they experiencing different problems that we could answer in our own videos when we make this video. So do detailed research on these competitors to understand, okay, yeah, I can see why this video performed well, and I can also see areas where I could go in and make the exact same video and approved improve on the content that they've made. I can make a better thumbnail or I can make that title more persuasive for humans. Or I could have skipped, skipped that intro and just hook the viewer in and got right to the content and that would be better. Another way you can be competitive is how long the video is. Maybe the competitors video is 30 minutes lawn, and you can see the exact same information in 15 minutes. Now when someone searches for that, they might see this 30-minute video and be like, I don't have 30 minutes to sit here and consume this. Oh, wait, look right underneath, there's a video that's 15 minutes long. I'll click on that one because I will get the same information but in less time. And so that tells you to wow, viewers are really interacting with this video over the one that we originally ranked above. We're going to switch places with those because this guy is giving them the exact same information, is making the viewers satisfied. They're clicking on this over the other. And so YouTube changes the ranking. Another area is how long ago was that video made? Was it three to five years ago when they made this example? What if we went ahead and made a more up-to-date tutorial and we put in our title that this is the 2020 to update or to 2023 update of this topic. Now when someone searches, there'll be like, Oh, this video is from five years ago, but there's other video is much more recent information in is probably more accurate. Therefore, I'm going to click on this video over the original one that was three to five years ago. These are, this is what we're trying to find. How do we be competitive against the ones that are already ranking for this video? And there's so many different routes we can go. We can have a better hook, we can have a better title. We can make the video shorter. We can have a better thumbnail. We can get to the content a lot faster than everyone else. We could have improved visuals or add music that makes the video more engaging. There's a lot of different areas and we'll get into some of the other one's a little more detailed continuing onwards this course. But that's where I want your mindset. Where can I beat this video? Where can I be competitive in, stand out with my content? 9. Optimize Your Title For Humans.: So let's talk about titles and how we could optimize these four humans. Now, obviously, if we stuff a bunch of keywords into a title that is not optimizing it for humans. Going back to the how to tie a shoe example, if we do a, how to tie a Nike new balance Puma ideas shoe. It's not optimized for humans that just keyword stuffing, it's not clickable, it's not interesting. We again, want to go back to our audience persona. We want to look at the problems they have, the benefits, their end goal that they're trying to achieve. And keep that in mind with how we title our videos to increase the potential of them clicking. Another useful thing that I printed out is something called the elements of value pyramid, which you can do a Google search for this elements of value pyramid, I did not know if I had the rights to share the image in this course. So I'm not going to share it, but you can do a Google search and there's tons of different examples of the elements of value pyramid. And what this pyramid is, all the different ways we can add value to consumers or people who are consuming our videos, normally used for business, but a lot of things for business come right over to YouTube. Some of the things on this pyramid. And again, definitely do a Google search of this and look at this image. I've printed it out and put it on my wall. I can always reference it when making titles, which is some of the benefits we can give is saves time, simplifies, reduces risk, organizes, avoids hassle, reduces cost, quality in forms, reduces anxiety, motivation. There's a lot of different ways you can add value to people. So for example, this saves time one, we've kind of talked about that already where our video is, you know, maybe our video shorter than there's something I've used is whatever whatever tutorial in five-minutes in the title. So I'm emphasizing in my title that you're gonna learn this in five-minutes or less, which is telling people you're going to save time by clicking on my video over someone else's. You could do something like quality, where maybe some of the videos up there just don't look high-quality and a thumbnail could be improved. The content itself, maybe the audio is bad by putting more work into your video, making sure you're having good audio, that the video looks good. That the thumbnail, which professional, that higher-quality people are probably going to click on you because they're going to want high-quality info over someone who just shot it on their webcam. So these are different areas we can target to encourage the viewer to click on our videos over somebody else's, something else you can look into. E is copywriting and learning copyrighting, which is persuading people with words. But again, it's a lot of the things we've talked about already, which is knowing who we are targeting and using words that they will respond to really, really well. If you're targeting busy moms, you're probably going to use language that helps moms do something very fast or that saves them time, or it gives them time to their selves to relax. Okay, well more we know that viewer, we could better craft titles for that person who might be watching our content. So focus more on the viewer aspect and getting them to click. I still think it's important to have the problem you're solving in that title, like how to tie a shoe, you should still have it in there, but use persuasive language along with that. How to tie a shoe in three easy steps. How to tie shoes in five seconds. Do this trick and never tie your shoes again. These are all catering to potential benefits that the viewer might have. And it's adding more. Because again, we got so many videos on YouTube already, all with the same title. How do we stand out by appealing to viewers and putting those things in our titles along with the descriptive part of what the actual content is. But that's that for titles. What about thumbnails? And that's what we'll get to in the next section of this course. 10. Create A Better Thumbnail.: Now when it comes to thumbnails and making good thumbnails and making thumbnails better than our competitors. It can be difficult because there's a lot of us on different skill levels when it comes to designing. But this is a super useful trick you can do to make sure that yours is better than the competitors. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to share my iPad screen again. And I'm using a software called Canva, which you can use for free on canva.com where you can download the app on the App Store. And what I have here is I took a screenshot of the video that I want to rank above. So I have this screenshot I searched for my topic. I took a picture of the top three videos because that's what all that would fit on my iPad screen. And this is what I did. This is my thumbnail off to the side here. And what I'm going to do is actually move my thumbnail over the top of the person who is third from the bottom. And I'm just going to line it up perfectly here. Might take a few tries. There we go. And now what I'm doing here is I'm comparing my thumbnail to the competitors who are ranking above me and I'm asking myself the question, is my thumbnail better than theirs? Is my thumbnail more clickable or does it look unprofessional? And I need to go back to the drawing board and make this because these are the people we are really competing with. So we need to have a more clickable thumbnail. And it might be tempting to just be like M minds, okay, I'm sure people will still click on mine. All that matters in the beginning is getting people to click. You can have the most incredible hook in your video and you keep people engaged till the end. But if you cannot persuade people to click on your content, it does not matter. You've done wasted hours of time making content that no one will ever see. So getting that click is so important, and that's why I do this with every single video I make. I look at my competitors and I tried to make a better thumbnail than theirs. So I stand out. So I win and get the viewers and channel the traffic to my videos over there. So you can use probably any photo editing software that allows you to add layers, a photo on top of a photo, I use Canva because it's a free resource that anyone can do. But definitely do this with your thumbnails. So that way you can make sure that yours is better. So that way you can beat your competition. 11. YouTube Description And Comment Section.: Let's get into reading our YouTube description and how to make a persuasive. Now when it comes to the description, but first, two sentences on a computer readable, if you're clicking on a video on a computer, you can read that description before someone clicks on that video and also on Google, that description will also come up. So if you can make the first one to two sentences persuasive for humans, you can potentially get more people to click on your videos. And it also tells YouTube, yes, This video is about this kind of content. We achieve two goals there. On my screen here, on my iPad, I'm just showing you the top part here. I just have one or two sentences talking about what people are going to learn. What this video is about, just to hopefully persuade people to click on my video. I also have on here chapters set up. Now the reason you might wanna do Chapters, chapters as of right now, are starting to pop up in Google search. So depending on what you put in these chapters, you could potentially get viewers from Google. It's not super important to get Google traffic. You might think it is, but if we're posting things on YouTube, we should be focusing on YouTube viewers. If we want to get people to watch your videos on Google, we should learn Google SEO and maybe make videos in a blog post or something like that. But also chapters can help people navigate through the content and find what they need to find, which might make them more satisfied, Mike, make them like our video, different things like that, showing signs to YouTube that viewers were satisfied when I clicked on this video, they got their answers, which is a good thing. So that's why I also have chapters here. The one other thing you're going to want to have, and I have this at the bottom, promotion of my own content. I have down here playlist linked in my description to let people know that sometimes people open that description when watching a video and I'll scroll through if they see other content that they may like to watch in that description, there's a link to it. And then they go into a YouTube playlist full of my videos that gets me more views. And what YouTube sees on their side is when someone watches one of my videos, they go and watch three to five more, which tells you too, man, this is really the right viewer for this content. They just go on and they consume a ton of his content. So we should promote this out to more people similar to that viewer. It's also just going to help you rank better because YouTube sees, man, people really go down this, this rabbit hole of consuming content and they're satisfied with all the content they watch. So ding-ding-ding, that's good. So I always pro, promote myself and my description. Hopefully get viewers to go over to my content. And then one last thing I also do is in the comment section, you're actually able to pin a comment. You can click the three dots and actually pin a comment if you want to. And in the comment section, I always pin in another one of my videos. So that way, when people scroll to the comments section while watching a video which they do, people do that all the time. They can see that I have another video on the exact same topic that they can go over and watch. I'm increasing the viewer's time on YouTube. I'm helping them get information they need and they're watching my content. And that's going to overall health my channel perform and helped me rank better. So also do that. Pin a comment in the comment section promoting your other content that's similar to this one. And that can help increase the views on your channel and can also potentially help you rank better in search. 12. Get To The Point Right Away.: So hopefully after doing all this research on topics on thumbnails and titles and descriptions, we now have people clicking on our content. The next part is we have to get them to watch till the end. Whatever we can do to get them to watch till the end, we've got to do. So. My recommendation is you want to have a hook in the beginning, letting them know that yes, you're going to solve this problem. You understand their problem. Probably only be about like 15 seconds lawn or less. Or if you really want to hammer on them and understanding their problem, maybe 30 seconds. And then you want to jump right into the content. You probably don't want to have branding. You probably don't want to have like an intro. You just want to hook viewers in and get right to the content because they clicked on that video. You promise them that wherever you put in that title and thumbnail that they're going to get, you better get right to that content. Otherwise, people aren't going to watch, they're not going to watch. There's so many other videos that they could click on and they chose u over all the other competition. And you better serve them and get right to it. And especially when it comes to tutorials, if you take too long people in my videos because I don't have an intro. I just say, you're gonna learn this or let's just jump into it. And people react in the comments section, I think you, almost everyone else takes like an hour to get to the content. And they're so happy that people even subscribe as a result. And they give the videos alike. And that tells you too, but yeah, this is good video. Just getting to the content. So important, can totally change the game. And then just making sure you're not being repetitive. You're not repeating information? No. Trying to keep that pace incorrect. And people can always rewind if they need to go over something again. So don't be too repetitive. And I just wanted to put this in here because you might get everything else right. But if you can't keep viewers watching, that's gonna be a problem in later on in this course. At the end here we're going to talk about analytics and how to pay attention and see if people are actually watching until the end and make adjustments based on that. But for now, just keep in mind, we got to keep viewers watching until the end. And we just need to get right to the content. 13. Where Does The Viewer Go Next?: Another important aspect is where does the viewer go next after they watch your video? And I think a lot of people and their videos with, alright, and that's the end of this video. Thanks for watching. I really appreciate you being here. Be sure to subscribe and like this video and hit the bell, goes on and on and on forever. And instead, that, what that does is it tells the viewer I've given you value. There's nothing left here for you. Go on and find someone else to watch. We don't wanna do that. We want to keep people watching our content. So when you get to the end, number one, we don't use ending language. We don't tell people that's the end. Thanks for watching or in that's that we want to tell people. Now, if you want to learn more about whatever subject you're talking about, check out this video and you're going to encourage people to click to your other content. Youtube allows you to put n cards, which are like video links in your video. If you go into YouTube studio on a desktop, it will actually allow you in their editor to add n cards. And so I pretend to point to this little end card that will appear. And I'll be like, if you want to learn more on this topic and try to give them a hook to the next video. Be sure to check out this video and learned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know the viewer, you know, once they learn this, they might be interested in this other video. We want to promote our other content and get them to watch more of our stuff. Because I've said in the past, YouTube is paying attention to what that viewer does. If that viewer goes and watches three more videos, it tells you to that. Yeah, this is the view where we're trying to reach. It's going to overall help your channel and will help those other videos rank better too, because YouTube is seeing viewers who, who are interested in this topic loved this video. So let's share it out to more people interested in that topic. So what if I've actually been able to achieve is when someone clicks on my video, they go and wash three to five more videos. And so they just binge-watch my content. And so that's what you want to create. If you can send me your content, tried to make playlist content. So you have a series like a five-part series. All of those are potentially linkable videos and getting people to continue to watch your content. So think about where you're sending that viewer. That's why we have stuff in the description, why we pin a comment, but also at the end of our video. No ND language. We're just like you're now going to have to watch this video next, because we are going to make you a master whatever topic you cover. And so we're just going to keep you watching content, keep you watching our stuff. If you do it right, people will feel like they haven't gotten everything yet. They'll feel like I can't just leave and go watch a different video. I need I need the answer to that problem too, because that's also another problem I'm having. That's also something else I'm facing because we know our viewer and we know their problems. So when we keep solving their problems and different things and we're helping them achieve that end goal. They binge-watch us. They binge-watch us. So keep that viewer watching. It's important, it's going to help you rank better. 14. Read Your Analytics.: The last step on this journey of creating wrinkle content, we've done what we can to get people to click. We're trying to get them to watch till the end. How effective of a job did we do? And we're going to know that by looking at our YouTube Analytics. So this tells us everything we need to know about our video and how well it's performed. Now YouTube analytics gets pretty deep, but the three you should probably worry about, our impressions, click-through rate and audience retention. So let's look at those. Impression is how many people see your topic, title and thumbnail. Usually if they look at it for 1 second, that counts as an impression. Next we have click-through rate or CTR, which is how many people clicked on your video after the impressions, after they sought How many actually clicked through. And then we have audience retention, also known as EVD, which is kind of similar, which is how long people stay watching your video and inside YouTube Studio, you can actually look and see like when they dropped off, how, how, what amount of viewers actually stay watching until the end? What points they drop off all those things so we know if we engage them correctly. Now, if you have low impressions, it usually means you're not getting a lot of traffic or there's just not a lot of people seeing your content. Usually it's a traffic issue where it's just your topic you chose. Wasn't that searchable? If you have high impressions and a low click-through rate means yes, People are seeing this, this, this topic title and thumbnail, but they're not persuaded to click. Normally, we want to get our click-through rate at least five to 10%, if possible, 15%. The highest I've ever gotten was like a 20% click-through rate. But normally if you're in that like five to 10% range or higher, you have a pretty good click-through rate on your video. But also the determining factor of how many views you get is how many impressions you actually get, which that is all based on how much traffic is actually going through that for that topic. And if YouTube is actually showing that video, so to start, you're really going to just focus on impressions and click-through rate. We want to get people to click on our videos and be able to actually see them. And then we can also pay attention to the audience retention after that. But I think if you do a good job on your topic title and thumbnail, those impressions will soar and you'll hopefully get a good amount of click-through rate there. And then we can look at the data and be able to tell where we're failing and what we're doing right? And we can learn based on that and make adjustments as we make more content. We can see, oh, maybe my hope is a little too low and I can see everyone's dropping off really, really quickly. Or I talked way too long on a certain topic and everyone abandoned the video at that point. And you can make changes to improve your content based on the data. So that's why analytics are important. It's going to tell you the truth. It's going to tell you if your thumbnail was actually good, if your title is actually good. And here's the other side of it too. If we find that we have really good audience retention on a video were just struggling to get people to click on it. We can go back and change our thumbnail and our title to make it more enticing. And this is actually what YouTube says on this subject, does changing a video title or thumbnail re-rank the video and the algorithm. Maybe. But it's because our systems are responding to how viewers are interacting with your video differently, rather than the act of changing the video title or thumbnail when your video looks different to viewers, it changes how viewers interact with it, when it's offered to them. Changing your video title and thumbnail can be an effective way to get more views, but don't change what's working. So if you have good audience retention for your video, and I would say like at least for the majority of the video you have 50% of viewers watching. I would go back and change those thumbnails and those titles because those videos could start looking different to viewers, causing them to click more often, which could then cause that video to rank. We spent hours making videos. Let's make sure they perform well. So don't be scared to go back and change the thumbnail and title for something that's not getting people to click. You can do that. Just don't go back in fixed thumbnails and titles for videos with like really bad audience retention because at that point, why cause people to click if they're not even going to watch till the end. So first look at audience retention. If it's looking pretty good, then go ahead and change the thumbnail and title to try and get people to click, but use those analytics, they're there for a reason to help you make better content. 15. Final Thoughts.: That my friends brings us to the end of this course. Final thoughts here, as I said in the beginning, it's not about how do I please the algorithm we need to change it to, how do I please the audience? That's who we want to please. That's who we want to make our content clickable. Four, don't get lost in the keyword mania because it's all about viewers and making them happy, knowing their problems and their pain points and their end goals and creating content that solves those problems I've done on my channel is help people solve their problems. And that's how I was able to get to over a 100 thousand subscribers. I helped people. Thank you for taking the time to watch this course through till the end. I appreciate it and I hope to see you on other courses here on Skillshare.