How to Get Your Video Recommended by YouTube

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I have a love-hate relationship with the sidebar of YouTube. It lures me into the depths of the platform; yet seems to almost always recommend me the perfect video. Getting your video recommended by YouTube can make a powerful impact on your videos’ views. So how do you get your video recommended? Well, I’ll tell you upfront that there’s no method that works 100% of the time but here are some techniques and data points to examine to improve your probability…

YouTube SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The first step to increasing of the probability of YouTube recommending your video is to think about which videos you want recommended next to your video. Analyze the videos that you want your video to be related with — take note of their title, keywords, description, and tags. This will help YouTube’s algorithm identify your video as similar content. Here’s how to do it…

Keywords

Keywords are the basis of SEO. You want to pick keywords and say them in your video, as well as put them in your title, description, and tags. The more niche the keywords, the more likely you’ll rank higher for the keywords (we call this “long-tail keywords”). You can use https://keywordtool.io/ to gauge the popularity of certain keywords.

Description

Having a lengthy description is vital to YouTube’s algorithm picking up your video. Once again, you want to include your keywords.

Tags

YouTube Tags are words and phrases you can include in your video’s description which provide more context to YouTube as to the content of your video. YouTube’s algorithm can then understand your video’s topic and associate it with similar content. Therefore, tags are extremely important. You should make your first tag your target keyword and then use variations of it, along with your competitors’ tags. Use a combination of both broad and specific keywords.

You can use VidIQ or TubeBuddy to help identify keywords and tags of similar videos.

Closed Captions

Closed Captions are the type of captions that users can choose to turn on or off. They’re another vital element to YouTube understanding the content and context of your video. Since search engine crawlers can’t “read” videos, captions increase the probability of your videos being discovered by the algorithm. YouTube can automatically add captions to your videos or you can add them yourself manually for better accuracy.

Ok, your YouTube video is optimized for SEO, now let’s get into engagement.

Engagement

As this article from The Atlantic on YouTube’s algorithm states, “YouTube wants to recommend things people will like, and the clearest signal of that is whether other people liked them.” Here are the data points to measure…

Click-through Rate

Your click-through rate is percentage of people who have clicked on your video after seeing it on YouTube. This can be on one’s homepage, after they search for something, or on the sidebar. Having a high click-through rate tells YouTube that people are choosing your video over others so that the algorithm should go investigate, so to speak, your video. A compelling thumbnail, title (including your keyword) and description all help lead to a higher click-through rate. These elements are critically important.

You can review your click-through rate of current videos in YouTube Studio.

Pro-tip: You can A/B test your thumbnail and/or title before releasing a video by running Facebook Ads with different variations. Just a small spend should be enough to gauge which combination may perform best on YouTube. TubeBuddy also has some A/B testing capabilities.

Comments

Once you have gotten people to click on your video, you want them to engage with it. This will then signal to YouTube’s algorithm that not only are people clicking on this video, but they’re actively engaging with it — another signal that it’s a high-quality video. Here are best practices to encourage engagement:

1. Ask a question in the comments and pin it to the top
2. Respond to every comment
3. Ask viewers to like, comment, and subscribe.

Audience Retention

You’ve got people clicking on your video, commenting on it, and now you want to ensure they watch the entire video and not just the first few seconds. This is called Watch Time and it’s another critical element to YouTube recommending your video. An easy win to kickstart your video having a high Watch Time is to watch your video the whole way through (and like and comment on it) right after publishing it. If you don’t have a large audience established, send it to friends and family and ask them to watch it the whole way through as well. Those early views are vital to the success of the video. You can view your Watch Time of past videos in YouTube Studio and understand where viewers are dropping off.

Channel Authority

A final piece to the puzzle is to develop channel authority. Channel authority is essentially like your YouTube channel credit score. It signals to YouTube that your channel is one that is worth recommending to others. Here are some tips on improving your authority…

1. If you have one video that’s getting a lot of views, create similar videos on that topic.
2. Put past videos in the description of new ones. As viewers watch more of your videos, you’ll start to appear more on their homepage. You should also put past videos as End Cards in your videos.
3. Make sure your profile is completely filled out — profile image, About section, channel trailer, etc.
4. Subscribe to related YouTube Channels.
5. Create playlists of your videos.

All these elements work together to enable YouTube’s algorithm to recommend the most relevant and high-quality videos to its users to keep them on the platform for as long as possible. Optimizing for SEO tells the bots what your video is all about — the content, context, and how it may relate to similar videos. The engagement tactics signal to the bots the quality of your video and if people are enjoying it. Developing channel authority tells the bots that your channel is worthy enough to be recommended. Put these pieces together and once it sees that a video has a high click-through rate, is receiving engagement, has its viewers watching the majority of the video, and comes from a high-quality channel, it categorizes it appropriately next to other videos. There’s no tried and true method of getting recommended but leveraging all these strategies together greatly increases the probability.

Originally published at https://joshdviner.com on April 13, 2021.