Did you know that YouTube is the second-largest global search engine and the most significant video platform of all time?
That’s right. Each day, millions of people worldwide visit the site to learn more about a topic, find YouTube content when Google-searching a question, or stream a YouTube video embedded on another brand’s website.
Despite YouTube’s enormous audience, developing a strategy for the broad platform can be an absolute mystery to marketers.
One of the biggest hurdles brands and new creators often face is learning how to pull in uninterrupted views for each video. Despite the millions of people who use it regularly, unlocking substantial viewership can feel daunting, impossible, or like a total waste of time.
According to many marketers who manage video successfully, this content is definitely worth your effort in 2020. Recently, our State of Marketing Report revealed that brands prioritized video over all other types of marketing content — including blogs.
As we’ve seen from several companies and influencers who pull in millions of views on YouTube each month, it is certainly possible to gain success on the platform. YouTube even offers several tools to help you create the content your fans are craving.
In this blog post, I’ll highlight seven of the most valuable YouTube tips or features that can help you get more video views.
Tools That Help Boost YouTube Views
YouTube Studio Features
The YouTube Studio is an all-in-one place where video creators can go to monitor, improve, and optimize there overall channel. Within the Studio, you’ll find a Channel Dashboard, Analytics, Insights, Comment Filters, and other tools to inform your strategy.
Channel Dashboard : YouTube Studio is a dashboard that tracks the performance of your videos and channel. It will also inform you of trends, news, and comments buzzing on the YouTube platform. You can use this dashboard to learn which videos performed well, which didn’t, or how your channel progresses. You can also use it to learn about trends or news topics that can inform your content strategy.
To get to your Studio, go to your channel, and click the blue YouTube Studio button.
Once you click this button, you’ll be sent directly to the Channel Dashboard.
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Channel Analytics
The Analytics tab of the YouTube Studio offers data about how your videos and overall channel are performing. While looking at this data can’t directly get you views, you can use it to make informed decisions about which types of videos will gain more perspectives.
For example, if you post a well-made explainer video that gets high views with time spent on videos, you post a product promotion that gets lower views. This means your fans prefer to learn more about your brand through the explainer format rather than an over-promotional one.
The Analytics tab will show you many essential data points, including (but not limited to):
- Average view times for each video.
- Channel-specific views and subscribers.
- Drop-off points where many viewers exited the video.
- View numbers for each video.
- Demographic information about your audience and their interests.
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Search Optimization Tools
YouTube might not have inherently created video descriptions, channel About pages, and video or playlist titles for SEO, but these areas are still incredibly important to optimize for the video search engine, and other sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Besides optimizing your content by filling in descriptions, you can also customize your video or channel by assigning keywords related to your niche or industry.
By filling out your descriptions concisely and informatively, you increase internet users’ chance of finding you when they search for content related to your channel’s.
Besides optimizing your channel on the platform itself, you can also use some handy and affordable tools to research search keywords you want to target with your content, like how you would do SEO research for a blog post.
For a more in-depth guide to optimizing your YouTube channel, check out this great post. You can also watch this video walkthrough from our Senior SEO Strategist Braden Becker:
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Featured Video or Playlist Autoplay
You can feature a video or playlist on your main YouTube channel that can welcome new subscribers or intrigue viewers who might subscribe to your channel. At this point, YouTube even allows you to set a different video for new viewers and subscribers. This means you can create informative or introductory content to convince new visitors to subscribe while still featuring more in-depth content for your current followers. They already know what your channel is about.
To update your featured content, simply click the Customize Channel button on your profile, and you’ll land on a page which allows you to personalize your images and your featured content.
Besides enabling you to create a more personalized experience for new and returning viewers, featured videos will also pull in views when watched. Once the featured video is selected, you can also set it to autoplay. This might even score you some additional opinions if a visitor does not pause the video too quickly.
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Online “Share” Button
Next time you upload or edit a YouTube video, consider encouraging viewers to share it on their social channels. We. can easily do this with YouTube’s built-in sharing feature.
- Cards (Formerly Video Annotations)
For almost a decade, YouTube has allowed users to post links to other videos or licensed websites inside a video. This feature, formerly called “Annotations,” was improved for a mobile experience and renamed as “Cards” in 2017. The Cardmaker for each video can be found in the YouTube Studio. Here’s a quick overview of how to set up these prompts:
Aside from pointing your audience back to your channel or other videos, Cards can direct traffic to your site, or even add interactive features such as polls. Such an internal link can also help with SEO rankings.
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Video description links
When you write a handful of blogs, you can connect them to pages or other blog posts on your site so that a handful of visitors give you many views. With YouTube descriptions, which appear under your video, this is no different.
Through connecting your channels or similar videos and giving a summary of each title, you can add content recommendations to the viewer’s experience while optimizing your videos for search engines.