Optimizing your YouTube channel requires more than just making your channel page neat and nice to look at.

Getting a consistently higher stream of traffic for your channel means leveraging the best YouTube SEO practices while keeping in mind the metrics that YouTube actually uses to rank your videos.

Unfortunately, it’s not always clear what factors YouTube takes into account when deciding which video goes first, second or last. There are, however, data that hint at what YouTube finds essential in videos.

So, let’s take a look at some ways you can rank higher on SERP’s, both on YouTube and even Google, based on the factors YouTube seems to use to measure the importance of videos.

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Social Media Promotion

Promote your YouTube channel on all your other social media networks. The more views your videos get, the more you’ll find your channel occupying that valuable real estate on SERPs.

Promoting your channel outside of YouTube is also a great way of building links to your channel, which is always a good SEO practice. Encourage other people to link to your content whenever possible.

Calls To Action

Sometimes, all it takes to get more views is to simply ask for it.

So, use strong calls to action in your videos and ask your viewers to share, like, comment, and subscribe to your channel for more organic views.

Views Promotion

In addition to improving your ranking, a high view count also builds your social proof. That is, your high view count will tell people that your videos are good, because they would never get that many views otherwise.

Did you know that you can buy high-retention YouTube Views to increase your view count? Read our reviews of YouTube views providers, and learn how they can help you gain organic views. Some will even embed and promote your videos outside of YouTube for greater exposure.

Thumbnail Image

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It won’t hurt (in fact it will do a lot of good) to have an appealing thumbnail image for your video to immediately grab the attention of viewers, whether on YouTube or on Google search results. Be consistent with all your thumbnails so your content stands out and viewers can easily recognize it.

Video Content Strategy

Leading your viewers to your videos isn’t the endgame. You need to hold their attention for as long as you can, and you can only do this by creating great content your viewers will not want to miss.

How long your viewers stay around watching your videos matters – this is called viewer retention – so focus on video content strategies that will reel in more views.

Collaborate with other Creators or Influencers

Indeed, recent recent research shows that YouTube places high value on views, which is why you should, more than ever, work on increasing your video views.

Collaborating with influencers or fellow YouTube creators is a great way to gain more views rapidly. When you collaborate on a project you share each other’s audiences, and anyone coming from the other side who likes what they see will likely subscribe to your channel too.

Image credit: YouTube

So, find people to collaborate with on YouTube to start reaching new audiences.

Audience Engagement

Forms of engagement like comments, likes and shares are also relevant to ranking high on YouTube.

There are quite a few ways you can get more engagement like this on your videos. You can respond to comments as they come, for example, and then showcase some in your next video.

To encourage viewers to comment, at the end of your videos you can ask for their input and feedback. You can also ask direct questions that will lead them to answer in the comments.

Subscribers

Never stop growing your subscribers, especially because they count towards having a high YouTube rank. One way of increasing your audience is by turning those casual, random viewers into loyal subscribers.

Again, high-quality content is important for you to pull this off. Make your channel inviting by creating an attractive channel trailer, if you haven’t already.

The more views you attract, the more opportunities you’ll have to turn those viewers into subscribers. Get more organic views by buying YouTube views. High view counts draw more views, especially from people who prefer watching popular videos over less popular ones – and that’s a lot of people!

Image credit: Adam Saleh Vlogs via YouTube

Keywords

Don’t forget to optimize your channel and your videos with your relevant keywords. Take some time to learn how you can effectively use keywords in your channel, video tags, and titles.

Remember to make sure you use matching keywords in the title and tags of each video, as well.

Get To The Top!

Driving traffic to your channel and appearing on the first page of SERPs often may seem like a case of having to already be popular to become popular. How do you get noticed if you never show up?

In reality, learning how YouTube’s algorithm works and creating your optimization strategies around it will most certainly help you rank high, whether you are popular or not.

This is important not just because YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, but also because ranking high on YouTube can mean ranking high in organic search results on Google, YouTube’s parent company. And that means way more attention for you.

So, start optimizing your channel in the ways that we know YouTube loves, and you’ll soon dominate key positions on valuable SERPs.

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