Do you want to increase the views of your YouTube videos but don’t know how to do it? Are you finding it difficult to figure out why the reach of your YouTube videos is being curtailed? To help you find answers, you will need to dive into the realm of social media algorithms and how they work. As regards YouTube, you may need to crack how does the YouTube algorithm work in order to help your video content grow and enjoy a much wider reach, that too unhindered.
To begin unraveling the secret ingredients of YouTube algorithms, let’s start with YouTube itself, what it has to say how its algorithm works!
The goals of YouTube’s search and discovery system are twofold: to help viewers find the videos they want to watch, and to maximize long-term viewer engagement and satisfaction.
— YouTube Help
How YouTube Algorithm Works?Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
How to Turn YouTube Algorithms in your Favor
We can infer from the above quote it’s clear that the topic delivery matters when creating video content on YouTube.
Certainly, how to use the YouTube algorithm in your favor is a challenge, and influencers have been battling it for years!
When it comes to pleasing the algorithms on YouTube, three things have to be perfectly synchronized: creativity, discretion, and discoverability.
Creative you are, as a video content creator on YouTube. But you have to balance it with elements of discretion and discoverability in order to harness the true potential of YouTube’s mammoth reach in your favor.
In other words, you cannot just rely on creativity, you have also to give ample space, and devote time and energy, to efforts to male your videos discoverable in a way that’s not flagged by YouTube algorithms – that is, optimize your videos for SEO, but refrain from overoptimizing.
In simple terms, forging a balance between creativity and discoverability entails creating content on topics of viewers find interesting. Therefore, it is the viewer interest that should guide and nourish your creativity!
There’s no dearth of videos on YouTube. All subjects imaginable are covered. Viewers don’t have a pre-planned playlist of videos on their minds when surfing YouTube.
And as such, they don’t even come to YouTube to watch a particular influencer’s video.
They just happen to discover a video because it ranks well in YouTube’s suggested videos and search results.
YouTube Marketing Tips
Whether you’re an influencer or marketer, what matters in YouTube marketing is audiences’ interests.
Knowing what your target audience is looking for is a marketing imperative to succeed on YouTube. And using Google Trends can prove very helpful in getting insights into audiences’ preferences, interests, and of course, what exactly they’re looking for on the world’s largest and most popular streaming platform, YouTube.
How to use Google Trends for YouTube search?
The default search settings for Google Trends is “web search”, which confuses many users as it loads trending web search results only.
But you can tweak it to view users’ interest in a topic or search term you propose to create a YouTube video on.
*Google Trends is a Google tool for marketing. You may want to know what other free marketing tools Google offers, check out my article, Google Tools for Marketing.
How to Use Google Trends for YouTube Search?
So, for assessing the “web search” interest, over some time, in a topic or search term you choose for your next YouTube video, there’s no better tool to use than Google Trends.
How do you use it for YouTube searches?
It’s a simple process. Just follow these steps:
- Go to the “web search” tab.
- Click on it.
- A drop-down menu will show.
- Inside the menu, you will see other options.
- Select “YouTube search” interest.
From what you see on Google Trends, as a YouTube influencer or marketer, you can get countless ideas to devise well-informed content strategies.
Look, getting a preview of search interest is a tricky business and one with the maximum impact on your YouTube marketing strategy.
Take, for instance, Fashion and Beauty, the two topics seem to share the same interest from the surface, but when further delved into the topics on Google Trends, we happen to be utterly wrong!
YouTube search interest in beauty turns out to be 31% more than in fashion, worldwide.
Simply put, YouTube search interest can render your content strategies as accurate and precise as possible, and help you optimize video metadata more precisely.
Whether it be metadata for titles, descriptions, or tags, Google Trends come in handy.
Yet, most of the marketers turn a blind eye to Google Trends or overlook its capability to uncover topics and search terms of maximum interest.
Instead of ignoring it, if they resort to it, they can easily come across YouTube topics relevant to their business. Not only that but also to identify YouTube influencers whose content is ranking higher for those topic keywords and phrases.
As regards influencers, their channels need to have well-organized content, relevant playlists to rank well on YouTube.
While sorting posts in users’ feeds, social media algorithms give top priority to the relevancy of the content, not publish time.
If your content is likely to be viewed or read, algorithms will send it to a users’ social media feed. In other words, the ‘likely yes’ seals the fate of your content.
The reverse chronological method of sorting posts – where new posts automatically showed up first no longer works.
Now an individual user’s behavior and other metrics factor in when algorithms deliver content to an individual user.
Video recommendations on YouTube bear it out. The individual user behavior alongside #tags, categories, and keywords come into play when the YouTube algorithm recommends videos.