How to optimise your YouTube videos

So, you have some of the most compelling content going on Youtube, but just aren’t racking up the views as much as you feel it should. How do you go about increasing your audience? We’ve compiled a list of hints and hacks to help you increase your youtube hits.

Annotations

Annotations are the little text bubbles that you sometimes see popping up part way through a video. You can use these to your advantage by highlighting and linking any related content that you have to the video in question, be that other videos or whole playlists. You can also use these to ask users to subscribe to your channel (which brings us onto our next point)

End Screens

End screens are great tools that you can use as a call to action for subscribing, or to link up to more videos or your channel. You can also set up poll cards here, which can help you engage with the viewers and find out what they’d like to see more of.

Engagement through Social Media

Promoting on other social channels is a tactic that goes without saying, but posting up teasers or social shorts that link viewers to the full video at the end is useful in boosting views to your channel.

It’s also worth remembering that YouTube is a community just like Facebook and Twitter. Even something as simple as responding to direct questions and comments on your own videos shows the viewers that you are personable, which will prompt more people to comment as they know there’s someone at the other end listening.

Keywords

Perhaps another no-brainer, but making sure your video title has all the relevant keywords in it helps bring it up at the top in search results. You can also think about posting the manuscript into the text box underneath the video, as search engines don’t have the ability currently to fetch keywords from spoken audio. If you don’t fancy posting up a long piece of text, you can try shortening that into a blurb of sorts, which you can pack the keywords into!

Content Calendar

You want to be posting fairly regularly to keep up engagement and interest within your audience, so creating a content calendar is a great way to make sure you don’t forget to upload any videos you have banked up for posting. You can also tailor some video campaigns to the time of year (Spring, Summer, Halloween, Christmas) to sneak in those keyword boosts!

These simple changes only scratch the surface of different ways that you can increase your video hits. If you’d like to know more about anything written here, or would like to know how we can help you get your video further, drop us a line at info@rockadove.com!