Nowadays, marketers want to learn the working of YouTube's algorithm to attract and maintain their audiences. YouTube operates as one of Google's subsidiaries. The sections of the YouTube platform that display relevant videos are: subscriptions, suggested videos, search, trending and homepage. Viewers stay on YouTube channels for more time because YouTube's algorithm helps them to watch and enjoy the videos.
YouTube determines the most popular channels by tracking the engagement of users with each video they watched. YouTube recognizes metrics such as average time spent on each video, likes, dislikes, videos watched by each viewer and what viewers do not watch. Since YouTube's algorithm gives more weightage to engagement metrics, Digital Marketing Boy would like you to create engaging videos.
Different signals are used by YouTube to rank videos on each section of its platform. Let us discuss YouTube's algorithm concerning the following sections:
A. Search: Relevance and keywords are the factors that can affect your rankings on YouTube search. Always optimize your content, titles and descriptions whenever you are planning to rank your videos in search. The search functionality of YouTube also considers the number of your channel videos and other videos (of a similar category as your video) watched by the viewers. Read our blog 'What is YouTube SEO?'.
B. Subscriptions: The subscription page of YouTube helps users to watch all the recent videos uploaded from their subscribed YouTube channels. Your channel subscribers watch your video once it is published and this is used as a measurement of determining rankings on YouTube platform. The rankings of your videos in this section also depend on the count of active subscribers on your YouTube channel.
C. Trending: A feed of popular and new videos in the specific country of a user is termed as 'Trending Page'. YouTube considers the growth rate of views (for originality) and count of views for each ranked video because YouTube wants to balance the originality with popularity whenever its algorithm ranks videos in the 'Trending' section.
D. Suggested Videos and Homepage: YouTube's algorithm provides personalized suggestions to every single viewer. Thus, you will not have the same YouTube experience as compared to other viewers. In this section, YouTube finds relevant videos after analyzing the activity history of a viewer. Further, videos are ranked based on satisfied similar users, engagement, several times the videos watched by each viewer and the views count of each YouTube video. Viewers receive suggestions from various channels and thus they view more content on the YouTube platform.
Videos Optimization for YouTube's Algorithm: The first thing is to perform keyword research and add relevant keywords to your thumbnail files, descriptions, tags, titles, video files and SRT (SubRip Text) files. You should access YouTube Analytics > Reach > YouTube Search to analyze the popular keywords guiding viewers to your YouTube videos. Digital Marketing Boy suggests you make slight changes in video optimization after you study the correlation between your video's category and the keywords.
Create attractive thumbnails for each of your videos to grab the attention of online users and generate engagement. Thumbnails are small images that are visible to users when they search for videos on the YouTube platform. Thumbnail is an important factor and it attracts users to watch your YouTube video. Make sure the background and foreground of your thumbnail are different and this will make it attractive. Once the users start watching videos, you can further engage them by publishing a series of videos on your YouTube channel. You should consider the engagement metrics such as average session duration, average view duration, watch time, audience retention and average watch percentage to measure the performance of your videos. Popularize your YouTube channel by creating videos on the topics that generate the most engagement.
