There are 3 different ways for your videos to be discovered on YouTube, search, recommended and linked videos. Today I am going to break down what each one means and what you need to do to be found. Watch the video below or scroll down for the old fashioned text version.
In Last Place
So the 3 ways of being discovered on YouTube, I will start with the one that has the least impact on the success of your video, can you guess what it is? Surprisingly it’s search.
Search
Search is the easiest one to explain, it’s basically when people type in their search terms into the search bar and they get a list of results, just like Google. Search is defined by the keywords you use in your title, description and tags and is ordered by watch time. As long as your keywords are relevant and your video is getting a good amount of watch time, YouTube will move your video to the top of search results.
Although search is the least impactful of the three ways of being discovered it is still very powerful. Look at this video below we produced for FJM Plumbing and Heating.
It’s about how to stop your outside pipes from freezing. As I’m writing this the temperatures are dropping outside so naturally, people are searching for this topic. If you type ‘How To Stop My Outside Pipes From Freezing’ you will see Fred’s video is second in the search results. With no promotion this video has received over 200 views in the last week, not bad for a local plumber.
Recommended Videos
Next, we move on to recommended videos. Recommended videos can be found on the YouTube homepage also you may have noticed a row of suggested videos on the right-hand side of a video page. YouTube measures the success of recommended videos by click-through rate.
Click-Through Rate is worked out by how many times YouTube have shown your video as recommended and the viewer has clicked and watched the video. The more people click and watch your video from the recommendations the more YouTube will recommend your video.
The way to boost your recommended video ranking is by targeting keywords used by popular videos on a similar subject and then creating stand out thumbnails to catch your viewers eye.
A good keyword tactic is to find a popular video on the same subject and then include that channels name in your tags. Again if we use FJM as an example, their most popular video is about ATAG boilers and 22% of their views come from recommendations. If we look at the related video in the gif, FJM is in the top suggested videos and it stands out. The keywords we used to rank this video are simply ATAG boiler.
Linked Videos
The last way to be discovered is with linked videos. This is the easiest discoverability method you can control yourself. Linked videos are literally views that have been counted due to a viewer clicking a link within YouTube. There are 4 different places you will find links to videos, they are the description, the comments, end screens and cards. I have a method to boost your discoverability with linked videos and you can find it in this video here.
That’s A Wrap
To wrap up, there are 3 ways to be discovered on YouTube and in order of least to most impactful they are search, linked videos and recommended videos. You have to set your videos up differently to take advantage of each method but you can make them all work together.
Let me know what discoverability method you are concentrating on at the moment in the comments and make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel to catch my weekly videos.