If you follow our blog, you know that creating an animated explainer video should be only a small part of your video marketing strategy. You should be marketing your animated explainer video and sharing it via social networks, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo or YouTube.
It’s no secret that YouTube is the place to be if you want access to a huge source of potential traffic. There is one not-so-little downsides to using YouTube, however.
It is a very crowded space.
According to the online video empire itself, there are over 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. What that translates to is tons of competition and potential for your viewers to get distracted (Look! A dancing cat!).
How do you get more views on YouTube?
The first block you should be checking is Video SEO. More often than not, people upload their animated explainer videos to their YouTube Channel with no thought to optimizing it (or their channel) for search. Don’t be that guy.
What are the most important factors that YouTube uses to rank videos?
YouTube’s algorithm plays with the big boys. Just a few of the ranking factors that YouTube uses to rank videos include:
• Keyword relevance
• Number of views
• Audience retention
• Length of video
• Absolute audience retention
• Number of comments
• Keywords in comments
• Comment reactions
• Number of thumbs up
• Number of thumbs down
• Ratio between thumbs up and thumbs down
• Favorites
• Video responses
• Playlists
• Number of social shares
• Number of embeds
• Strength of sites that embed your video
• External links
• Authority
• Channel description
• Playlists
• Homepage
• Channel keywords
• Interactions
• Channel title
• New videos
• Frequency of uploads
• Age of channel
• Total video views
• Number of channel views
• Number of subscribers
• Age of video freshness
• Video filename
• Outgoing links
• Descriptions
• Annotations
• Transcriptions
• Attractive thumbnail
• HD quality
• Click rate in lists
How can you use YouTube’s ranking factors to help optimize your animated explainer videos for search?
1. Use your description area!
Google and YouTube cannot watch your explainer video, which means both of these search engine giants use the text in your video description to understand what the video is about. More importantly, YouTube will use your descriptions to help rank your explainer video for the long-tail keywords.
2. Find “video keywords” to use for your explainer video. To do this, do a Google search for target keywords so see which ones produce videos at the top of the universal search. Use keywords that align with those searches to write your titles, descriptions, tags and comment responses for your explainer video.
3. Utilize your social networks. Another reason why being an active member of online communities is important: when you have a relevant piece of content, share it! The more videos you make and the more views each video has, and the longer people stay on watching your videos, the greater chance your video will have ranking in search.
4. “Liking” and “subscribing” are two very important factors in the YouTube algorithm. When people watch a video on your channel and like it enough to “like it” or subscribe to your channel, it sends a message to YouTube: this was an awesome video that served up just what I was looking for. If you’re already creating great content, then bump up your YouTube channel subscriptions and “likes” by asking for them. You can do this either within the video (better) or in the description area (will do in a pinch).
5. Create playlists and make them rich in keywords. Once you have at least 10 videos in your channel, organize them into playlists that make sense and use keywords to create the titles of your playlists.
Want an explainer video of your own? Check out our portfolio and give us a call to get a free quote today.
