Many musicians get followers, streams, and likes on YouTube because it directly correlates to their online visibility, popularity, and potential for success. Higher streaming numbers and likes indicate a larger and more engaged audience, which can attract new fans, record labels, and potential collaborators.

Concept Overview: How Does The YouTube Algorithm Function?

The YouTube algorithm works like a helpful computer program that works behind the scenes. It considers many factors, such as videos, comments, descriptions, and how much Youtube streaming you get. Its goal is to ensure you find videos relevant to your interests and that you’ll enjoy watching. With this, it ranks and attempts to recommend videos based on what it thinks will satisfy its users as viewers and keep them engaged.

How Does YouTube’s Algorithm Determine Recommendations In 2023

YouTube’s algorithm is now structured to allow small accounts to grow fast and exponentially. No longer will recommendations be based solely on the most popular, but instead, they will be personalized to recommend videos that are likely most suited to individual desires. Two people who search the same thing may even receive completely different results!

Among many, YouTube’s algorithm prioritizes factors such as relevance, engagement, quality, and user search or watch history. In relevance, it considers titles, descriptions, and tags. In engagement, considers watching time, comments, shares, and likes. In quality, it considers an account’s overall performance in a given area or subject. Lastly, in user search or watch history, it considers historical behaviors. This will combine and contribute to recommended videos, giving creators “impressions.”

How To Transform Impressions To Get A Better Click-Through Rate?

Although your video has been recommended if a viewer does not click on your video, let alone watch it. YouTube will also take this as information to consider, which may lead to your impressions decreasing. With that, here are some ways to continuously be recommended and to improve your click-through rates.

Before watching your videos and developing data for YouTube, people need to want to watch and know about you. Creating attractive titles and thumbnails, sticking to a premise, collaborating with others, and promoting on social media will get you recognized, develop a better click-through rate, and ultimately get on YouTube’s radar for recommendations.

Going from clicking on a video to watching it is a different ball game. For YouTube Shorts, a key element to look at is viewing over swipe-away rates, while for long-form videos, pay attention to average view duration. YouTube considers this information for recommendations and provides insight into how people react to your videos. To encourage viewers to continue watching your videos, the first 3 seconds in a YouTube Short and the first 30 seconds in a long-form video are crucial in capturing a viewer’s attention.

Once you can get viewers to watch your videos completely, you have somewhat developed trust that your video is of good quality, and the algorithm will reward you for that. The cycle then repeats itself. From here, it is especially important to stay consistent in uploading. YouTube will then note that you are a serious creator on their platform, boosting your reach even further.

What Exactly Is SEO and How Does SEO Work On YouTube?

But, searching on Google for “How to make coffee” won’t show you “How to cook pasta.” It would instead show you pages that would best answer that specific query. Similarly, YouTube will deliver videos that best match your search queries.

However, countless videos are being uploaded every day. Your well-crafted video could drown in the masses and not achieve the desired results. This is where SEO comes into work. When optimized, only the videos that are specifically SEO optimized and flow well with YouTube’s algorithm will rank high in any search queries.

Elements That Are Considered In YouTube’s Search Algorithm

Since YouTube is a part of Google, it uses very similar search algorithms, and whatever you search on Google would also typically come with some YouTube video recommendations. Specifically, these algorithms consider several elements contributing to their decision to rank specific search terms.

SEO optimization would include elements such as video titles, video descriptions, metadata, tags, comments, video transcription, and more. Essentially, anything that can be put into text contributes to it, including your original video file name!

3 Tips To Improve Your YouTube SEO And Boost Visibility

1. Get Your Keywords Right!

This is the initial and most important part you need to nail for both back-end and front-end purposes. Search engines use these keywords to comprehend what your content is about and to determine what users are looking for while avoiding competition at the same time. It also helps as when people read it out, they better understand what to expect from your video.

There are numerous keyword explorers out there that you can use, such as Ahrefs and AnswerThePublic. With these, instead of only recognizing “music,” for example, “lofi music” may be much more relevant and specific to your content.

Some creators craft their videos by working on this first! They will make videos surrounding them by looking up trending topics and keywords, such as news updates.

2. Search Tags

This is where you throw all your keywords in. You should try to include as many keywords as you can that relate to your video. It is specifically for back-end purposes on YouTube, so viewers will not see this, but it helps the algorithm make sense of your videos. The first few tags are the most important, so include the most relevant and popular tags first!

However, it is important to note that the tags should be relevant to your videos. Otherwise, you may face negative consequences or even penalties associated with it.

3. Video Transcripts

YouTube would typically generate transcripts for your videos. However, these transcripts have a high chance of being inaccurate. Although it’s tedious work, videos that contain transcripts have historically been able to get 16% more viewers than videos that don’t.

With that being said, doing the extra work would pay off. If you don’t have the time to do so, there are a ton of AI transcription software out there, such as Descript or Cockatoo, that can help you do the work. Alternatively, you could hire someone to do it for you.

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