5 Ways to Climb the YouTube Search Rankings

Posted on Dec 15th 2015 in Social Media

Are your hotel’s videos falling flat on YouTube?

Optimising your content to take advantage of the site’s algorithm will ensure your videos get seen by more of your guests.

In today’s blog, we’ll look at 5 ways you can rank higher in YouTube search.

1. Discover What Your Guests are Searching For

If you want more guests to discover and watch your videos, it’s important to know how your guests are discovering them. This means identifying the keywords and phrases people use to search for content like yours on YouTube.

There are a number of paid and free tools that will provide you with these valuable insights, including Keyword Tool, vidIQ and YouTube Trends, amongst many others. The paid tools have the advantage of showing how difficult it is to rank highly for certain popular terms.

Ideally, what you are looking for is keywords that are getting a decent volume of hits but aren’t overly competitive. Once you have pinpointed the best keywords, you can incorporate them into the YouTube content you create.

2. Optimise Your Video

Although you may be surprised to hear it, YouTube is still not great at reading video content, so you need to help it out.

Strategically placing your keywords (without overstuffing) in your videos meta data will inform YouTube what your video is about and help you rank for even competitive terms. You should include your chosen keywords close to the beginning of your video’s title, as well as in the description, video tags and transcript file.

3. Start Strong and Maximise Video Watch Time

The single most important factor YouTube uses to rank content is video watch time. There’s no way around it: if your audience is clicking away just a few seconds into your video, your content will rank poorly no matter how much care you take choosing your keywords and optimising your meta data. Remember, it’s the percentage of your video that’s viewed that matters most, rather than the total number of minutes watched.

So how do you keep your viewers hooked? Make the opening of your video strong. Use interesting imagery to draw your audience in, if you have posed a question in the video title get straight to the point in answering it, and if your video features a voiceover or presenter, pay attention to tone of voice and personality. You want to pique your guests’ curiosity and leave them wanting to find out more, not clicking away in boredom and frustration.

If you can successfully lure people to watch more of your video, YouTube will see your content as valuable to its viewers and will be more likely to rank it highly and suggest it to a wider audience.

4. Promote Your Other Videos

This one may seem obvious, but try to drive guests to watch more than just one of your videos. This is what all YouTube content creators want of course, but not all of them are taking time to actively drive views across their whole channel.

If your hotel’s channel regularly pulls in people for multiple video views, YouTube will reward you with higher rankings in search.

An effective way to encourage viewers to have longer YouTube sessions is to use clickable thumbnails or end cards to draw attention to your other content and drive clicks.

5. Encourage Audience Engagement

As you know, likes and shares are an excellent form of social proof and comments in particular are useful for gaining valuable feedback from your audience. But encouraging engagement has another advantage you may not have considered: a welcome boost in the YouTube search results.

As before, it’s all about providing value. If your guests are happily liking your videos, sharing them with friends and family and talking about you online, YouTube can clearly see that your videos are worth promoting to its users. With this in mind, you should include calls to action driving audience engagement on a regular basis. You can also consider posing questions to your audience to get them conversing in the comments section.

Just like any other platform, the more work you put in with YouTube, the more results you get out of it.

How do you make YouTube work for your hotel? Let us know in the comments below?