YouTube Algorithm and How To Rank Videos in 2018

What if I told you to stop wasting your time trying to find those perfect tags to add to your videos? Or what if I told you ranking videos on search wasn't necessarily really that important to growing your channel? So how do you grow a new channel and get in front of new people if tags and ranking videos aren't as important as you thought they were? Today, I'm going to share how you can get discovered on YouTube by using the YouTube algorithm. Hi, my name is Trena, and on this channel I help creative entrepreneurs like you get on YouTube to grow your business. Today we're going to be talking about the YouTube algorithm. Kind of a scary thing to talk about, but it's not too difficult to figure out once you know what you're looking for. The first thing that you got to understand when it comes to the YouTube algorithm is watch time is your currency. Think about the minutes people are watching your video as currency. The more minutes you accumulate, the more money you make, right? So the more valuable your channel is. So how to really grow that watch time minute number is to focus on the content that you are creating. Make sure it's valuable content, make sure people are watching it. And one key piece of data that you should be looking at to see if your content is resonating with your audience is looking at your audience retention graph. You'll go into your creator studio, pull out a video that you recently created and see how long you are keeping people's attention. If you can get to 50% of people watching by the end of your video, you know your content is good. Which leads into my second way to use the YouTube algorithm to your benefit. And it's to really study those analytics, right? Look at traffic sources that are driving you new views. Look at channels or videos that your videos are being suggested on. Look at the videos that you created that are drawing you more traffic. Now this is going to lead into the next way to use the YouTube algorithm to grow your channel. And it's to have a nested video strategy. What that means is go to your analytics and see what keywords are driving you the most amount of traffic. For me, the keyword YouTube video ideas or new YouTube video ideas was driving me a lot of traffic. The way I used this information from analytics was I created a playlist titled Best YouTube Video Ideas for 2018. And then I tried to create as many videos as possible around the idea video ideas. Now, I credit this strategy to Jeremy of Vidpal. He's got an entire video on it. I'll link it down below. But this really helped me take my channel off at the beginning of this year was thinking about this nested video idea. With that playlist you want to create about six to eight videos. Really as many videos as you can think of around that topic. So I created video ideas to get more views, video ideas for your business, video ideas that don't show your face. So all around that keyword video ideas which was drawing my channel traffic. So the next piece of YouTube algorithm information that you can get from your analytics is which videos you should focus on. It goes back to that nested idea again, right? You'll want to go into your analytics and go to your traffic sources. When you go to traffic sources, you'll want to look at the YouTube search level and that's going to give you some keywords people are searching you and watching your videos for. For me, I had some calendar blocking and Snapchat analytics, which was such a long video I did, was one of my first videos. But this is going to give you some ideas of what videos you can create that are resonated with your audience and how people are finding you. This is basically the code you can crack to get in front of more people and use the YouTube algorithm to your benefit. Did it work? I think it worked. It worked. And yes, you should still add tags to your video. Make sure though tags describe what that video is about, don't add random tags that aren't what your video is about. You should also be creating enticing titles that have keywords in them and also using your tags and your keywords in your description box. Summary if you want to learn more tips on how you can make your YouTube channel even better, make sure you watch the playlist that is on your screen right now. And don't forget to subscribe for more tips and strategies on how you can use your YouTube channel to grow your business. Thank you so much for watching. Bye.