If you've just started your YouTube channel and you're struggling to get people to watch your videos,
I'm going to show you how to get more views on YouTube, even if you have zero subscribers.
Stay tuned.
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What's up creators?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
Today I have some crafty tips for you to get more views to your YouTube videos.
And more views often leads to more subscribers.
So first, let's kick things off by touching on 3 core principles that will help you consistently
get more views to your YouTube videos, and then we'll jump into some tactics.
The first core principle is to focus on your title and thumbnail
to boost your clickthrough rates or CTR.
Now, if you can't get people to click on your videos, then you aren't going to get any views.
CTR generally comes down to your title and thumbnail.
Now, this doesn't mean you should create clickbaity titles like,
"This One Trick Got Us 15 Million Views in 1 Hour."
While it might drive a click, it's unlikely that you'll be able to deliver on that promise.
As for the thumbnail, you want to create something that compliments the title.
For example, let's say you created a video on "How to Get a Six Pack in 3 Months."
Now, if I were to create a thumbnail like this, I highly doubt it would help my CTR.
The thumbnail has nothing to do with the title.
On the other hand, a thumbnail like this,
would likely drive more clicks because it teases proof of concept.
#2. Create videos that engage your audience.
And by "engage," I'm referring to people actually watching a good portion of your videos,
liking, commenting, and sharing.
Here are a few tips.
Make sure your video delivers value.
Script or outline your videos so you stay on topic.
Ask questions throughout your video to get more comments.
And ask viewers to like and share your videos.
And #3 is to create relevant videos on a niche topic.
When you're just starting out, I highly recommend staying very focused
on a specific topic within your niche.
By doing this, you're building an audience that isn't just interested in one of your videos,
but will likely want to watch other related videos on the same topic.
For example, your broad niche might be food.
And under that umbrella, you might make your own home-cooked meals.
Now, rather than creating videos on all of the foods you eat, it might be best to start out
with a more narrow topic like "grilling meat on a barbecue."
Then start branching out to "marinades," "sides,"
and as your audience grows, getting views won't be such a feat
because slowly but surely, you'll be building a like-minded audience over time.
Now, take these tips as foundational advice, so that the tactics you learn today go beyond one-off views.
Alright, so the first tip is one of my favorites, and that's to leverage the power of suggested
views using series playlists.
Suggested views are when someone clicks on your video in the sidebar.
Now, there are two parts to this sidebar.
The Up next, and then the rest of the videos.
Obviously, the spot that you want to get is the "Up next" spot.
Reason being, the next video automatically plays after the current video is over,
which is super powerful for getting more views,
particularly on mobile that doesn't have a sidebar.
Now, the problem is, if you're a small or new channel, it's tough to get suggested on other people's videos.
So if you're just starting out, claim the "Up next" spot on your own videos using series playlists.
A series playlist allows you to mark your playlist as an official set of videos
that should be viewed together.
And only the creator of the videos can do this.
Think of how Netflix does it with seasons and episodes of your favorite show.
Watching the videos out of order wouldn't be the best experience.
So when you create a series playlist, YouTube is then able to judge whether people agree
with the order of the list you've set.
And if viewers are watching your videos in the order you set, you'll heighten your chances
of getting suggested views in the "Up next spot."
To set up a series playlist, go to your Playlist, click on Playlist settings,
and choose "Set as official series for this playlist."
And if all goes well, the next episode in your playlist should be in the "Up next" section.
In fact, Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs is starting a new channel called, "SaaS Marketing Vlog."
And as his official and very expensive YouTube advisor,
I've recommended he waits until he has at least a few episodes before launching.
Why?
Because he should get more suggested views, which leads to longer session watch times,
and ultimately, creating the binge-worthy effect.
The next thing you can do is target keywords that actually have search demand.
One of the biggest mistakes that I see new creators make is creating "me-centered" videos with titles like:
"Camera Gear I Use."
If you don't have a following, the truth is that people won't care who you are
and no one is searching for these kinds of queries.
But people are looking for advice on camera gear.
In fact, Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer, which is our keyword research tool, shows that
"best camera for YouTube" gets 4,500 monthly searches in the US
and 7,300 globally on YouTube.
Now, targeting a popular keyword usually means the competition will be fierce.
So to find lower-competition keywords that still have search demand, you can use keyword modifiers
to target long-tail queries.
YouTube's autosuggest works great to get some ideas and angles fast.
But again, you should use a YouTube keyword research tool to find out if there's search demand,
otherwise you could be creating a video for no one.
Now, since YouTube's autosuggest gives you suggestions based on phrases,
you can use the "Phrase match" report in Keywords Explorer to see even more suggestions
and choose based on monthly search volumes.
Now, this is just a way to determine search demand.
If you want to actually rank your videos,
then I highly recommend watching our video on YouTube SEO.
The next way is to embed your videos on forums that are already getting traffic.
Now, by no means am I encouraging you to spam your videos on forums.
In fact, I think this does more harm than good.
But there are popular forums like Quora, Stack Overflow, and TripAdvisor where people are
asking questions where your videos could have the answer.
Now, you can go and answer all relevant questions and I'm sure you're going to get some views.
But a more effective way to do this is to find questions that are
already getting consistent traffic from Google
and post your answers with your video there.
You can find these popular pages on forums using Ahrefs' Site Explorer.
So I'll type in quora.com and run the search.
Next, I'll go to the top pages report, which shows you the pages that generate the most
search traffic for this website.
Now, using the Include search feature, I'll look for pages
that rank for a keyword related to my niche.
So assuming I have a tech blog, I might type in a broad keyword like "mobile."
And this one looks interesting on the topic of checking your T-mobile balance.
Now, as a final check, I'll open the "Overview" report for this page and then I'm going to click on
the "organic search" tab to analyze the page's traffic over time.
And it looks like this page has been getting consistent traffic for the past couple of
years, so it would definitely be worth the time to answer the question.
The next thing you should do is leverage your existing audience outside of YouTube.
If you've built an email list for your blog, send your videos to them in your weekly newsletter.
If you have a business or personal social media account, share your videos there.
And if you have a blog, you should embed your videos in relevant blog posts.
A good way to find pages that can drive views to your YouTube videos
is to look through your Google Analytics.
In this case, you'll see we had around 12,000 unique pageviews to our SEO tips blog post.
And since we have a video on this topic, we embedded it in our post, which has resulted in
over 2,000 views from this page alone.
Another strategy that I absolutely love is to use YouTube search ads.
This is something that we've experimented with for a little while now and we've found
two ways to use YouTube ads effectively.
The first method is to target keywords on YouTube that are already producing high watch times.
As I mentioned earlier, we don't want to get views for the sake of getting views.
We want to get views that engage our audience.
Views that teach people how to do SEO effectively.
Views that are going to stir a desire to watch more of our videos because the original ad that
caught their attention was worth watching.
Now, to do this, go to the Traffic sources report in YouTube analytics.
Next, click on YouTube search, which will show you the keywords that have driven views to your videos
along with keyword-specific watch time stats.
From here, you'll want to scan the keyword, average view duration, and average percentage
viewed columns to analyze which keywords are generating minutes watched for your videos.
As you can see, "SEO," "search engine optimization,"
and "SEO for beginners" are all producing great watch times for us.
Now, looking at the "Average percentage viewed" values, you'll see that people are watching
around 45% of the video for these keywords,
which in my opinion is pretty good for long videos.
Now, these keywords all happen to come from the same video too.
So we created an ad targeting these exact keywords,
which has resulted in over 100 new conversions,
over a thousand subscribers, and over 9,500 earned views, meaning over 9,500 people
who clicked on our original ad, decided to watch another video on our channel by their own will.
The second way that has been super-effective for us is using retargeting ads.
For each of our SEO tools, we have landing pages.
And because every person isn't going to subscribe to our tools, we retarget educational videos
showing how our tools fit into everyday SEO processes.
And the results have been pretty awesome.
58 conversions and over 1,100 subscribers.
Now, the most impressive stat here to me is that we've had over 6,800 earned views.
Now, the reason why this is so impressive is because 23.5% of people who watched
one of our retargeting ads, watched another video on our channel, which didn't cost us a penny.
YouTube ads are cheap relative to more popular advertising networks like Google Ads and Facebook.
So try YouTube ads to amplify your best videos and enjoy growth in your channel.
Another thing I highly recommend doing is using endscreens and cards.
Endscreens are video thumbnails that you can add towards the end of your video.
And if someone clicks it, then that video begins to play.
Cards on the other hand are slide-ins you can add at any point in your video.
You can do things like suggest videos and playlists to watch, promote other channels,
add polls, or link to a website.
Now, while your instincts might tell you to always link to your website, you might want
to think about keeping users on the YouTube platform.
From my experience, the cumulative value you get from longer session watch times far outweigh
a few link clicks here and there.
By getting viewers to keep watching your videos,
the better your channel will perform as a whole
and you'll increase views to your YouTube videos.
Now, which YouTube marketing strategy are you going to try?
Or maybe you have some better tips that are working for you.
Let me know in the comments and if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe
for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
So keep grinding away, get more views, and I'll see you at the top.