Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling a combination of grateful, happy and chagrined because for this vlog, the vlog
Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers, we have passed the 100,000 mark so a great
big woo-hoo.
That’s where the happiness and the gratefulness comes from, by the way.
Where the chagrin comes from is that I haven’t published a vlog in this series for quite
some time and that is on me.
I should have done that but it has just been so busy.
I had so many little projects going that this always kind of slips kind of to the back of
the queue and then you get that self-fulfilling prophecy where you haven’t done something
that you know you should have for a little while so you’re feeling guilty about it
so when you return to it, you feel more guilty than you feel like you’re making success
so you put it off again and it just gets worse.
So here I am making an effort.
We are going to spend over the next couple of months we will publish into this vlog as
many of the lessons that I learned in growing our channel to 100,000 subscribers, as many
of the tips that I can think of over the next period of time.
So let us return today.
Today on Growing Your YouTube Channel to 100,000 Subscribers, we’re going to be discussing
the ever important search.
When I look back and think about what the touch points are that have given me the most
traction as far as helping grow the channel, remember the subscribers are really just a
vanity statistic.
What’s really important is engagement, people being migrated to my mail list and those sorts
of things.
But it is a measuring stick that we can look at and we can say ah, there is success there;
we are getting traction.
When I think about the things that have driven the most traffic to my YouTube channel and
helped grow the channel, nothing does better than search so paying attention to your analytics
and paying attention to your SEO, to your YouTube SEO is a constant.
It’s such a constant that I think some YouTube content creators consider it to be a drudgery
to a certain extent.
They stop paying attention because it seems like work.
Fair enough, it seems like work but it’s work that works.
If we go into our YouTube analytics at any point—I’m just going to go in and I don’t
even know what video I'm going to use.
Actually, we’ll just look at the channel stats to start—let’s go in and let’s
take a look at this right here: Traffic Sources.
What does Traffic Sources tell us?
It tells us where people are discovering our videos.
If you take a look here, this is an important thing for me.
If you take a look here, 58% of my watch minutes comes from Suggested Videos, from YouTube
search another 21%.
Stop for a second.
On my YouTube channel, on the DottoTech, 100,000 subscribers, 76% of the total minutes watched
of that channel comes from search or Suggested Videos.
Now Suggested Videos are when you’re watching a video, those Suggested Videos which appear
on the sidebar.
Very powerful.
One of the main reasons we want to make sure we have great thumbnail images so that we
are clickable when we are there in the sidebar and we’re not just some random screenshot.
Very important.
Another 21% comes from YouTube search, from people looking.
That’s the beauty of YouTube video.
When we talk about the difference between YouTube video and these other newfangled video
types that are coming, the Facebook video, the Twitter video—Twitter video, my gosh!—the
Instagram video, now I mock it a little bit but those video platforms are all video being
delivered incidentally to a market place.
People aren’t coming and looking for video.
It’s being served to them by somebody else.
When people come to YouTube, the beauty of YouTube and the importance of YouTube video
is it’s intentional.
People come and they look for a video on a topic, search for it and they come to you.
So they come to you already in a mindset to consume your content and to possibly become
part of your community.
When you stumble across a video, even if it’s a good video on Facebook or on Instagram or
on Twitter, it is happenstance.
You’re just stumbling across it.
It might engage but there is an intention in the process so the chance of stickiness,
the chance of the people actually converting into something in your community is far less,
if you think about it from that perspective.
So 21% fro, YouTube search and 55% from the Suggested Videos.
You go way down and YouTube subscribers, you see here that all of the other sources of
traffic is a fraction of what we get just from those two criteria.
So building your chops as far as SEO goes, making sure you have good search engine optimization
and you are findable and that YouTube wants to suggest you is something that we all need
to concentrate on, on a constant basis.
So I guess there are two parts to that equation as far as being searchable and findable and
making sure that YouTube is suggesting you.
From the YouTube suggestion perspective, what you want to pay attention to is your watch
time and your engagement, seeing what percentage of your videos people are actually watching
and making sure that that number is a good and healthy number and is a good percentage
of your overall video.
What does that tell YouTube?
That tells YouTube that when people are searching for the content, that’s valuable, that it’s
viable content and that it’s worth recommending again for people to view because when people
watch the video, they’re generally happy with the video so they’re staying with you.
That’s number one.
That’s where you generate additional traffic through the Suggested Videos and through search
for that matter.
As far as the search goes, you have to make sure that you do good titles, you do good
tags and that you create an SEO-rich environment within the description field within YouTube.
I have found a tool for that.
We’ll dive into this tool in a little more detail in coming episodes but it’s called
Tube Buddy and if you take a look at it—I've got it installed here—I'm just going to
show you quickly how it can help with some of the SEO challenges that we face.
Let’s go to this video here on 1Password that I created about a month ago.
For me, it’s getting more than my average amount of traffic for a couple of months but
it’s not like blowing the doors off.
If I take a look at the different tools that Tube Buddy gives me, one of them is search
rankings.
Search ranking is going to tell me how this video is ranking in search.
Now you can do this manually yourself by creating an anonymous browser session then going to
YouTube and typing in the different search phrases and seeing where your video appears
but that’s fairly labor-intensive.
I think so as well.
Here it takes all of the keywords that we’ve put in as far as tags and it tells me how
this video is ranking.
And look at these.
This is what I'm looking for: #1, #1, #2, #5 for password managers and here the change.
It’s kind of like a leaderboard in golf tournament.
It’s telling me that I've moved up three in the “best password manager” search
term but I've moved down one in the “password manager” search term.
Damn you, password manager!
I want to be up in #4.
I'm going for 3, not for 6.
So you here though why this video is probably doing well is it’s ranking quite well in
many, many search criteria, although this one here it just plummeted in.
I don’t know why.
But going through, checking this and then modifying your content, modifying your descriptions
in YouTube to help boost up its SEO, that’s an exercise that’s well worthwhile.
Now I'm not saying you have to do this for every video.
Some of your videos are just kind of run-of-the-mill videos but your star videos, the ones that
you know are going to generate traffic and are going to generate interest in your channel,
you have to make sure that you do a great job of creating good search ranking criteria
within the title, the descriptions and the tags and go back and refresh it.
As a matter of fact, I won’t show you right now but this tool will actually go through
and help us suggest different search phrases instead of search terms and tags which might
help us as far as SEO ranking is concerned.
SEO in YouTube is a very straightforward relationship.
It’s not like in Google where you’re trying to game the system all the time.
If you create good, compelling video, describe exactly what it is accurately to YouTube,
they will reward you with traffic.
As far as I am concerned, there’s a lot of trust between content creator and YouTube
channel because when I create good video, I'm pretty sure that YouTube is going to celebrate
that video and help me get it before not just my community but other people that might be
interested in it.
That is the beauty of YouTube publishing.
Well, there we go.
I did it.
I got back on the saddle.
I got back on the horse.
It didn’t seem too painful and we got another episode of Growing Your YouTube channel to
100,000 Subscribers out.
Now listen, there are three ways that you can stay in touch with me and I would appreciate
you using any of them.
The first is please subscribe to this channel.
Secondly, subscribe to my newsletter.
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Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!