If you’re looking to gain more views from YouTube’s search function, it’s important that you understand the YouTube ranking factors to better optimise your video and YouTube channel. Many online marketers may believe that optimising the on-video content is the most important step to increasing its views and rankings, and while it’s true that on-video YouTube ranking factors are important, these are not the only YouTube ranking factors that should be focused on. So, what are these YouTube ranking factors that you should take into consideration?
Note: The YouTube ranking factors listed here are only guesses based on the input from my own experience and the experience from others.
Video
Important YouTube ranking factors for your video include quality, annotations, keywords, and age. Since YouTube’s algorithm cannot actually see your video, it relies on the input from you to determine what the video is about and what to categorise it as.
- Video file name
- Quality (1440p, 1080p, 720p, etcetera) – Higher is better
- Age of video
- Freshness of video
- Outbound links pointing to video
- Inbound links pointing to video
- Authority of links
- Keywords
- Annotations
- Transcriptions
- Thumbnail
- Total video views
- Length of video
Channel
The channel factors in the YouTube ranking factors focus on optimising a channel to help a video rank. A completed and optimised aged channel that receives visitors can drive traffic to your videos, which may indirectly cause your videos to increase their rankings. In addition to this, a completed channel will also make you seem like a more serious user.
- Number of channel views
- Number of subscribers
- Age of channel
- Outbound links pointing to channel
- Inbound links pointing to channel
- Channel Title
- Channel Keywords
- Channel Verification
- Playlists
- Channel Art
- Channel Description
Content Creator Behaviour
YouTube will obviously trust a user who had made the effort to verify their account over a user who had just created an account and uploaded several different videos with dubious content, thus giving the verified user a small boost in their rankings.
- Upload Frequency
- Profile completion
- Phone verified profile
User Behaviour
A more active video where users are constantly interacting with a video is more than likely a video that YouTube would want to promote by pushing it to the top of YouTube’s SERPs. In the case of up votes and down votes, a higher up vote count that maintains a natural-looking ratio is better than a 100% up vote rating.
- Thumbs up/down ratio
- Thumbs up
- Thumbs down
- Favourites
- Comments
- Keyword in comments (for relevancy)
- Number of comments
- Relative audience retention
- Absolute audience retention
Social
Social signals, which are often fabricated by black hat search engine optimisers, are claimed to be the equivalent of backlinks for a websites. They are used specifically to boost a video’s rankings, allowing it to appear in a higher position in the YouTube SERPs. Whether this works or not will vary between Internet marketers, although in a few tests I ran on a few sample videos I created for YouTube, I did notice that there was a significant increase in rankings for a few videos (I will most likely release a case study on this in a few months on this website)
- Number of Facebook likes pointing to video
- Number of Facebook shares pointing to video
- Number of Tweets pointing to video
- Number of Google+ Shares pointing to video
- Number of Google +1’s pointing to video
- Number of Linkedin Shares pointing to video
- Number of Pinterest pins pointing to video
- Number of Facebook likes pointing to channel
- Number of Facebook shares pointing to channel
- Number of Tweets pointing to channel
- Number of Google+ Shares pointing to channel
- Number of Google +1’s pointing to channel
- Number of Linkedin Shares pointing to channel
- Number of Pinterest pins pointing to channel