Tips to Rank YouTube Videos In 2020, Complete YouTube SEO Guide

In this article you will see that how to rank your YouTube videos, step-by-step. In fact, there are 7 strategies to rank in YouTube for competitive keywords like link building, on-page SEO, video SEO and YouTube SEO. These strategies have also helped my videos rank on the first page of Google. So if you wanna get your videos to the top of YouTube and Google, make sure to watch the rest of this video.

When I first launched my YouTube channel a few years ago, I was completely lost. I knew that YouTube was the world's second largest search engine, but I didn't know how to rank my videos. So I did what anyone would do in my situation, I searched for things like YouTube SEO and how do I rank my videos and I saw the same exact advice over and over again.

You know the kind of thing I'm talking about, use your keyword in your title, use a bunch of tags and my favorite, create great videos. Oh, create a great video, why didn't I think of that? Needless to say, this generic advice didn't work, and after years of trial and error I finally figured out what actually worked. And now that I have YouTube SEO pretty much figured out, my rankings, views, and subscribers have shot through the roof. 

Here are 7 strategies that have worked best for me. So let's kick things off with strategy.

1. Boost your click-through rate.

Your click-through rate is the percentage of people that see your video in the search results and click on it. As it turns out, YouTube pays very close attention to your video's click-through rate and if lots of people click on your video, YouTube will give your video a rankings boost. In fact, YouTube's own data shows that your click-through rate is key. So how do you increase your click-through rate without using click bait?

Use brackets and parentheses in your video title. Industry studies show that you can get up to a third more clicks just by adding brackets to the end of your title. That's because the text in your brackets gives someone a sneak preview into your video which makes them more likely to click. For example, check out the title of this video from my channel. My original title was just how to rank number one in Google, but I decided to add this text in brackets which makes my title much more enticing to click on. Which leads us to our second strategy, increase engagement signals. Engagement signals are things like comments, shares, likes, and subscribes and the more engagement signals your video gets, the higher it'll rank. In fact a recent industry study found that engagement signals strongly correlated with rankings in YouTube. And YouTube has even gone on the record, saying that videos are ranked partially based on engagement.

The question is, how do you get more people to engage with your video? First ask your viewers to answer a multiple choice question. This is a big one. When I first got started on YouTube, I'd say things like, let me know what you think of this video in the comments. That's when I realized something, people love giving their opinions but they hate thinking. And when I ask people to let me know what they think, I was making commenting way too hard. That's why today I ask people a multiple choice question that's super easy to answer. 

Here's an example. In fact multiple choice questions like this is one of the main reasons that my videos get thousands of legit comments. Next give people a reason to subscribe to your channel. So instead of something like, please subscribe, say, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on my future videos.

For example, Dr. Mike does a great job giving his viewers a reason to hit that subscribe button and it's one of the main reasons that his channel has millions of subscribers. And now it's time for strategy number three, embed your videos. Justin Briggs recently analyzed 100,000 videos across 75,000 channels, and one of the most interesting things he found was that rankings on YouTube were closely tied to video embeds.

In fact, top ranking videos had an average of 78% more embeds than average. And the easiest way to do this? Just embed videos on your own website.

For example, I embed my YouTube videos in almost every post. Now sometimes I use a video as a way for people to learn more about something I'm talking about, And other times I use an embedded video to explain a step or a technique, either way works. You can also embed videos in press releases, guest posts, or anywhere else that you publish content.

Let's keep it moving with technique number four, the TSC tag formula. It's no secret that tags can help your videos rank higher in the search results. That's the good news, the bad news is that most people use tags the wrong way. In fact, when I first got started on YouTube, I'd stuff my videos with tags like there was no tomorrow and no matter how many tags I used, my videos wouldn't rank.