If you want to grow your YouTube channel as fast as possible, you can't think of it as a video platform. You need to think of YouTube as a search engine. Treating it as a search engine will get you views for months and years to come.
When creating and posting videos on YouTube, your goal shouldn't be to make videos that go viral. The odds of your videos going viral are low, so we think it's much better to make videos that will consistently get search traffic over time. Sure, maybe some of your videos will go viral along the way, and that will just be icing on the cake.
How to rank on YouTube
In order to rank on YouTube, you need to target various search terms. For example in the video below, our primary targets were "Intolerance to food" and "Why Mexican food is superior." These weren't our only targets, though. We were also targeting many other search terms.
Which search terms to target?
- You want a clickable title
- Low competition keywords
- High search volume keywords
- Highly-relevant to your video
To find out which keywords to target, we take out our trusty keyword explorer tool. If you want to know what we use for this, feel free to ask in the comments below.
We usually have to try a whole lot of search terms to before we find one that's as good as this one. "Why Mexican food is superior" has very low competition and decent search volume. It gets a score of 79 which is really good! We knew that we would easily rank for that phrase if we went after it.
Comparing that last search term to "Eating Mexican food" - Eating Mexican food has much higher search volume but it's actually a far worse keyword to target due to the competition being so much higher.
This is the other primary search term that we decided to go after. This was an easy decision because, at a score of 95, it is the highest score we've ever seen. It has quite a bit of search volume and almost no competition, which is very rare to find.
As your channel gets more established, you can try to try to rank for keywords that have higher competition. That's because, as your channel grows, YouTube will be giving your channel more authority, which allows you to rank for search terms more easily.
If you're going to try to rank for tags that have higher competition, you should also make sure that they have high search volume.
You don't want to be going after search terms that have high competition and low volume, which is why it's so important to do keyword research beforehand. Despite have high competition, in this video, we decided to target "Food intolerance" as well.
So, how are we doing? Are we ranking on any keywords in this video?
For our two primary targets, "Intolerance to food" and "Why Mexican food is superior," we are ranking 3rd and 1st overall. That means if you search YouTube for "Intolerance to food," our video should show up somewhere around 3rd on the front page. To our surprise, we're also ranking high for "Food intolerance."