How To Grow Your Organic Traffic on YouTube

topic. Create a script that outlines the key points you need to speak about in your videos – this will help you stay on track and really get into the subjects you’re discussing. Get to the point! Audiences will dis-engage if you don’t give them the important content straight away. Think about who your video is for, and what the audience will gain from it. What is the value the audience will get from your content? Are you wanting to inform them? Give them hints and tips? Promote a service you want them to use? All these questions are important when you first start out with video creation. Your first video will never be your best, but set a goal to get 1% better with each video you produce. Before you know it, you’ll be creating your best content in no time. Study other content creators in your sector, and see how they present themselves and their information. Watch the most viewed TEDTalks that discuss areas your business operates in. Seeing how other people showcase themselves and how they talk will give you a good idea on how to “perform” in front of the camera – just show your personality and be authentic. 

 

When planning your content, think of 3 different videos. One for your subscribers – hit the core audience that exists within them to give them valuable content. Create on for views – this will boost your channels views and provide ideas on what to create if you want more traffic to your channel. Finally create one for engagement. Get people to comment and subscribe, ask them to share your videos around. This will help you grow and show new visitors to your channel that people trust and respect the information you're providing them with. 

 

Another vital thing to do when planning is to use the ASQ model. ASQ stands for ask specific questions, and this is highly important when you’re thinking of what to create. What do the audience want to see from you? What are they looking for? Go onto YouTube or Google and search a phrase like ‘How to’. For example, if your business is to do with creative industries, search ‘how to create... and see the suggestions in the drop-down menu. This will give you an idea of the key terms your audience are searching for and what they want to see, and will give you a head start in creating titles and descriptions that will boost your channel in the rankings. 

 

When you’ve filmed your video, you need to edit it to be engaging and interesting for the viewer. The visuals need to be eye-catching. Viewers don’t want to sit through a video of just you speaking for a couple of minutes with nothing else. Attention spans need to be engaged. Add graphics, jump cuts and transitions to keep viewer retention. These graphics will help the viewer get the key points from the video and keep them entertained. 

 

When you’ve created your content, the next important thing to do is get all the main elements of your video correct and optimised for the most engagement. The title is one of the first things the audience will see and will be the thing that helps your video appear in searches. Use key words that are trending in your industry, but keep your titles short. Audiences will scan titles when searching for videos, so shorter titles will help the audience know if your content is of value to them. Don’t make them clickbait! Clickbait is where titles will promise or mislead audiences into thinking something will happen in the video when it doesn’t or is only a minor part of it. Clickbaiting will reduce trust in your content. Look at videos with similar titles – what are they saying to get views? What wording and key words are they using? Creating multiple different titles will also help you figure out which one is the best for your video. Ask people outside of your industry which one they’d be the most likely to click on and why. This will provide you with the knowledge of what’s the most likely to get views. People outside of your industry won’t understand certain ‘industry’ terms, so making sure you’re keeping your titles simple and understandable to all audiences is crucial if you want to build traffic. 

 

Thumbnails will draw viewers into your content if they’re eye catching. Thumbnails exist across most video content based social media, so optimising yours so you can get the best views is important. If your face is in the thumbnail, show some emotion. This will make the viewer interested into why you’re feeling a certain type of way. If there’s over 3 people or objects in the thumbnail, engagement will drop because there’s simply too much going on to retain. The best videos have a maximum of 3 objects or people, so consider this when creating your thumbnails. Just like your titles, make sure your thumbnails aren’t clickbait. Once again, this will lower the viewers trust in your business. When people search for videos, thumbnails will often draw them in. Make them colourful, but avoid certain colours. Contrasting colours that are bright will interest viewers, as will similar toned colours. Just don’t use black, red or white. These colours are like the YouTube logo, and videos often perform poorly if they follow this exact. Research by Netflix shows that audiences spend 82% of their scrolling time looking at thumbnails, and will spend 1.8 seconds looking at individual ones. This is a very short amount of time so making your thumbnail the most interesting will give you a head start over your competitors in getting their audience to watch your content. 

 

The description has to be optimised to its maximum potential in order to boost your rankings. Fill it with key words in your explanations about the video content, and hashtags and link to other forms of social media you may have. Descriptions give people an idea of what you’re talking about and give a brief overview of your knowledge. Ask the audience questions, and tell them in the video to check out the description. YouTube officially recommend having long descriptions, so take their advice and start filling your descriptions with content that will boost your videos in key word searches. 

 

Tags are important also for YouTube. These tags will signal what your content is and promote it in search terms. Aim to have SEO friendly tags. Have 2-3 targeted key word tags – these are the main tags that will be specific to your business. Then, tag your video content. These aren’t the main tags as they may get a little too specific, but they are important. Then, do one or two tags that represent the industry that you’re working in. All of these tags will promote your video under multiple different search terms, and give you a good chance of reaching different audiences. 

 

One of the final things you need to consider is making playlists. Playlists will put all related content into one area. Playlists mean more session time. Session time is the people spend on YouTube after watching your video – so why not increase their session time with more of your videos? Playlists automatically play a video after another ends, which will increase your views and watch time. Playlists will also organise your content, so people who are only interested in one aspect of what you’re offering can just watch that content without having to endlessly scroll through the other videos available on your channel. 

 

When you have content uploaded, keep to a consistent schedule, which includes regular analysis. You have 4 questions to consider when analysing – What content is performing best? What older videos are performing the best? When you find out, make more, newer versions. What videos are doing best for you competitors? Consider how you can enter this market. Finally, what content isn’t performing? This will help you work out what to make less of. Consistent analysis will ensure continued growth if you act on it. 

 

Marketing your business on YouTube does take a lot of work, time and effort to get it right. But when you understand the algorithm and find a way to reach the audiences you want, you’ll begin to see growth and interest in your content. Follow the tips we have suggested and your channel will flourish. 

 

 

 

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