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With 247 million monthly Youtube viewers in the U.S alone, there is no shortage of people to watch your videos.However, getting your videos in front of the right audience on Youtube can be a challenge, especially for newer channels.In this post, we’re sharing 12 tactics you can use to increase your Youtube traffic.
As the second most popular search engine (behind only Google), it is no surprise that the majority of the respondents we surveyed stated that Youtube is either a crucial or very important marketing channel for their business.
This applies to every type of business we surveyed for this post — from B2C and B2B industry to agencies and consultants.
Did you know that 62% of the respondents we surveyed post at least one new video each week on their YouTube channel? And almost 9% post videos on a daily basis.
Publishing new videos frequently is not surprising considering that upload frequency along with Youtube watch time are key YouTube ranking factors. So, this is basically your first tip – if you want to get more YouTube traffic, you need to publish new videos regularly.
While upload frequency is a ranking factor, there are many other levers you can pull to increase traffic to your Youtube channel.
To uncover the best tips, we reached out to 47 Youtube channel owners to find out what’s working for them today.
Most of our respondents (76.6%) have smaller Youtube channels with fewer than 10,000 subscribers.
Despite having a smaller number of subscribers, the majority of these channels have engaged audiences and are getting 1,000 or more views on all of their videos.
Now let’s take a look at the specific tactics you can employ to get more traffic to your videos.
Your title and video thumbnail are the first things a Youtube viewer sees. As you know how important first impressions are, it’s vital to optimize your thumbnails.
“Recently we started adding professional looking thumbnails,” says Eric Andrews of Eric Andrews Land Sales. “We put this off for years as we have some very niche and unique content about selling large acreage tracts of land. However, going into Canva and making some catchy thumbnails with images from around town and a professional headshot overlayed on top has greatly increased clicks on our videos.
Robert Warner of VirtualValley adds, “I’ve found that tweaking the thumbnails to my liking is one of the most effective ways to get more viewers to my videos on YouTube. Making my own unique thumbnails is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to promote my channel on YouTube.
Making your own thumbnails for your videos has the dual benefit of making them look more professional and increasing their visual appeal. It’s not necessary to have a Ph.D. in rocket science to create a good thumbnail. To ensure everything stays uniform and on-brand, you can even develop a template using a specific typeface and design. Canva and other similar image-making programs make this process incredibly simple.
In fact, when Paul Glykins went back and optimized the thumbnails for all of the videos on his channel, he saw a big lift in views.
“I have been going back to older videos and changing my thumbnails to make them better now that I know how important it is and also the title, and that has helped some of my videos,” says Glykins. “The newest thing I have been doing that gets quick views is live streams. My live streams get faster views than most of my videos.”
To find out what types of video content perform best with your audience, you may track video engagement metrics such as watch time, number of views, likes and dislikes of each video individually using a variety of tools, including YouTube itself.
Now you can quickly monitor your video content performance in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our video marketing experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important metrics for measuring your YouTube channel performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your YouTube account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
In addition to creating great thumbnails, you also want to spend time writing better titles.
“If you want users to be intrigued enough to click, you need to make sure that your titles are catchy.” says Mark Sider of Greater Than. “However, they must also provide a sneak peek into what someone will see when they view your content. Stay away from click bait, and promote your videos with creative, enticing titles.”
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers agrees, “A great way to get more views on your YouTube videos is by creating titles/headlines that people search for as well as adding long-tail tags. What you want is to find questions people are searching for on YouTube and also on search engines. Then, create a video answering that question. You should put the question as the title of your video but also use that title as a video tag. For the tags, you have a limit of 500 characters and you should maximize it by adding similar questions in your video tags.”
Related: 18 Tips for Writing YouTube Video Titles That Drive Views
The Youtube channels that get the most traction are the ones that are niche and focused. They choose one topic, and then dive deep into audience and keyword research about it.
“To increase YouTube traffic, you have to really understand your target audience,” says Shaun Price of MitoQ. “Look at the data that you collect and ensure that you know what they’re hoping to see, and how to best showcase their wants and needs. As you make changes, keep an eye on your views and note what causes an increase and what causes a decrease.”
Ashley Amor of People Find Fast adds, “When uploading the video content to YouTube, I ensure the target audience can engage with my video and interact with me about the content. Therefore, I aim to deliver an engaging tone in the video so that it could engage with the target audience to insist they know more about me or my upcoming projects or the current video. Besides this, I aim at building a community with the target audience to build my brand identity and increase organic traffic to the YouTube channel.”
Related: 16 Ways to Increase Your Average Video Engagement
As we alluded to earlier in this post, another Youtube ranking factor is upload frequency. If you are serious about getting more views, you should strive to upload at least 2-4 videos each week. “We’ve went through the ups and downs of consistently updating our YouTube channel, but do have some good guidelines that have worked for us,” says Alex Cascio of Vibrant Media Productions. “To start, uploading on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at a similar time of day is a good idea to get a flow going with your subscribers.
Having a consistent opener/closer (short) with titling is a nice touch that helps people recognize your videos and come back. Making sure to have a call to action in your video to remind people to subscribe can be near the beginning and end of the video as well. We’ve grown fully organically and properly tagging your video with keywords, description, and titling can go a long way at getting into people’s queues if they are watching similar content.”
However, many channels will post several times a week.
For instance, Jayme Muller of RTA Outdoor Living says, “Posting 12 to 15 high-quality informational videos each month ensures we keep educating our audience on how they can benefit from our offering.
People love video content because it’s quick to consume and easy to understand. And reports show that channels that post often perform better and receive more recommended views. So we publish at least three videos per week monthly. And because these videos focus solely on how everyone can create an outdoor kitchen, we’re demonstrating our authority on the subject which further boosts our channel algorithm. And because we partner with relevant celebrities and influencers, viewers keep coming back for more.”
While posting a lot is helpful, you want to make sure the content is still focused and relevant for your audience. You don’t want to be posting cooking videos one day, and then gaming videos the next. Instead, it is better to pick one niche and go deep.
“One of the best ways that we have employed to increase Youtube traffic is to use SEO strategies,” says Rhett Stubbendeck of LeverageRx. “These strategies are not limited to your business websites but can also be incorporated into other marketing strategies.
For example, when we post a YouTube video on our page, we make sure that its title includes important SEO keywords. Some of the examples of these keywords are “medical professionals,” “loans,” “debt,” “financial advisor,” “mortgage” etc. We also copy the transcript of the video into the description so that we maximize the use of all the SEO keywords. Therefore, this increases the opportunity for users of interest to be directed to our Youtube videos when looking for solutions to their problems, thus increasing the traffic.”
Peter Lee of Famlee Digital adds, “One of the biggest things that we did to optimize our YouTube views was to take our knowledge as an SEO agency and utilize that to explore what subjects are commonly searched, and create videos that directly address search intent. In doing so, we were able to capitalize on addressing the anxieties, questions, and concerns that people had and utilize our knowledge and experience to answer them concisely. As well as that, we investigated gaps in the market with what people were doing, and slotted ourselves within a niche in order to create authority and avoid heavy competition. This worked well and we saw great results.”
Alvaro Moreira of Moreira Team agrees, “Incorporating strong SEO knowledge into my company’s Youtube content has helped draw more traffic because our title becomes more relevant through the lens of search engines. Search engines play a critical role in a lot of things, even YouTube. In my experience, when I tweak our headline and content using SEMRush and other SEO tools, our video content gets to climb up the first page of Google, hence increasing our traffic. SEO allowed us to attract a larger audience and expand naturally both on YouTube and Google, enhancing video engagement metrics. I highly suggest maintaining an eye on the whole search experience and serving video material in accordance with SEO standards to increase YouTube traffic.”
Related: Video SEO: Ranking on Google vs. Ranking on YouTube
While content repurposing is all the rage, you are going to see more success if you create videos specifically for Youtube.
“The main thing that has helped me perform better on YouTube is to create content specifically for YouTube,” says Alex Birkett. “I know repurposing is all the rage, and it can be done, but long-form podcast interviews don’t do well on YouTube. Rather, we look at YouTube keyword research, plan topics based on that, and record shorter form content with great titles and thumbnail images. You have to create content that is native to the platform to really win here.”
One way to increase Youtube watch time and channel watch time, which in turn drives more traffic and views, is to go live regularly.
For instance, Jeff Moriarty of Moriarty’s Gem Art says, “We have seen our Youtube followers skyrocket since we started doing live shows each month. In just the last year of doing live shows, our Youtube following jumped from 50,000 to over 85,000. These shows are promoted through email, sms and social media. The engagement is excellent during the live streams, which leads to more of our viewers subscribing, get notifications of new videos, resulting in more traffic.”
Related: Small Business Video: 16 Tips for Creating Great Video On a Budget
Educational content, like DIY and how-to videos, are one of the largest categories on Youtube. How-to videos can apply to almost any topic from gardening to coding mobile apps.
“Weave educational, real-life applications to your videos,” explains Simon Bacher of Simya Solutions. “Brands can boost their YouTube traffic by incorporating educational content into their videos. Informational content about a product includes highlighting the features and benefits. You must carefully weave them into giving concrete examples in real life to help drive viewership interest and establish thought leadership and authority. Don’t forget to include a relevant link below your video to help viewers access your business page to learn more about your product and services.”
Tracy Jacobs of Techimperatives adds, “I always try to make my videos as relevant as possible for my targeted audience (techies in particular). So I always try to add a lot of how-to and best practices content that can be easily ranked by Google.”
Once you have a dozen or more videos on your channel, there is a lot you can learn from studying which videos are performing the best.
“One of the best ways to increase YouTube traffic is to go into YouTube analytics and look at the data to see what types of videos perform best and then use that information in your video planning,” says Jordan Figueredo of Online Optimism. “For example, determining the average watch time of views on your videos can help you optimize your performance. If users stop watching after 25 seconds, you can ensure none of your videos go beyond that length.”
Monte Deere of Kizik adds, “Follow the fun found in your most successful videos and build upon it. As a brand works to find their identity, a fair amount of experimentation is common to see what lands.
One video we tried to talk about our product within the confines of a comedy sketch went viral, surpassing our other videos by millions of views. Its specific tone provided us a roadmap for our brand identity, allowing us to have a more targeted marketing strategy.
We even examined at what point people would stop watching so we can continue improving upon our approach to content. When you find yourself finally connecting with viewers beyond your subscriber base, it’s like trying on that perfect pair of glasses that focuses your vision going forward.”
Related: How to Create a Comprehensive YouTube Analytics Report: Step By Step Guide
As your subscriber base grows into the tens or hundreds of thousands, you can start to deploy more sophisticated A/B testing to see which video titles and thumbnails perform better.
“One great way to increase your YouTube traffic is to A/B test titles and thumbnails using a tool like TubeBuddy,” says David Lynch of Payette Forward. “A/B testing allows you to compare titles and thumbnails head-to-head to see which results in a higher click-through rate (CTR). The higher the CTR, the more views your video gets.
The best content in the world won’t get views if you can’t entice viewers to click on your video. While the title and thumbnail aren’t the only things that get people to click (the video topic is also important), they are extremely important. Even a small increase in CTR can result in much more traffic, especially if your video is getting thousands of impressions per day. As you A/B test titles and thumbnails, you’ll get a better understanding of what works for your channel and audience, allowing you to start with better-performing videos as soon as you publish them — but you should always keep testing and improving. We’ve seen videos have as much as a 40% increase in performance simply by A/B testing.”
If you are not already embedding your Youtube videos on your website and/or in blog posts, you are missing an easy opportunity to drive more traffic. Not to mention, if both the video and the page are optimized properly, you could rank for both on Google.
“Embed, embed, embed,” says Vickie Pierre of CarInsuranceComparison.com. “Without a doubt, getting your YouTube link embedded and posted on as many websites as possible is a simple and proven way to increase traffic.Bonus points if you can embed it on a website’s main page, and near the top.
The mistake so many people make is to assume by simply posting a video on YouTube and sharing it among your friends, you’ll get all of the traffic you need.
While those methods are absolutely valid and valuable, having a more permanent presence on a page cannot be understated.
In our case, we always make it a point to post a video on our front page. Without fail, that video will quickly shoot up in views. And before we know it, more people are subscribing and browsing through our other video offerings. When we know our video involves other groups and organizations, we share the link and ask if they’ll post and embed to their respective sites. While they don’t always agree to do so, many will, even if for just a season. This is especially fruitful, as this will bring in new viewers and subscribers who might not normally visit our page.”
One of the best ways to expand your audience and drive more traffic to your channel is to collaborate with other Youtube channels in your niche.
“The best way to increase YouTube traffic is to collaborate with influencers,” says Priya Kumari of Valasys Media. “While partnering or linking up with influencers can be an effective strategy for any business, especially when it comes to YouTube, it really takes a whole lot of work to see results.
Collaborating with influencers to increase Youtube traffic is definitely a way to get more views and subscribers to your channel. We plan to partner with some top-notch YouTube creators to drive traffic to our channel. The key is not only getting them on board but also working together to build a culture of reverence and mutual trust between both the collaborating parties.”
If you are looking to increase your Youtube traffic, it is all about posting consistent videos in your niche, knowing your audience, and optimizing your video titles and thumbnails.
Then, track and analyze your Youtube video performance.
That’s where Databox can help. With hundreds of dashboard templates and 100+ integrations, Databox is designed to minimize the time you spend manually creating reports and pulling data.You can also create your own custom Youtube performance dashboards from scratch. Sign up for a free trial now and try it for yourself.
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Jessica Malnik is a content strategist and copywriter for SaaS and productized service businesses. Her writing has appeared on The Next Web, Social Media Examiner, SEMRush, CMX, Help Scout, Convince & Convert, and many other sites.
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