YouTube Space logo on a white wall

How to get more views on your YouTube videos

In Blog, Blogging by admin

You’ve gone to a great deal of effort to create your latest YouTube film, but how do you get more views of the video on YouTube?

If your channel is new and doesn’t have a lot of subscribers and you don’t have a large budget for advertising, getting the basics right when you upload your content can help your YouTube video gain more views.

In this blog, we will give you 5 top tips for getting more YouTube views.

1. YouTube video title optimisation tips

Getting a great title that inspires people to watch, yet is keyword heavy, will help your in getting your YouTube video to appear at the top of search results.

In our fictional example below, we have a video by a great covers band, they specialise in music for weddings and parties. They’ve recorded a version of Nora Jones’ song, Sunrise. Here’s their title:

“SUNRISE (Cover by TheBand)”

Whilst it’s fairly factual, the title has little Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) value so needs work. As YouTube is the second most used search engine on the web, it makes sense to optimise your titles using keywords. Here’s a better example:

“Sunrise, Nora Jones, cover by wedding and event band – TheDVPRband”

At 66 characters, it easily fits under the YouTube title character limit which is 100 characters, however anything over 70 will be truncated in most search results, so the whole title will be legible. It also features some useful keywords for catching people who may be looking for a wedding or event band.

Finally, the name of our fictional band features for people who may search directly for the band.

Resist the urge to use all capital letters in titles, studies show that it takes longer to read sentences in capital letters, and it is off putting.

2. YouTube description optimisation tips

Well written YouTube description fields can help your video gain views because they will turn up in more search results.

Your YouTube video description should be over 300 characters long (the field allows up to 5000 characters) and contain keywords and phrases that could be used to find your video in search results.

You should put the most important keywords near the beginning of your description, the first 157 characters of this field will appear as a snippet in search (sometimes less in other search engine results) and will also appear to viewers before the “show more”.

Add links into your description to your website, but also to any relevant resources for the viewer. The better the user experience, the better ranked it will be.

Finally your description should be legible and not stuffed with irrelevant keywords.

An example of a description for our fictional band is below.

“Listen to Nora Jones’ Sunrise, performed by fantastic wedding band, TheDVPRband.

In this live cover version of Sunrise by Nora Jones, TheDVPRband, an event and function band, consists of Sandra Lieu on lead vocals, Heff Stellar on lead guitar, Steve Stevens on percussion, Roger McKane on Bass, Sally Smith on keyboards and Shay Smith on saxophone.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more great live cover versions of popular music songs.

Find out more about the band here: https://digitalvideopr.co.uk
Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/digitalvideopr
Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/digitalvideopr
Add us to your Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/digitalvideopr

Some other information you could include in the YouTube description field include: time stamps (enabling the user to skip to segments of a longer film), links to any relevant playlists and links to collaborators or sponsors.

Don’t forget to preview the description on the videos watch page, in the YouTube App on different devices and in YouTube search to see how your video and description are appearing.

Top tip: YouTube allows you to add a default description that automatically adds in the standard text to each video you upload, this can help in ensuring that you include vital information in each video you upload.

3. YouTube tag optimisation tips

You can add tags to your uploaded YouTube videos to associate relevant keywords (or phrases) with your film.

Your tags should be a word or phrase that is relevant to the content of the film.

A good way of achieving this is by thinking about the phrase people would use to search for videos similar to yours.

Try searching for similar videos and using YouTube’s autocomplete function to show you common search phrases for similar content.

4. How to create a perfect YouTube custom thumbnail

The thumbnail image is an important mechanism for getting video views, it needs to entice viewers to click to play.

The image must be sharp, representative of the content of the film and can also contain some custom text (a few words, not an essay).

The image must stand out and be completely legible on all devices, especially mobile phones.

5. Hire a marketing expert to manage your video production and uploading

As a video production agency, we really enjoy being able to maximise the video’s we create for clients.

Therefore, we offer a complete uploading and meta tagging service for clients, with advanced keyword optimisation, title and description writing and custom thumbnail generation. Get in touch today to see how we can help.