YouTube SEO: how search and rankings work

What YouTube is optimising for

YouTube's system is not trying to find the most relevant video. It is trying to find the video that will keep a particular person watching. Relevance gets you considered; retention gets you distributed. That single difference explains most of the advice that works and most that does not.

Practically: your title and thumbnail decide whether the click happens, and the first thirty seconds decide whether the click was worth showing. A video that wins clicks and loses viewers is punished faster than one that does neither.

The order to work in

• Title and thumbnail together. They are one unit and should not repeat each other. If the thumbnail says the words, the title should add something.

• The first thirty seconds. State what the video will deliver and start delivering. Cut the introduction.

• Description and chapters. These help search and accessibility, and chapters visibly reduce people leaving to find the bit they wanted.

• Tags. Nearly irrelevant. Fill them in and stop thinking about them.

Search versus browse

Two different distribution systems share one platform. Search traffic comes from people typing a question, which makes it predictable, small, and durable. Browse and suggested traffic comes from the recommendation system, which makes it unpredictable, large, and impossible to plan around.

If you are using YouTube for SEO rather than as a media business, aim at search. A video answering a question people actually type will earn views for years at a modest rate, and it will show up in Google results too — video results appear for a large share of how-to queries, and that surface is far less crowded than the ten blue links.

Where the topics come from

The best source of video topics is the same as the best source of page topics: real questions, in real words. A video answering the question a thread is arguing about will outperform one built from search volume, because search volume tells you how many people asked and a thread tells you what they were confused by.

Work from a topic or an existing video: write three title options, a description with timestamps, and a note on what the current top ten do differently. Pair it with the Reddit query finder when you need the question before the title.

Measuring it honestly

Views are the least useful number YouTube gives you. Watch time, average percentage viewed, and click-through rate on impressions tell you whether the title promised the right thing and whether the video kept it. A video with a strong click rate and weak retention has a title problem in the opposite direction from the usual one: it is over-promising.

Check those three together, one video at a time, and change one thing before the next upload. Changing the title, thumbnail and format at once tells you nothing about which of them mattered.