YouTube Video Optimization: Blowing Up Your Rankings and Revenue (Without Making More Content)

​What if you could increase leads by ~1,000%, without creating content - just optimizing what you already have?

We did it for a client, and if you've got a YouTube channel, chances are pretty good you can get stellar results as well...

We're always looking for creative ways to boost our clients' results to the next level.

Not just in search, but the traffic channels where they're ALREADY flourishing.  

Why not maximize what's already doing well, right?

After some begging and pleading from friends that wanted the secret sauce behind some of our success optimizing YouTube channels, we decided to release a client case study on YouTube video optimization with some really juicy bits of data to back up our method.

We decided to release it for everyone, not just our inner circle :).​

P.S. We're giving away the full tracking document as well so you can do this yourself (although we do offer this service to clients as well).​

But First, The Results...

Remember, all of these results stem from videos that already existed and in some cases were years old.

That means that these increases tend to be permanent and may even increase over time.  The methodology can be applied to future videos at upload so instead of reoptimizing, you're just doing it right the first time.

Step 1: Choose Videos To Optimize

If you have a small channel, this is a simple step: just optimize all of them.

In the case of this particular client, there were at least 300 videos spanning 5+ years, so it didn't make a lot of sense to target them all until we proved the method with a smaller batch.

To choose the videos, we followed this line of thinking:

With these guidelines in mind, we chose 50 videos to optimize and got right to the next (and arguably most tedious) step: setting up the tracking document.

Step 2: Track @$#%ing EVERYTHING

​There are a lot of metrics to keep track of in a YouTube optimization campaign.  Without some way to organize it all, you're dead before you even begin.

You won't know where you came from and what actions resulted in positive changes for the channel.

Below is a list of the metrics we tracked.  Write these all down in your Excel document (or use the one we'll give you at the bottom of this case study.

Now that you've got your entire baseline set up, you can get to researching the new keywords you'll be targeting!​

Step 3: Keyword Research

We found that it was much more useful to use Google's Keyword Planner rather than YouTube's built in keyword research tool.  Simply put, that tool sucks.

Because one of your goals when optimizing YT videos is to get them showing up in the organic SERPs ANYWAYS, you may as well use the most accurate keyword data you'll ever get and stick with the Keyword Planner.​

We won't go too in depth here as most of you already know quite a bit about keyword research.  The basic rule of thumb we used was this:

Step 4: Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

The optimization step is the meat of this post and of the methodology itself, simply because there are so many things to optimize for each YouTube video.  Here's the list, then we'll go through each one and show you exactly how to optimize each element:

That's a lot of different elements to optimize!  Don't worry - here's exactly what to do with each of them*.

* For privacy, the images below are NOT the client we're basing this case study on, but the optimization principles remain the same.

Video Title

Like standard web content, your title is arguably the most important piece of content for your video.  It's the way you'll get anyone to click on your video in the search results, and it's one of the primary ways YouTube's ranking algorithm is going to decide what your video is about.

​The formula we use is as follows:

It's not an exact science, and there are millions of articles out there on writing good headlines.  You want to keep your keyword close to the beginning of the title and modify it if you have to to make it work - don't write the title for a robot.

We've found it helpful ​to add "by BRAND" if you're a personal brand to add some personality 

Video Description

It's a sad truth that some of the most valuable real estate on your channel is likely under-utilized.  The video description is a spot that's ripe for promotion of your brand, social media, and most importantly, CONTENT.

There are two views your audience will see: standard and expanded.​  You need to optimize your video description with both of these in mind.

Here is an example of an well-optimized standard description:​

The formula here is the following:

We like to use the play button as an attention grabber, but you can mess around with whatever you want.  Use  alt codes to create these eye catching elements.  The idea behind this formula is to attract attention and drive clicks to the most relevant and important piece of content for this particular video.

That can be a blog post, a sales page, landing page, you name it - it's up to you to determine what piece of content pairs best with the video.

Important: be sure not to double space after the call to action.  You'll be wasting a full line of your short video description on whitespace, which is effectively worthless!​

Here is that description expanded:

The extended description formula is the following:

Because few people expand the video description, you want to make sure that the most important actions are promoted at the very top.  Social media links and other less important links can be buried in the extended description.

If someone's engaged enough to expand, chances are good they're looking for that type of content over the direct link to an accompanying blog post or product that you've put at the top of your video description.

Tags

People like to obsess over the tags, thinking that they're some of the most important elements to optimize.

While they are important, it's really not that hard to optimize for them.  Generally, you want to optimize for your target keyword and brand, then a bunch of variations of the target keyword in different sentence structures and phrasings - think LSI.

For the example video we're using, the target keyword was "starting seeds in hydroponics."  Here are the tags used:​

Pretty simple.

Subscribe Annotation

Think of YouTube subscribers as the video equivalent of people that sign up to your email list.  They're the lifeblood of your channel, the ones that push your brand further via shares, likes, and comments.

Knowing the importance of subscribers, every single video on your channel should have a subscribe annotation that prompts new viewers to click that subscribe button.

We found it very effective to lead with a 5-10 second annotation in the bottom left corner that points downward using an arrow symbol.

​To cover your bases, just add this annotation.  If you want to get crazier with it, or have longer videos, you can copy this annotation and space it throughout the video to get even more subscribers.

​If you want to get REALLY crazy, you can look at your video analytics to see the points of highest engagement and add the subscriber annotations at those points as well for a few seconds.

Product Annotation

​If the video you're optimizing has a direct connection to a product or service you offer, you MUST have an annotation for this product at a relevant point in the video.

It usually makes the most sense to send them to a landing page for lead gen and not try to directly sell the product.  Think of the product annotation as another avenue for traffic to hit the top of the funnel.

Related Video Annotation

​Just like interlinking your blog posts and pages in traditional content marketing, you should be linking to related videos on your channel via annotations.

Our rule of thumb with this client was to link to at least one other related video with a pop up annotation that lasted for 3-5 seconds at the point in the video that it was MOST relevant.

Hidden Annotations

This is a bit of a murky area as far as its effectiveness in boosting rankings, but the general theory here is similar to the related videos section.

For this client, we chose 2 random videos on the channel to link to with completely transparent annotations that lasted for a couple seconds.  We wanted to create a large web of interlinked videos on the channel, with the assumption that YouTube is aware of these connections in the same way that Google spiders are aware of things like siloing and interlinking on the pages they crawl.

Plus, while you're already knee deep in creating annotations, it doesn't hurt to add a couple of these :).

Playlists and 3rd Party Videos

Ideally, every video you're optimizing should be added to a playlist.  This is a good idea just for organization's sake, but it also offers a great opportunity to target some higher-level keywords and starting ranking the playlist itself for some big traffic:

Ranking second here means that this channel is effectively ranking all 8 videos 2nd for this keyword, and the fact that it's a series-based playlist does wonders for viewership, subscribes, and just about every other metric you want to boost for your YouTube channel.

​If you don't have enough videos to make a complete playlist for a topic, its OK to add 3rd party videos that perform well for the keyword you're targeting.  Try to pick ones that add value in the context of your video, and seek to replace them with your own content in the future.

Your playlists should start looking something like this:​

That's it for optimization!  If you've done this correctly, you've done it for every single video and worked your way through a checklist as you go through the process.

It can get a little tedious, but as you've seen from the results above...it's very worth it.

Breakdown Of Our Client's Results

Now we'll get into the meat of the results that you saw at the beginning of this post.  This campaign was a BIG WIN for our client, resulting in hundreds more leads in their funnel and a lot of revenue in their pockets.

Let's take a look at what drove those numbers.​

​

Likes, Shares, Favorites: Social Markers

We attribute most of this growth to the increased amount of views, giving viewers more opportunities to engage socially with our client's content.

Minutes Watched: A High Quality Signal

Minutes watched increased from 284,553 to 338,587 month over month, an 18.99% increase.​

One extremely under-rated post that came out from Upworthy's blog was about ​attention minutes, and while this had more to do with time on site metrics and engagement, it can be applied directly to YouTube in a simple way with the minutes watched metric.

Most of the increase in minutes watched is attributed to increased ranking of certain videos with high view counts, boosting them to new levels of popularity.

Bonus Ideas To Take Your Channel To The Next Level

We hope this piece illuminated in a very clear way some how you can take your YouTube channel to the next level with some nitty-gritty, classic optimization techniques.  It worked wonders for our client, other client's we've worked with, and our own YouTube properties.

However, there are endless things you can do to improve your YouTube metrics and the optimizations listed above only deal with existing videos.  Here are a few higher-level recommendations for YouTube channels in general: 

​Long Form Videos

In most cases, longer videos drastically outperformed shorter videos in almost all metrics. They drive the majority of views, clicks, and subscribes, which are by far the 3 most important metrics to consider. If you have the ability to produce more of this longer-form content on our channel, that’s what we would recommend.

Trust The Data

Look at the categories you placed your videos in when you began your optimization project and segment the metrics by category.  If you start seeing a clear trend in one category, MAKE MORE OF THOSE VIDEOS!  They will begin to dominate your views, shares, clicks, and subscribes.

Keep Optimizing

Because of the compounding effect of one-time optimizations, we recommend keeping every single video that you upload well optimized. You’ll also want to be interlinking these videos with your older videos to increase the chances that someone gets “sucked in” to your content on YouTube and becomes a subscriber, email optin, or student.

Another ongoing process that should be done is a rotation of the featured InVideo suggestion that shows up at the end of each video. The best policy here is to switch it to a video that you most want exposure to (say a new product launch).

Tracking Document and Tutorial Video

What? You need more?  We've got you covered.  We stripped down the tracking document we use for projects like this and made it available for download.

Get that document here.