Doug: Hey, what’s going on. Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today I’m going to talk about YouTube specifically. I have a few questions about YouTube SEO and ranking in YouTube. And these questions were submitted and I thought, Hey, I’m going to just create a whole episode about this. So we’re going to go through a few things, including what are tips and tricks to get a ranked video?
How do you best use keywords? Are some colors better to use than others for thumbnails and how do you best use SEO for greater visibility? So I’m going to do my best to answer these questions and they are certainly the kind of questions where you can go over to YouTube, type them in and get a bunch of videos that will.
Do their best to answer that question. A lot of these are regurgitated answers from other people over and over again, because that’s unfortunately how YouTube works a lot of ways. And you can also search over on Google and you’ll get while probably some YouTube results, but you’ll also get blog posts again, where there might be some best practices that were regurgitated over time I’m going to.
Speak kind of off the cuff here. I will refer to my experience, which is, uh, luckily it’s vast on the YouTube side. I think I’ve published well over 2000 videos. I’ve done hundreds of live streams. I published tutorials, vlogs, interviews, these solo type episodes, these solo. Just videos. Sometimes I’ve published on a daily basis and sometimes I’ve, this was one particular month back in 2018.
I published twice daily for a full month just to see what would happen. I stopped doing it. So while I got more views and watch time and all that stuff, it was somewhat unsustainable, at least the way that I was doing the videos at the time. However despite all of that, I have not burned out. So that is key because a lot of YouTubers will burn out or other, you know, social media creators will burn out because it could be a bit of a treadmill.
So, I’m going to be answering from my own personal experience as well as I’ll project a couple ideas just to give you a better idea about actionable things that you can take away. There will be some actionable tips by the way. So hopefully you’ll get something out of that. But the other subtext in this whole thing is I’ve done a lot of videos.
I have like three current channels where I publish weekly and those are podcasts as well. And again, I have not burned out. So that is one of the key things. And I think that’s really important. No question was asked about that. But if you don’t protect yourself, if you don’t think about the risk of burnout, then you may end up in a situation where you’re actually successful.
You’re actually accomplishing what you intended. To accomplish, but then you burn out and it’s stressful, keeps you up at night, all that kind of stuff. So we’re going to dive into a handful of those pieces and I’ll give a quick plug. If you are not subscribed to the email list, there’s a link in the description and or show notes so that you can subscribe.
I am. I’ll give you some more news about this in the future, but I’m sort of, I got to revamp my email list a little bit. I think I might be moving to a different list provider and just redoing my autoresponder sequence and some of the funnel pieces, which is all sort of a fluid thing that I’m.
Currently trying to figure out. So there’s nothing to share yet. Cause I don’t know exactly what I would share. However, if you want to be informed when new videos or podcast episodes come out, or you just want to stay more connected, you can sign up for the email list. There’s usually a freebie in there recently.
I created a compound interest calculator so that you can see the power of compound interest, especially if you’re thinking about side hustles and earning a little money on the side. Like if you just saved all the money that you’re earning on a side hustle, how much could you save? If you. Just kept investing year over year.
And you did this for a few years. The spoiler alert is compound interest is not intuitive. So once you start plugging in some numbers and you let it ride for about like 10 to 15 years or so, it’s an alarming amount of growth. And it is kind of amazing. So you can check that out. I’ll probably put a link in here so you can get to it.
And I think from here, let’s go ahead and get into the episodes. We’re going to talk about ranking tips, keyword strategies, thumbnail, color psychology, and some SEO best practices. So. We will go over some of these best practices. I’m going to open up with just some YouTube ideas. Now, these are best practices, so you should follow these.
All right. However, you should also not follow them and just do your own shit. And if you have an urge to create a specific kind of video, That does not follow the best practices, then do that. So follow your own interest. That’s one key to not burning out is create the content that you’re actually excited about, because one unfortunate thing is that you can create a job for yourself.
Especially if you become successful and you’re creating videos that you’re not actually into, and you can fill in the blank by the way, it could be social media content, any kind of creator, it could be blog posts, it could be a podcast, but if you’re creating content that you don’t really care about, it’s going to show over time, people will see that and you will kind of make yourself unhappy.
So follow these kind of ideas and these best practices, but If you feel the urge to not do that, then go ahead and break the rules and do what you want to do. So overall, you kind of want to optimize for watch time. So the video length can impact that and audience retention. They work hand in hand, so you don’t necessarily want to have like.
Two hour long videos to try to boost watch time. If you have really poor audience retention, so you kind of have to play with the sweet spot and depending on the topic area and the type of videos you have, it might be, you know, eight minute videos are perfect in the long video for you might be 12 minutes, depending on what you’re talking about.
And it depends on how you create those videos. While if you’re doing interviews, like many of my episodes are, they’re interviews. So I could do like an hour, hour and a half interview and the people that are interested, they’ll watch the whole entire thing. And there’s a whole other part of the channel where, you know, they, they don’t want long videos.
So that’s actually been another secret for me. Not burning out is I enjoy having. Conversations and doing interviews. So I could do really long videos, but it turns off a huge portion of the audience, but that’s okay because I enjoy doing those videos and they fit another area. So think about your watch time and the length of your video and do some analysis over in the analytics portion.
So you can see what videos do best. You can think about the topic area. The length, look at the retention, maybe some other details. Maybe there’s sort of a category that does really well as far as watch time, the video length and audience retention. Again, they all play together and all of those metrics are easy to get to within the analytics section.
Next is to encourage engagement. And I am actually pretty bad at this because there was certainly a stretch of time where everyone. All the time was asking for you to like the video, comment on the video, subscribe, do all this stuff often at the very beginning of a video before they provided any sort of information or value or anything like that.
And it can work, but Over time, it got a little overdone. So I just stopped doing it. Turns out people know how to like comment, subscribe, and all that stuff. And if they want to, they will. If you’re, if your videos are really good, if your shit’s good, then people will, they’ll just naturally do it. So comments, I think are probably one of the best things you can get if people are commenting or maybe sharing it.
Those are, Pretty high value interactions. And those are going to happen naturally. If you tell someone to share the video, they’re probably not going to do it, but if they just think it’s so cool, they will probably share it. Same with commenting. Uh, some people are just more on the comment side. Some channels are very interactive and.
It depends on the niche sometimes, but on my channel, I really don’t have that many commenters and it’s probably the vibe that I put off in general, while other more friendly creators, they have dozens and dozens of interactions within the comments, but again, uh, it fits their channel. I’m not. To be fair, if there were a bunch of comments on my videos, I probably, I like pop in every two weeks and like answer a couple of them and then like, go away.
Like I, I’m not good at going back to it. And that doesn’t mean that. There are some channels out there where they’re big enough that there’s kind of a community happening in the comments and the creator doesn’t even need to interact within the comments there. Best case scenario though, interact with you, with your folks, and that’ll be a better situation.
I could do a better job at that. I’m not against it. I actually do have some nice conversations in there. However, the one thing is I do live streams often, and again, I’ve done hundreds of live streams, so I have pretty strong interaction, but usually it’s like chat. I’ll answer the question versus like me going in the comments.
I can tell you there was a video on, I think I did a camera review a couple, few years ago. It’s been a few years and someone asked a question about the settings of my camera. Cause the, they said the video looked nice. So I went in and tried to answer some questions for that person because they had a little problem.
They did a nice thing and said, Hey, your video looks good. And I tried to give them some tips about how I have the settings on my camera and that sort of thing. So I hope that helped. And I think I answered it within like an hour. It happened to be like a day that I was in the office actively working.
And I saw the comment come in and I answered it pretty quickly. So hopefully that person got what they needed. So you can encourage people to like comment, subscribe. That’s all fine. And I hear there’s like a resurgence to just like remind people, but do it maybe towards the end of the video, like after they’ve gotten some value, I will give you a secret engagement tip that unfortunately you really can’t control very much, but let’s say one of your videos is doing pretty well and then you start seeing the, the, the views go up.
Pretty dramatically. So you see the YouTube’s actually distributing this to a wider audience than normal, and it’s being suggested when I’ve done a little analysis in a few videos of mine that have done that. And then talk to some friends who had a similar experience. Those videos tend to drive a lot more subscribers.
So what I think is happening is the video is performing pretty well and YouTube starts suggesting it But the thing is like non subscribers to your channel or subscribing on that video. That is one of the most powerful signs I believe for having a video go viral is when people are starting to subscribe to it.
So Put that in your back pocket and try to observe that it is unproven. I haven’t heard anyone else talk about it ever, but basically if people are subscribing to your channel from a specific video, I believe that video will become a lot more popular because YouTube is going to suggest it to more and more audience audiences out there well beyond your existing audience.
And then. You get some cool traction and that’s how you can really grow your channel. It could, this is a chicken or the egg kind of thing. It’s really hard to tell. But I think as the video is spread to new people that subscribe to your channel, it’ll keep growing until it hits some saturation point and it doesn’t perform as well.
So if you can somehow magically get subscribers to your channel from a specific video, that video is probably going to do really well. Okay. Finally, the last little best practice here is consistency. So much like a, a podcast, if you can put out videos on a regular basis at a specific regular time, people will look for those and they will expect to see a weekly video from you.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t publish more often, but at a minimum, it’s great to establish publishing cadence and then stick to it. You don’t have to, YouTube is a little bit different than a podcast where a Is sort of a habit that people do YouTube’s a little different. People do like some. binge watching occasionally, and you may have videos that are years old that continue to get views in the future.
The consistency can help, but the other thing, consistency is the same as you getting reps in and getting practice in a specific program. You know, practice. So you’re getting better and better and you’re building skills and publishing videos. So let’s move on to keywords here and you can use keyword research tools like TubeBuddy or vidIQ.
I use vidIQ for many years, but for me personally, I actually had several years of keyword research experience already. So I didn’t find TubeBuddy or vidIQ to be particularly helpful. So if you are brand new to keyword research, you can go to tools like that. There are other tools like some rush or there’s a KW finders.
Another one that I use, those are great. I have most experience with those, but there’s. Dozens of keyword research tools out there. And they often can give you details about YouTube keyword research. And generally these are just keyword phrases. These are little search phrases that people are using to search either on.
YouTube directly or on Google. And it could be, I have some examples coming up, like a best microphone for interview podcasts, right? So sometimes it’s like product related or it could be informational based, like how to get good audio for a podcast. So. With that in mind, these are just queries that people are searching for.
Often they have a problem and they want to solve that problem. So that’s the best way to think about it. Other times it could be informational based, right? So if someone’s like, Oh, when, who was in this movie, they might get a IMDb results and they might get some other information from like, Wikipedia, for example.
And again, they could be searching on YouTube directly, or they could be searching over on Google or other search tools, but those are the two. Two biggest ones out there. So the idea is people are searching for something and then your video will come up as the result. So they’ll go and watch the video.
It’s a fine thing to do. I think you can use those tools to get an idea, especially if you have sort of a broad idea, like microphones, and you want to find out a bunch of different microphone keywords that people might be searching for. So you can. Go to TubeBuddy, vidIQ. You can actually go to some of the AI tools and say, what are 50 keywords with this topic area?
And you’ll get a bunch of different suggestions. You can also go on Google or YouTube, start typing those out, like best microphone for. And then you’ll get an auto suggest. You’ll be able to get probably a few dozen just by going through that exercise. There’s also not only the auto suggest, but you have the related searches as well on over on the Google side.
So you could just get some ideas from that. As far as using the keywords, hopefully you’ll naturally get. Say the keyword at some point during your video. So that that’s good from a content standpoint, but the best thing you could do is put the keyword at the beginning of the title for your video, the title holds a lot of weight, probably the most weight aside from the video content.
As far as the keyword and the topic area, you can put some information in the description and that’ll be great. I don’t think it. Makes as big of a difference as the content of the video or the title, but you could have your keyword in there as well. The thing is, do people really read the descriptions that often?
Probably not too much. And there was a time where people said, Oh yeah. As many, like fill the whole, I don’t even know how many characters is like 5, 000 characters. You could put it in a YouTube description that could be wrong, but it turns out it doesn’t matter. You could put a long description in there if you want.
And there was some common wisdom back a few years ago that, you know, you should use YouTube description. As much of that as possible, even putting in like the, as much of the transcript of the video as you can. But I don’t know if that’s helpful at the end of the day, when it’s something like that, I just think about the end viewer and what information could be helpful for that, and it turns out having.
A few hundred words, basically a blog post in your description is probably not helpful unless your video needs a lot of that narrative in there. As far as tags and other stuff like that, I don’t think tags really matter anymore. Again, there was a time a few years ago where tags maybe made a difference, but at this point in time, I think if you try to like throw keywords in the tags, it doesn’t make a fucking difference.
In fact, One funny thing, cause we’re talking sort of keyword optimization and SEO of a video, I get probably two videos a day, sorry, not videos. I get two emails a day from people that say they’re YouTube SEO experts and they send me a screenshot of my channel and a video and they say, Hey, you didn’t use tags, your SEO score is zero.
And they really wouldn’t help me. They want, they want me to hire them. Well, the thing is, apparently they didn’t look at the, you know, the topics, right? Because my I’m an SEO person, right? So obviously I know SEO, there’s probably a reason I don’t put tags in there. It’s because it doesn’t make a fucking difference.
So these folks are, unfortunately they’re, they’re trying really hard, but they’re sending like cold emails and it’s so, uh, they’re so uninformed. They’re probably sending me. They’re sending me these emails saying they’re going to do SEO for me while I’m publishing YouTube SEO video. And they’re like, Hey, I could help you with the YouTube SEO.
The thing is, if I have emailed them back and say, Hey, what, what, um, what’s your channel? Like how many views do you have? Like what’s your experience? Do you have any success metrics? And they don’t, because it turns out all the stuff they’re trying to sell me is worthless. Okay. Moving on. I mark them as spam and block them so they can hopefully improve their business model and move on with their life.
Okay. Next targeting long tail keywords. So these are very specific kind of keywords. So these are long tail keywords and the example. So a short tail keyword would be. Best microphone, a longer tail keyword would be best microphone for interview podcasts or best microphone for new podcasters, for example, now those are product related, but it could be anything.
So quick point here, just so you understand a short tail, this in long tail, those refer graphical representation of these keywords and their search volume. So there are very few short tail keywords and I’m not going to try and, uh, draw a picture or anything like that, or even make symbols and sort of gesture with my hands here.
Basically, long tail keywords are, there’s a whole lot of long tail keywords. Like dozens and hundreds and thousands of long tail keywords, but usually they have a very small search volume. So that’s like the tail end of this graph. So the graph goes on for almost forever, right? Eventually you do run out of long tail keywords, but there’s a whole lot of them.
The long and long tail does not, I repeat, it does not mean it is a long phrase. However, there is a strong correlation to longer search queries. So like the ones, the examples I’m giving you here, best microphone for new podcasters. Well, that’s more words, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s long tail.
It does happen to be in this case. So if you followed me and you’re a math person, you know why I’m making that point. But. I just wanted to point that out. The good part with a long tail keywords is they’re very specific. So there’s often less competition for those keywords. So if you publish a video that targets a long tail keyword, there might be very few other competing pieces of content on the internet.
So. You’re highly likely to rank because you’re kind of one of the few that has a video in that topic area next moving on to thumbnails and the colors. So the specific question is, are some colors better to use than others? So I don’t know. The answer is, I don’t know. There is some urgency with the color red and orange.
But I don’t know if it would actually like make a big difference. The thing that I look for is high contrast. I want it to be very easy to read on a phone. And if it’s not easy to read the thumbnail or text on a phone, then. It’s probably not going to perform as well. That’s not always the case. High contrast and visibility is important.
A lot of people, not necessarily most, but I will say most people currently these days are watching YouTube videos on their phone. So. Keep that in mind that these thumbnails are going to be a lot smaller. So the contrast is important, huge letters. I kind of like that as well. I recently watched a video about creating great thumbnails and they emphasize having very few words.
Like one word would be really cool that intrigues the reader, the viewer, but basically If you have just a couple words in there that create curiosity, that’s a great kind of text to have on there versus having a lot of text on there where you have to read a bunch of stuff. Again, like I said before, best practices are interesting, but break the rules when you think it’s appropriate.
I will say from a, Just presentation standpoint, like what I’ve done a handful of talks or been the, been the audience member having slides with a shitload of text. I don’t really like that. No, no one really likes that. Cause you got the audience, like reading the whole thing instead of paying attention to you.
It’s a little bit different in a slide, but basically having a big picture with like one or two words is much better than having a lot of words and kind of a busy situation. So one last thing that I actually do a bad job at is maintaining brand consistency. I’m not a branding person. I enjoy the pattern interrupt to like have different kinds of thumbnails.
Additionally, I have been lazy and even though I had some templates that I was like, okay, I’m going to use these. I often got bored with them and, or told my VA. To just use the default templates over on Canva. They’re often high contrast. They usually look pretty good and just make those work. And you end up with, you know, a variety of different looking thumbnails, which I think is good again for the pattern interrupt.
That said, I. Don’t have any brand consistency. It looks like I use the templates from Canva, which is a hundred percent true. So if you want to have a better branding situation than me. I think that’s probably better than just haphazard and taking the lazy way out. But basically if you maintain that brain consistency, when people see your thumbnail, they know that is your channel.
They know it’s you and there’s no mystery behind it. So that, that is kind of good. That said it’s okay. You know, I would say it’s probably okay to introduce some other, like if you were trying to test. Then you could try some different colors and see how it goes. See if red is actually more more clickable and urgent.
If you have a more chill brand and you don’t want to introduce urgency or make people feel anxious, then maybe you use colors that don’t. Make people feel anxious. So maybe like blue and green, cooler colors instead of the hot red and orange out there. And all that, all that to say, high contrast and visibility is probably one of the most important things.
And I encourage you to test. So you have an idea how your audience reacts to different thumbnails. All right, finally, we’ll move on to how to best use SEO for greater visibility. So I think you have to. You have to kind of have a balance here. So I mentioned not burning out one of the most important things.
Cause if you quit, even if you were doing a a great job and you quit, then everything stops. You stop creating content. So I’m potentially on my channel. I’m doing a lot more of what I want and I’m not going to burn out. I have a pretty good time. It’s fun. But I might not be getting as many views. So you have to balance this with your own desire for growth, your financial responsibilities, your overall sanity, your creativity, and balance it and figure out what works for you.
You’ll have to test. You’re going to kind of. You’ll go too far in one direction and then you’ll need to move in the other direction and just make sure it works for you. But overall, from an SEO standpoint and a creation standpoint, if you just follow the ideas that I mentioned before, kind of go after some keywords that fit the audience that you want to build, that fit into your sales funnel or whatever it is that you’re trying to do in your YouTube channel.
If you follow some of those best practices and you keep in mind that you want to keep creating over the longterm and not burn out, you should be in very good shape that will also allow you to create more videos. And I think. Quantity, at least for me, quantity over quality has worked pretty well. It turns out your quality does get better over time.
If you get the reps in, I’m not too precious with my content. If I think, Hey, I want to try that out. I will try it out. I think I have a vlog from a few years ago where I was like, I think I’m going to brew a beer and just video that and see how that goes. So if you look back, I have some vlogs where I’m like brewing a batch of beer and it’s kind of random.
It doesn’t fit with anything else, but I wanted to publish it. There’s some other travel videos in there too. And I thought, Hey, I just, I want to see how it goes. Turns out, uh, recording vlogs is pretty difficult. Completely pulls you out of whatever it is you’re doing. Unfortunately, you have to record things a few times or just deal with the fact that you’re not capturing everything.
So I never, I never got enough reps in to make that work, which actually now that I’m thinking about it, like maybe I just need more reps and figure out how to do vlogs that work for me. But I am now rambling on and I forget what I was talking about. Oh yeah. I was saying I’m not too precious with the topic area. So if I’m interested in something that is outside what I normally cover, I’m not afraid to go outside, cover something that maybe won’t get a lot of views, maybe. The people that like the channel don’t actually like the other topic, but part of it is creating content for the audience.
It’s also creating content for me, the stuff that I would want to watch. And I studied a handful, actually probably a couple dozen YouTube creators and, and folks that help you grow your channel in general, and some of them do a better job sticking directly. In that topic area that they’re working in and then others spread it out a little bit more.
Turns out I like the authentic sort of all encompassing view of what someone’s interested in, even if it doesn’t fit overall within the channel. And I think because, you know, I fall into that area, that’s the kind of content I want to create, and I’m okay with sacrificing some of the. Potential for audience growth.
So keep that in mind. Overall, it’s great to throw in some keywords and maybe expand topics that you’re already covering, but expand them with Keywords that you have not covered yet. And you can get great ideas with some of the tools that I mentioned before. You could also go to something like Reddit where there are a bunch of topic areas, or you can go to forums or whatever communities and see what questions people are asking.
And there, those are topics that people are interested in. Even though maybe they don’t show up in search engines, but you know, people are interested in certain topics. So don’t be afraid to go outside of, you know, normal keyword research areas and just see like, what are people talking about? What do people care about?
Maybe you have specific questions and you’re like, Oh, if I have these questions and other people, maybe they have them too. So when you do start covering like different topics, then can get your message and you can get your channel out in front of other people. Quick example from my channel. So on this particular channel on the Doug show, I have talked about affiliate marketing, SEO, couple other, maybe side hustle topics, some random stuff in there, but largely it follows.
Earning money online, basically. And my, one of my other channels, one of my other interests is fire. So financial independence retire early with that. It’s a completely different audience, completely different topic area. But in the last couple of weeks, I was like, you know what? There’s some overlap here. I want to cover some stuff.
As I mentioned before, I think I’ve talked about the compound interest calculator. So I was like, I’m going to do a video on, I’ll tell you what the title is really quick here. It was on compound interest was the general idea, but it was the math to become a millionaire in 10 years. And then I thought.
Because I know YouTube may or may not push that video. I was like, I’ll do one about side hustle millionaires as an example. And I’m not going to cover anyone specifically. So as to not you know, it’s privacy for everyone. Right. But I just wanted to go through. An example of compound interest and how powerful it can be over the course of 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 years, it’s dramatic.
And people often don’t really understand what compound interest can do. Luckily, when I was first out of college, I, I learned about that and I. Invested in my retirement accounts. They tell you about that in orientation, but I think a lot of people don’t pay too much attention or they don’t follow through or when they switch jobs, they cash it out instead of rolling it over.
And this is not financial advice, nor, you know, I’m not giving any advice to anyone, but basically. I started covering some like the overlap, the Venn diagram overlap of people interested in side hustles and people that are interested in either investing, retirement, early retirement, financial independence, financial freedom, all that kind of stuff.
So I’m pretty sure YouTube is not going to help me out spreading these videos because it’s outside my normal topic area. But if I Force the issue which I may or may not but if I force the issue and I do a handful of videos Like this, I might have a playlist of like five or six videos that are all in this idea area of millionaires, compound interest, earning money online.
It all fits together. These are adjacent topics, but it’s just like in our. And this little niche, a lot of times people don’t talk about that. So that’s just an example. And I suspect that I’ll get a little more traction outside of my normal audience. Within three days, I had someone comment on the video on this live stream that I did, and they said, Hey, I randomly ended up on this video and it was pretty good.
So thanks. And they, they were like, I have no idea who you are and they just started watching it. So just an idea to go outside your normal area. Overall, if you hit keywords that, you know, people are interested in to that point, like if you have millionaire in the headline, it gets attention. And I was like, Oh, I’ll give it a shot.
I’m not going to, I’m not going to use any specific individuals. I’m just going to provide some examples. So people get an idea. All right. I think that’s it for today. If you have any questions, if you want to connect further, you can send it for the email list. If you’re watching on YouTube, of course you can leave a comment and I’ll reply back.
Probably, you know, I’ll look, I’ll see, I’ll see. Have a good one out there. We’ll catch you on the next episode.