Last updated on June 14th, 2024
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
How can you get more traffic from Suggested Videos on YouTube?
Well, today I’m going to tell you, coming right up. VidAction.tv!
Hey, this is Dane Golden. This is a channel where we help you share your expertise and build your customer community with video.
So the Suggested Videos really is the holy grail of YouTube optimization. That’s what you want to have happen. You want to have a whole bunch of thumbnails that look like each other, your thumbnails, in that right-hand column or below on mobile, where most people watching now.
It used to be you could have the first four were pretty much dedicated to each channel, so if I had a video, the first four of the Suggested Videos were likely going to be my videos. Not anymore. I can have a video and then have zero Suggested Videos, so you really want to do your best to make sure you’re approaching the right audience and that your videos are valuable to them.
Now, you may be saying, Dane, what about thumbnails, and titles, and tags, and descriptions? Aren’t those important? Well, yes, they are important, and YouTube, particularly in the first 12 to 24 hours, looks at these metadata symbols to decide what it thinks goes there first. But then, it does a lot of tests, so you can put the word Kim Kardashian in your tags hoping that anyone who wanted to watch Kim Kardashian would see you in the Suggested Videos, but once they came to your video and they realized it wasn’t about Kim Kardashian, YouTube would actually rank you lower. So that may work for a brief moment of time, but not for very long, so you want to be as clear and honest about your tags as possible. Enticing, but clear and honest.
Same about your titles. You don’t want it to say Kim Kardashian if that’s not what the video is about, so you want it to say something clear and enticing about your video, and that’s what people are going to click on. They’re going to click on a combination of what’s present in that Suggested Videos and then a combination of the topic, the title, and the thumbnail. So the topic and the title are very closely related, right? You can’t have a title that is not about the topic, but if it’s a good title about a topic somebody doesn’t want to watch, they’re not going to click anyway.
The thumbnail, we’ve talked about that a lot, and we’ll talk about it more. It has to be engaging and honest. It has to really stand out, and there’s lots of features to that. So you want it to be in the Suggested Videos, and get it clicked, and get traffic from the Suggested Videos, but it has to be the right, relevant topic, and ideally, you’ve done these things to match up these two videos in the viewer’s mind.
Also, there’s descriptions too, and the description field can be a lot more than descriptions. You can have a description, but you can also have links to other videos, so a lot you can do there.
Okay, here’s the free secret bonus tip. Each Suggested Video is really catered towards the individual, so you’re viewing it one way, another person’s viewing it another way, so it may be suggested for another person and not you or vice versa.
If you want a less biased way of seeing how you’re ranking, you can use the incognito window on Google Chrome, and that shows what it looks like if you’re logged out and what the logged out person is using. But it’s almost impossible, even with tools like TubeBuddy and vidIQ, to know exactly where you’re going to rank for a given person in Suggested Videos.
Do you have questions about getting more traffic from Suggested Videos? Ask me in the comments right below. Also, I have scoured YouTube to find you the very best video to watch next, and it’s right here, so go ahead and click on this video. Tell me what you think of that one, too. See you next time. VidAction.tv.