We learned a lot about YouTube video SEO and YouTube ranking factors. And I’m sure you will too. There are many articles that list “YouTube videos top ranking factors”, but hardly any data to support these claims. It’s definitely useful to know what all of those YouTube ranking factors are, but unless it’s properly backed by data… it is simply “throwing a stone in the dark”.
Brian Dean, in association with Zach Russell (Founder & President of ProTech Internet Group) and Qi Zhao (Data Scientist at SEMrush) conducted a large-scale study of YouTube’s search results to better understand the relationship between various proposed YouTube ranking factors and actual rankings in the YouTube platform.
To understand these relationships they had analyzed 65,000 YouTube search results (resulting in 1.3 million total videos analyzed).
If you’re genuinely looking for the most important YouTube ranking factors that you should start implementing today, then you’ll love this infographic.
It’s a simple checklist that will help your YouTube videos climb the top of YouTube search results page organically.
So according to the spearman correlation count, here is the summary of most influential YouTube ranking factors that should push your YouTube videos in the desired spot of YouTube search results page:
- More Comments = Higher YouTube Ranking with a correlation of 0.107643041695
- Longer YouTube videos tend to outperform shorter videos, an average length of a first page YouTube video is 14 minutes, 50 seconds.
- A spearman correlation of 0.126530750213 suggests that higher the YouTube video views greater are the chances that your video will rank high.
- The number of shares your video generates is strongly tied to first page YouTube rankings, with a 0.121176362191correlation.
- A correlation of 0.0657063257 suggests that even small channels have a chance to rank their videos in YouTube.
- More Video Likes = Higher Rankings. A correlation of 0.121801724975 strongly supports this.
- “Subscriptions driven” has a correlation of 0.0952794970413 which suggests videos that result in new subscribers have an advantage in YouTube search.
- Keyword rich-video tags and rankings have a very small correlation, just 0.01563844348084
- Correlation of 0.00969802682216824 between Exact-match keyword in video title and YouTube ranking, suggests including a keyword in your title may improve your rankings by a slim margin.
- There is almost zero correlation (0.00969802682216824) between keyword-optimized video descriptions and rankings.
Finally, 68.2% of videos on the first page of YouTube are in HD which clearly proves that HD videos dominate YouTube search ranking compared to SD videos.
Upto you…
Which finding was most surprising to you? Have you had your YouTube videos hitting the sweet spot in YouTube search results page without any of the above factors?
Either way, leave a quick comment below right now with any question you may have.