Digital Machiavelli #6: Optimizing for YouTube Discovery Algorithms
How to leverage the web's most powerful equalizing force.
Welcome back to my ongoing digital content strategy course, delivered straight to your inbox every week.
What You’ll Learn Today: How YouTube’s discovery features promote content, and how you should think strategically to use them to your advantage.
The YouTube platform uses recommender algorithms in all sorts of overt and subtle ways, but their core value is presented most clearly on the Home page.
While your Subscription feed can be customized through choosing which channels you follow and what format you want the list to adopt, the Home page functions the same for everyone, which is of immense benefit to content creators looking to get eyes on their creations.
Because once a potential viewer starts browsing the Home page regularly, your videos will pop up on their radar eventually, whether they like it or not.
Why Does the Home Page Exist?
You may be thinking that your subscription feed is more than enough for you, what with following hundreds of different channels and being flooded by content on a daily basis from creators you know and love.
But the inescapable reality of online content is that we always desire more.
This is where the YouTube Home page comes in, creating a feed of content based on your activity on the platform, and working hard to shove new things under your nose.
Videos you find on your Home page can be there because…
A friend sent you a link to a video, and you watched it
You watched a video from the recommended videos sidebar
You searched for particular keywords, e.g. to learn some new skill
You consistently watch content on a particular topic
You watched a mouse-over preview of a video for three seconds
Point is, just about every action you take on YouTube informs the recommender algorithms and helps them adjust what kind of content is presented to you on the Home page in an attempt to expose you to channels relevant to your interests.
But to effectively utilize YouTube’s recommender algorithms as a content creator, you need two pieces of a larger puzzle:
An understanding of relevant technical platform features
And a content strategy that takes into account online content trends
One without the other will leave you flailing around like a fish out of water, and with an infinite ocean of content out there, that’s probably not where you want to be.
Discovery Algos: The Technical Part
This is the simpler, more straightforward part, since there’s only a limited, predefined set of features relevant to discoverability, and you’ll be hard pressed to avoid them.
Titles
As with SEO writ large, your video title gives YouTube a strong signal of what your video is about.
However, long gone are the days of black hat SEO, where search results would favor articles with titles full of disconnected keywords.
Using relevant terms in your title certainly helps get you on the Home page and into the good graces of recommender algorithms, but do try to avoid the Technicality Trap, which is what happens to a disturbing number of content creators who become so obsessed with technical optimization that they forget the major role played by narrative and creative wording.
Keywords
Let’s say you came up with an exceptionally inspired title, but it ended up short on terms relevant to your topic.
Fortunately, keywords pick up the slack here in a big way, allowing you to enter explicit terms that will inform YouTube’s algorithms about the subject matter in your video but will never be seen by anyone else.
Unless, of course, someone decides to check the source code for your video’s page, at which point all the keywords you used become visible in the “keywords” meta tag, which serves to support discoverability of your video in web searches.
Everything Else
The video description, the subtitles, the age settings, and everything else available for you to configure for any given upload in YouTube Studio — these all play smaller roles than your title and your keywords, but they’re still useful.
Ultimately, the rule of thumb is: the more comprehensively you fill out everything YouTube asks of you when configuring your video, the more opportunities you give the platform to recommend it to prospective viewers, which fits neatly with Google’s overarching aim to reward creators of high quality content.
Discovery Algos: The Strategic Part
While understanding the technical aspects of optimizing exposure on the platform is important, it's far more important to understand the strategy required to craft the kind of content that can leverage the discovery algorithms.
That means composing your content from the earliest ideation stages to effectively leverage both the platform and -- no less importantly -- the content trends on the platform and the broader web.
Some guiding questions in this endeavor:
Which topics are particularly popular on the platform right now?
Which topics are fresh and emerging but showing traction online?
Can you tie an emerging or trending topic into your content, even just tangentially?
If the answer to that last question is yes, you can then proceed to write the script, compile the keywords, build the clickbait title, and otherwise prepare to utilize the aforementioned technical platform features to optimize for discoverability.
A Word of Warning
Creators who go too far down this path risk running afoul of what’s known as audience capture — a situation in which the creator panders to trends and popular themes so much that their content becomes monotone just so they can preserve the viewers who keep coming back to see more content on the same topic.
So as with all things in life, moderation is key.
Use the recommendation algorithms to your advantage, but never at the cost of whatever story you’re trying to tell or any other value you want to deliver.