How VEED’s YouTube Channel Grew (in the early days)
In the early days of VEED’s YouTube channel we were scrappy. Alec, our first video creator and now video team lead, had to start from scratch with building our channel. Therefore, with no past data to work with, he didn’t yet have the specific insights for what would specifically work for VEED.
We also didn’t have the team of creators we now have that allows us to scale our content production efforts with greater ease.
Here’s the part most people stay stuck on:
When you have no data of your own to start with you need to shoot your best shot content-wise before you can make bolder and more precise content decisions later so you can get buy-in to scale your efforts. But people will become overly-fixated on perfection and romanticize content to the point they mislabel their procrastination as perfectionism.
There is no room for perfectionism in the early-stages of your content. Your content needs to go through the awkward stages of “puberty” before it has a glow up.
After a few months of posting 5 days a week, we noticed 54% of organic traffic coming to our site from YouTube came from just 17 videos.
And from those 17 videos here are some obvious (or maybe not-so-obvious things) we noticed:
Video Result Keywords: Videos ranking for a featured video result or video carousel brought in the most traffic.
Business Value: The more your product/service is an irreplaceable solution to help solve the viewer’s problem the better the quality of the traffic.
SEO-Friendly Scripts: When you incorporate related terms people search for you capture more search volume and have a better shot at ranking.
SRT Files: Scripting topics with SEO taken into consideration and then uploading the SRT subtitle file helps content perform better (all our top content had an SRT file and lower performers mostly did not)
Zero Fancy Intros: Not wasting time with a longwinded intro retains more viewers.
From there we made sure to prioritize covering high-business value topics with a video-result keyword and ensuring each video took SEO into consideration with the viewer experience placed on a pedestal. Our channel became more intentional covering topics and their subtopics that we finally knew worked for us.
The VEED channel now drives 40,000 to 50,000 organic visits resulting in 200+ monthly paid signups.
Quick Note: Don’t forget to add a tracking link to pages linked your video descriptions.
How you can apply our video content + SEO lessons to your own videos
Target video-result keywords when possible to rank on booth Google + YouTube
Using a tool like Ahrefs (or simply searching terms on Google) you can find which topics might contain a video-result keyword you can target.
Go after topics with a high business value
It’s easy to get stuck in the virality trap of trendy topics that simply get you more engagement but don’t translate into getting results that will help you grow your business (and your video team if you want to scale). Reverse engineer what else people might be searching for before choosing to spend their money. You can then map out what question you need to answer for different hubs of videos and even group them into playlists for a better content experience.
You can use Ahref’s scale for business value which looks like this (quoted from their site):
“3”— our product is an irreplaceable solution for the problem;
“2” — our product helps quite a bit, but it’s not essential to solving the problem;
“1” — our product helps marginally;
“0” — our product doesn’t help solve or relate to the problem at all.
Nail search intent
Always look at content that’s already ranking and watch a few videos to make sure you’re not making assumptions about what the search intent is. By watching other videos doing well you can begin to pinpoint patterns in terms of:
what are some things these videos all seem to cover that you should cover?
And what are they not covering well or not at all that you have an opportunity to do better on?
Incorporate related terms in your script in a way that sounds natural
It’s not about saying the same term 5,000 different ways. Think of it more like finding chapters and ideas that should be included in your video. For example, a video covering best live streaming equipment might find related terms like best cameras for streaming or best mics for streaming. You could use these terms as a way to split your video into chapters.
And inside a chapter like best mics for streaming you could mention other terms like popular brands (e.g. Shure SM7B) or create a subcategory based on a term like best mics under $100.
The simplest way to go about this, in my opinion, is:
Write the first iteration of your script with just the keyword-rich chapters mapped out so you have a good “skeleton” to build off of. Don’t worry about adding terms beyond the chapters at this stage.
Review and make sure you like the direction you’ve mapped out.
Dive back in and plug in other terms
Write a strong title and description with keyword-rich timestamped chapters
Before people watch your video your thumbnail, title, and description help invite them to click through.
Create and upload an SRT file
Use a tool like VEED to automatically generate subtitles and then download the SRT subtitle file to then upload on YouTube. You can also translate your subtitle file with VEED if you want to have other languages available for your video.
