2 6 Mistakes of Amateur YouTubers
#1 – No keyword research
YouTube is another search engine where users use keywords to search for videos. To make your video discoverable by the right audience, you must explore and use their words in your YouTube content.
When you publish textual content on a website or blog, the search engine automatically understands what your content is all about and serves it to the right audience based on their search intent. If you want to start a blog check this guide.
But no search engine is capable enough to understand what your YouTube videos are all about until you include the right keywords in YouTube content.
Remember, using keywords in your videos doesn’t guarantee their rank; there are several factors YouTube considers in the ranking, but keywords are the only way to help YouTube identify your video and make it discoverable.
Before you publish any video on YouTube, take your time to find out the right keywords and include them in your video descriptions (we will talk about in the next section), title, subtitles and tags.
Finding keywords for your YouTube videos is not a complex process; there are tons of SEO tools available in the market like Ahref and SEMrush, but I won’t suggest you spend money on these tools initially.
You can get the same result by finding keywords manually. You need to open YouTube and search for the types of video you will upload, don’t hit enter, keep searching with different words and note down all the autocomplete suggestions.
These are the words users use to search for videos. Once you note down all autocomplete suggestions, cross out the most common ones. Now you have a list of keywords that you can use in your gig title, subtitles, tags and video description.
#2 – Copy title of others
When you see someone has a great engagement on video and copy their titles to get the same amount of attention on your content, you fail because your videos don’t offer the same value.
If you don’t have the exact matching content in your videos and copy the title of others, you won’t be able to achieve the same amount of success. Even if users click on your videos, they will hit back if videos are unreverent, so you must write your unique titles.
#3 – Not adding the relevant description
Your video description describes what your video is all about. Users read video description before clicking on any video to know how relevant it is for them. Writing better video description will increase your CTR rate.
Your video description is where you can add additional information about the video, such as links to the product and service or any resource you talked about in the video. You can also give someone credit in video descriptions if you are using copyright material.
Your video description is not the transcription of your videos, I have seen some beginners who type the entire description as video transcription, but it has no sense; no one will read it. It would help if you wrote a conscious description to explain what your video is all about.
Adding proper tags help a user find out your video quickly. You can add as much as 10-12 tags but only when they are highly relevant to your videos.
If you overuse tags, it will confuse YouTube algorithms figuring out what your video is all about and which category is perfect for it. It will reduce your growth dramatically.
You can target additional keywords in your video tag sections. Tags help YouTube algorithm to categories your videos and make them discoverable for the right audience.
#5 – Not adding subtitles
If you target an international audience via your YouTube channel, you must have transcription in your videos because the voice tone and consent are different in every country.
The audience outside of your country might find it hard to understand your voice consent. They might have difficulty understanding some words and phrases, so it is better to add subtitles in your video so they can read and understand.
When you add subtitles in your video, you have to specify the language, and YouTube will automatically generate subtitles for supported languages.
Even if it does the job automatically, I suggest you don’t use the auto feature because it is never accurate enough; it miss some words and phrases, so it is better to create your subtitles and add them to your videos.
YouTube also index your subtitles and use them to rank your videos.
#6 – Upload videos that have no demand
Even if you completed all the requirements mentioned in this blog, your video wouldn’t succeed if no one searched for them.
Although YouTube is the biggest video platform, and you will find videos on almost every topic, it is always better to cross-check the video demand on the topic you are working on.
To know the demand for your video, you will have to check your topic’s trend and popularity.
To check your topic’s popularity, search for similar types of videos and look at their engagement Metrix. You can get a pretty idea by looking at likes and comments, and views.
I suggest you work on evergreen content to get the maximum output of your videos.
For example
If you are creating videos for valentine 2020, your video will only get engagement in February, and then you won’t receive any engagement until next year. You can’t even make changes in your videos like the blog post.
To check the trend of your videos, search for the topic in google trend.
It is a google’ product, and it tells about the topic trend across the web. Checking trend is necessary because if you see any random videos on YouTube, you will think, “wow, these videos have great engagement”, and create videos on that topic.
Soon, you will figure out there is no potential because those videos are uploaded years ahead, and topics are outdated for the current time.
For example –
Search for “gameplay videos resident evil 2”. You will find tons of engagement on top ranking videos because the game was launched in 2014, and there was a craze for it, but now a more advance version of the game has found, “resident evil 5”, so engagement is shifted.