How To Rank First On YouTube: 3 Steps You Must Take!

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Do you wanna know How To Rank First On YouTube?

Read this post till the END to find out about the 3 steps you must take to rank on the first page of YouTube Search.

If you have ever wondered what is the secret behind ranking on first on YouTube you are in a right place.

I am going to show you how you can achieve this in 3 simple steps. Nothing too technical. These are the same techniques that I have used to rank First on YouTube search and also as a bonus point to show up on the first page of Google search, I will show you the secret later 😉

Just pay close attention so you don’t miss any of the steps.

This technique works for both small and big channels.

This post assume that you have VidIQ installed. VidIQ is a free chrome extension that is super powerful in helping you with optimizing your videos. If you don’t have it get NOW via this link.

There are 3 steps you need to take:

Table of Contents

How to rank first on YouTube (Step 1 Video Title):

This is most important ranking factor for your video. It is super important to take your time when choosing your video title.

Couple of general notes for this:

don’t go for a very long titles
have a descriptive title (so it is very easy to understand)
user should understand what is your video is completely about by just reading your title.

Now that you have decide your title, you need to go back to YouTube search and start typing your own title and see what ‘suggestions’ comes up. Make a note of these suggestions and copy those that are relevant to your video, you will need them later for your description.

Another thing you want to pay attention to, is the VidIQ overall score for your title. If you have a small channel I would suggest to stick to overall score 50 and below. This make sures that you are not competing with a channel with more than 1M subscribers.

So you will have a better chance of getting rank on the YouTube Search first page.

How to rank first on YouTube (Step 2 Video Description):

For your description you want to make sure that you use your title (EXACT words) in the first line. This signals the YouTube algorithm that this is the main keyword that you want to rank for and that your video is highly related to this/these words.

Also the first couple of lines of your description are the first thing that the user sees below your title, which help them to choose whether to tap on your video or not, so pay close attention to it. It is also important to say that your Thumbnail plays a huge part in your CTR (click through rate), however the topic of thumbnail and CTR is beyond this post and needs its own article.

Now continuing with your description, you want to make sure that you use couple of variation of the keywords in your title along with the keywords that you copy in the previous step from the YouTube search suggestion.

Don’t overuse keywords. Your description should be readable and understandable. In addition, only use the keywords that are relevant to your topic and video. Otherwise, YouTube algorithm will get confused and won’t be able to rank you probably for your main keywords.

This description will also be indexed and crawled with Google bots. This means if you have a very good optimised (SEO wise) description, you will probably get a place on Google search first page, As you saw above, my video was ranking higher than my actual blog post on Google.

This means you will get huge amount of traffic to your content from the biggest search engines in the world, Google and YouTube.

How to rank first on YouTube (Step 3 Video Tags):

Now there is 2 things here that I would like to talk about;

YouTube Hashtags:

You can have up to 3 hashtags (currently) on any of your videos. You should use this to your benefits cause there are lot of YouTubers, even the big ones, not doing it.

These hashtags helps boost up your SEO and helps YouTube algorithm to understand your content better and rank you better. Use them wisely cause you only have 3 per video.

My recommendation for hashtags are use your main keyword for one of them then go with your second main keyword and for the third one if you wanna start promoting your channel use your channel name.

YouTube Video Tags:

Video tags are the third tool that helps with your YouTube video SEO. That is where VidIQ comes in handy.

VidIQ allows you to spy on your competitor and see what tags they are using and for what tags they are getting ranks.

It also helps you and recommend tags to use based on your keyword/title.

Tagging Strategy:

Always start your first tag same with your main keyword. YouTube algorithm gives more weight to your first couple of tags. So use them for your main keyword you wanna rank for.

After that start with branching out a bit wider and use wider range of keywords. Don’t go off the topic, this will ruin your SEO and ranking if you go crazy with tags. Having VidIQ here will help you to keep you on a correct route, it keeps updating your video SEO as soon as you change/add/delete any tag.

If you see yourself that you are running out of idea for tags and your SEO score is still below 40, you can check some of the similar videos that your competitors have put on and copy their tags and use the ones that are relevant to your video.

Doing this not only allows to get your SEO score up, it also might help you to show up in the ‘Suggestion/recommendation’ section of YouTube for your competitors video. What I mean is if you have made a video about ‘How to make money online’ and one of your competitor have the same type of video, If I choose to watch your competitor video, YouTube might suggest/recommend your video on the sidebar. This very useful and powerful technique.

What you are achieving here is basically stealing your competitors visitors and giving yourself a chance to make them your subscriber.

So use your tags wisely.

That is pretty much it. I hope you enjoyed this post and if you have any questions or suggestions, make sure to write it down in the comment sections.

Also here is the complete training video I have done on this topic.