The Grey Hat Strategy For YouTube Ranking Success
First off, let me just say that the reason this is called grey hat is because there’s a few different ways to go about it. Some of them are black hat and some of them are white hat. The entire method here is just fine in regards to TOS on any video sharing or hosting platform. So there’s no need to worry about that stuff.
Now that you’re of this, let’s just get right into it…
In terms of creating a video, it doesn’t matter what kind of video you upload to YouTube, this strategy will work for any video.
Just make sure that your video is optimized in terms of production.
That means you should have a clear call to action within the video, or something that encourages your viewer’s to take action in some way or another.
This is, of course, dependant on the goal of your video.
Let’s say you have a video created, and you’ve set up your YouTube channel so that the home page is fully optimized.
You should have an appropriate channel name, art, a description, connected social networks, and make it look like the channel is active – which it should be. This is the important part, you have to do some relevant research for the
optimization of your video.
Let’s assume you’re uploading a video to YouTube as part of your marketing strategy, which would be to gain views and often times conversions.
This would mean that you want the video to rank high in the search results, and draw in unique visitors on autopilot. After all, that’s one of the biggest benefits of video marketing as a whole when it comes to the internet.
You’re going to want to do some Google searches AND YouTube searches for relevant keywords related to the topic of your video.
This could be different variations of keywords or key-phrases. You want to determine the amount of traffic that’s possible for certain combinations and keywords, on both of these platforms since they’re essentially intertwined.
During your search you want to take note of several elements of the searches:
- Is there a video ranking for the keyword(s) on Google or YouTube?
- How many views do the top ranking videos receive?
- What is the like to dislike, and comment ratio of the videos ranking?
- Are the comments and interactions recent?
- How well optimized is the video for these keywords? Is it ranking naturally or does it look like it has been up for a long time?
- Is the uploader of the video an established channel or not?
All of these factors will help you determine if a keyword or set of keywords is worth your time.
Overall, you just want to research and see if you can improve upon other campaigns or cash in on keywords that are wide open and have yet to have videos ranked for them. Now that you’ve done your research, you should have some keywords for the video
that you plan to upload.
When you upload the video, try to tie in the best keywords with the title. You should also include them naturally in the description.
Do this by writing a short blurb about your video and place the keywords in there naturally. Also make use of the “tags” feature that YouTube offers to you, this is where you want to enter the most relevant keywords to your video and message. It’s super important that you don’t start “keyword stuffing” during any of this though.
Keyword stuffing is when you mindlessly place tons of keywords all over your video’s description, title, and tags.
In reality, this not only hurts your rankings but it looks bad as well. Stick to a small pool of very targeted keywords for each video that you upload.
In some cases, you could create multiple generic videos with a call to action and
maybe different art or styles, and then upload them with this method.
That is where some marketers may consider this process to be a bit grey hat or even black hat.
After your video is uploaded and you’ve optimized the keywords in the title, description, tags, and so on – you’re ready to start the next step towards ranking. If you want to go the natural white-hat route, which is highly recommended, then what you want to do is share the video on all of your social networks.
Proceed to embed the video on a relevant page or section of your website.Create natural engagements and encourage your audience to share your video as well.
Patience is the most important factor with this part. Don’t be afraid to network and reach out to other YouTubers (politely) to ask if they can help you out with your video(s).In time, the more social signals and natural backlinks that you receive towards your video, the higher it’s going to rank.
If you’re creating valuable content, then it shouldn’t be a problem to get websites and other networks and people to share your content with their own audience or friends.
If you want to go a somewhat blackhat route, then you can start purchasing backlinks or running SEO campaigns and pointing them to your video(s). Some of the best outlets for buying these sorts of backlinks in bulk would have to be Fiverr or even SEOClerks.
You can even buy or attract different social signals and point them at your video.
This is a major hit or miss and can be extremely risky, so use it with caution on your campaigns As a whole, this method will work very well if you put your own spin on it and have a lot of patience. If you target the right keywords, and keep creating valuable content then your audience will expand and you’ll see loads of traffic on autopilot.
