How to Grow a Successful Business YouTube Channel

YouTube currently attracts 122 million active users every day, making it the second-largest search engine.

With such a large audience, it’s becoming impossible for businesses to overlook the platform. Nevertheless, many are left wondering how they can make their channel successful.

It isn’t enough to post content and hope it reaches the target audience. Instead, you can implement these strategies to create a channel that resonates with your audience and generates leads for your business.

What you must know about YouTube’s algorithm

Unlike other platforms, YouTube has outlined the workings of its algorithms on several blog posts. Knowing how their algorithms work is a significant advantage because it enables you to make content that suits it and, as a result, will get recommended to viewers. 

YouTube's blog reports over 500 hours of content get uploaded to YouTube every minute. Because of this high volume, finding what you need would be nearly impossible without some help sorting through the content.

YouTube’s search feature prioritizes three core elements to provide users with the best and most accurate search results: relevance, engagement, and quality.

Many factors play a part in determining relevance, including the title, tags, description, and whether the video content aligns with the search query.

YouTube also uses engagement signals to determine relevance on a given topic. They include aggregate engagement signals from users, such as analyzing the watch time of any given video for a specific search query to determine if it’s relevant to the search. Based on how long users watch a video, YouTube determines whether a video is a good match for people conducting similar searches.

A quality metric scans the content to identify signals that help determine which channels demonstrate expertise, trustworthiness, and authority on a particular subject.

Understanding YouTube’s personalized recommendations

As part of its ongoing efforts to improve the user experience, YouTube's personalized recommendations system is constantly evolving. For example, in 2011, YouTube learned that just because a user clicked on a video doesn’t mean they watched it, so they made watch time a factor in their recommendation system in 2012.

For many, this change affected their channel’s success since they no longer could use “clickbait” features to essentially lie to users about the content of the video for the sole purpose of getting them to click on the video.

Since the recommendation system is constantly evolving, you must pay attention to YouTube's updates to their algorithm to ensure your content will reach your target audience.

As of now, the following features help inform YouTube’s system about what users enjoy watching: clicks, watch time, survey responses, sharing, likes, and dislikes.

Tips for growing your business’s YouTube channel

Assuming your YouTube channel has already started posting videos and your goal is to reach a larger audience, you can use these tips to optimize your channel and content to accomplish this goal.

1. Find keywords for your videos

It can be challenging to know what keywords to use.

Do you use broad topics or more specific terms?

You want to implement searchable keywords that are not too crowded with competition. The less competitive a keyword is, the more likely your video will populate for that term.

To find keywords for your videos, start with broad topics that describe or relate to your niche.

For example, Fund&Grow obtains zero-interest business credit for business owners and real estate investors, so some of our broad topics include business credit, real estate, eCommerce, small business funding, and startup funding.

Next, take these terms and plug them into a YouTube search to see what keywords they suggest for each topic. You will want to use a Chrome extension, like TubeBuddy or VidIQ, to determine the competitiveness of the keywords.

Once you find some keywords that are low in competition and compliment your niche, you will have a list of keywords to use for your channel and your videos.

When we plug in “business credit”, we get noncompetitive keywords such as business credit cards, business credit cards for new businesses, and business credit for real estate. These terms are used in our videos to help our content populate for users searching for variations of the phrases.

2. Optimize your videos for watch time

YouTube wants to keep users on its platform, thus emphasizing watch time.

YouTube’s Creator Academy states in a blog post, “Channels and videos with higher watch times are likely to show up higher in search results and recommendations".

 You can increase your watch time by creating longer videos, removing any fluff from your introductions, adding “pattern interrupts” to keep your audience interested, and planning your videos.

Unless you’re someone who can deliver perfectly on camera, many YouTube creators use scripts to plan what they will say to help stay on topic and have a crisp delivery.

3. Optimize Your YouTube videos

Like Google, SEO also matters within the YouTube platform, so keywords are imperative.

With YouTube’s recent updates, keyword stuffing your video title isn’t as important as it used to be, but it does help slightly. Include your keywords in your description and tags to help your video populate for a search related to those terms.

Since YouTube uses CTR (click-through rates) as a ranking signal, be sure to optimize your title to increase CTR while having a clear benefit for the user without crossing the line and resorting to clickbait.

Short descriptions can hurt your video’s ranking, according to YouTube. Thus, it’s best to write one or two paragraphs describing your video.

Your tags, as mentioned above, play a role in the ranking of your video. Generally, you want to include two or three tags with your target keyword or variations of it, two that describe the topic of the video without using the main keyword, and one or two that represent your high-level industry.

4. Create custom thumbnails that stand out

YouTube states that “90% of the best performing videos on YouTube have custom thumbnails”.

You can use these two tips to create thumbnails that are customized and attractive to users:

• Use high contrast colors: You want the colors to clash as much as possible since it will bring their eyes to your thumbnail.
• Use colors that stand out on YouTube: Since YouTube’s colors are red, black, and white, most will recommend not using those colors since they can blend in with the platform.

Ultimately, your thumbnail is like a first impression of your channel, so you want to ensure you make a lasting impression on your audience.

It’s unlikely that your channel blows up overnight, so it will require time, effort, and consistency.

However, using these tips to perfect your YouTube strategy will help your channel grow and allow you to create a never-ending stream of leads for your business, making all your efforts well worth it.

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