How Does YouTube Decide To Rank Your Video?

When you create a YouTube video, upload it, optimize it, and publish it, your goal is to get it to rank. But how does YouTube decide whether to rank your video? Before YouTube looks at performance metrics, the first thing it looks at the title and the first two lines of your video’s description.

Views are obviously less relevant when you’re just starting out, which is part of why YouTube uses this route first. After looking at the title and description, YouTube also creates a transcript of your video and scans it for accuracy to make sure the content matches the title. They don’t want their popular videos to be misleading.

YouTube also analyzes your video’s clickthrough rate. This just means that they analyze how many people click on your video. They’ll further check your views and your viewer duration. If your video is between the 5 and 15-minute range, you’ll get an extra boost. Finally, they’ll look at comments, likes and dislikes, and how many people are subscribing. This is why hitting all the optimization marks is incredibly important for video marketers.