You just spent the last week recording a video, editing it, and uploading it to YouTube. A month later it has eight whole views and you're incredibly frustrated and want to quit making videos because you poured your heart and soul into making an amazing video nobody watched. In 2021 we interviewed the legendary Chris Myers from Fox Sports and between then and now our video only had a disappointing 48 views. Because our channel is smaller and if you search "Chris Myers" on YouTube, our video will not be found on the first couple of pages, that would explain why nobody has seen it. You have to be creative and detailed to get those initial views when you are a smaller channel.
Today in our post we're going to discuss TubeBuddy, a Google Chrome plugin tool to help you properly set up your video before publishing to give you the best chance of your video being seen. Of course, there are no guarantees with anything on the Internet, but this will increase your chances of being seen and give you important feedback to adjust what isn't working. TubeBuddy is FREE to get started with and some of the more advanced features we show below require a paid account. If you click our link anywhere on this page and have less than 1000 subscribers to your channel you'll get a promo code at checkout to cut your first-year subscription in half. Even without the promo code, a premium account is very affordable!
Note: We're required to disclose that we are an affiliate partner of TubeBuddy and if you click one of our links, install the plugin, or make a purchase results in a small commission to help keep Stadium Scene running. It doesn't cost you anything extra, but it goes a very long way to help keep Stadium Scene running and expand our content offering to you!
The Basics
There are five major keys to configuring your video on YouTube:
- The Title
- The description
- The keywords/keyphrases tags
- Thumbnail Image
- Cards, End Screens, and Chapters
The key behind these is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and it's no shock that YouTube SEO works very similar to Google's SEO. TubeBuddy provides you with tools and feedback to help you break in and get those initial views.
The Title
The title of your video is going to decide if anyone sees it or not. As you use TubeBuddy's Keyword search for at least a partial title. TubeBuddy will tell you if you have any chance at all of being found based on the keyword, the number of searches using the keyword, and where you'd likely fall on the list. Check out a couple of searches we did for our Chris Myers episode:
So this was the obvious first place to start. There are 10.1 million videos involving Chris Myers and that shouldn't be a shock to anyone. We'll never get found if we settle for this as the key phrase in our title. We made a slight modification and found this to be pretty good:
When looking for a keyword it's good to target "Good" or better. 90% of the search results were moved by lowering this search. There are definitely fewer searches but as a smaller channel would you rather have your video seen and watched by 50 people or 0 people? I thought so...
The Description
A good description showing the contents of your video, using that keyphrase, and individual words from the keyphrase will further boost your post in search results as you grow your channel. TubeBuddy will score your description based on a handful of metrics as seen below:
95% is good, but how do we get closer to 100%? Check out the next section featuring the Keywords.
Keywords/Keyphrases Tags
YouTube is kind of misleading about the purpose of keywords. They put a disclaimer above the section that says:
Tags can be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in helping viewers find your video.
After doing a little research, that's not entirely true. You can definitely take advantage of commonly misspelled words like names, or typos like "tlaking" instead of "talking". You should be taking advantage of these terms and using them to have your video show up in a variety of search results:
Now we're just about ready to go! Another awesome feature is that TubeBuddy will calculate where your keyword tags rank in searches. Note that your numbers for the same video may be different for someone else due to the complexity of YouTube's algorithm:
Thumbnail
When searching YouTube, the image next to the video is known as a "thumbnail". An eye-catching thumbnail is going to definitely attract more attention. Being seen in a search result is only the first battle, getting the user to click on your video is the other half of the battle. TubeBuddy helps you with Thumbnails, but you can also make them in Photoshop or a tool like Canva.
Cards, End Screens, and Chapters
Cards pop up during the video in the corner that tries to guide users to subscribe to your channel, watch more videos, or check out similar videos.
End Screens are important because at the end of your video it gives the user a chance to stay on your channel and go watch other videos, playlists or subscribe. These are highly recommended by YouTube and it may help your video show up more often in the search algorithm. YouTube won't confirm or deny this, but many experts in the field believe this to be the case.
Chapters help break down your video into sections and it's great for longer videos. If someone wants to hear the story about Chris taking a phone call from a casting director and legendary film director, Oliver Stone you can skip right to it! YouTube has a decent system where it automatically will insert chapters, but ultimately you should create your own chapters as time allows.
Initial Results
If you search "Chris Myers Interview" on YouTube, we show up on the first page! As of this post, we are 8th on the first page and currently sit between Chris interviewing Randy Moss and interviewing the legendary John Wooden. We definitely don't belong above Coach in my opinion, but YouTube seems to disagree and who am I to argue with YouTube?
The key takeaway is patience. As much as you'd like to have a video go viral and generate millions of views, subscribers, and dollars for you, it's not a reasonable expectation. Just like having your blog post get found by Google takes time as does TubeBuddy. If you keep using TubeBuddy, follow best practices, and focus on building quality content. Your views will grow and snowball over time as your content and subscriber count grows accordingly. TubeBuddy is here to put down a proper foundation to build those initial views to increase your chances of being successful on YouTube.
This post was proofread by Grammarly
