“To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity,” says HubSpot SEO expert Braden Becker. “The View Velocity metric measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.”

Braden Becker, Senior SEO Strategist at HubSpot, reveals the secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm in his latest video:

The Secrets of YouTube’s Ranking Algorithm

Since marketers are at the mercy of algorithms on nearly every publishing channel, knowing how each of these unique algorithms work is crucial to attracting and maintaining an audience. Luckily, while some channels are rather reserved about the secrets of their algorithms, YouTube has been remarkably transparent. To figure out which videos and channels that users are most likely to enjoy watching, YouTube follows their audience. This means they pay attention to which videos each user watches, what they don’t watch, how much time they spend watching each video, their likes, their dislikes, and “they’re not interested in” feedback. 

Ranking High In YouTube Search Results

YouTube’s algorithm also uses different signals and metrics to rank and recommend videos on each section of their platform. With this in mind, let’s go over how the algorithm decides to serve content to its users on their search results, homepage, suggested videos, trending, and subscription sections. First, are the search results. The two biggest factors that affect your video search rankings are its keywords and relevance. When ranking videos in search, YouTube will consider how well your titles, descriptions, and content, match each user’s queries. They’ll also consider how many videos users have watched from your channel and the last time they watched other videos surrounding the same topic as your video.

Positive Engagement With Your Videos Is Key

Next is the home page and suggested videos. No two users will have the same experience on YouTube. They want to serve the most relevant personalized recommendations to each of their viewers. To do this they first analyze user’s activity history and find hundreds of videos that could be relevant to them. Then they rank these videos by how well each video has engaged and satisfied similar users, how often each viewer watches videos from a particular channel or topic, and how many times YouTube has already shown each video to its users. 

Ranking On The Trending Page

Next is trending. The trending page is a feast of new and popular videos in a user’s specific country. YouTube wants to balance popularity with novelty when they rank videos in this section, so they heavily consider view count and rate of view growth for each video they rank. 

High “View Velocity” = High Ranking

Last is subscriptions. YouTube has a subscriptions page where users can view all the recently uploaded videos from the channels they subscribe to. But this page isn’t the only benefit that channels get when they acquire a ton of subscribers. To determine rankings on their platform, YouTube uses a metric called the View Velocity, which measures the number of subscribers who watch your video right after it’s been published. The higher your videos view velocity the higher your videos will rank. YouTube also accounts for the number of active subscribers you have when they rank your videos.