First of all, I want to congratulate you on leveraging YouTube videos in your content marketing strategy. It is a wise choice. The demand for video content continues to grow, and you don’t want to be left out of the game.

43% of people want to see more video content from marketers.” (HubSpot, 2016)

But how are your videos doing?

If you post videos regularly but don’t see any increase in views and engagement, you may not be putting enough thought into your video creation process.

Why is video quality crucial?

You are probably tired of hearing that quality is important. But I can’t stress enough how important this is.

You have to increase the ranking of your YouTube videos so that people find your videos and have a chance to enjoy them.

While it is true that the quality of a video does not directly influence YouTube video ranking, it still carries a lot of weight.

If the video is bad, no amount of YouTube SEO can make it shine.

Let’s say your video ranks high in search results and people click on it. But the video quality is bad and users click again after a couple of seconds.

In addition to not having a chance to convert viewers into customers, this behavior severely hurts your rankings.

How is that?

One of the main YouTube ranking factors is audience retention.

The longer users watch your videos, the more higher the ranking. YouTube wants its users to stay on YouTube for as long as possible, so if you keep your audience entertained and on the platform, you’ll be rewarded for it.

As YouTube states in the Creator Academy: “Your goal is to keep audience retention as close to 100% as possible (because that means viewers are watching all of your videos). And videos with audience retention and a Consistently high watch times have the potential to appear more frequently in search and suggested placements on YouTube.”

I hope that by now you are convinced that you should put in the effort to create compelling content that will hold the interest of your audience. until the end of the video

How to create videos that keep the audience watching?

High-quality audio and visuals – The way you deliver your content in terms of audio and video quality plays a huge role in retention. If the sound or picture is bad, people won’t stick around long enough to find out what they can learn from you.

Let viewers know what they will learn at first: About 20% of viewers will fly away after the first 10 seconds of the video if they are not sure that the video shows them what they are looking for. Be sure to point out what they will learn at the beginning.

Introduction – Like I said earlier, it’s easy to lose viewers in the first 10 seconds. You want to make sure your intro is engaging and grabs your viewers’ attention so they stay present throughout your content.

don’t ramble – Especially if you’re just starting out, you’ll be tempted to create those long introductions with unnecessary information that tend to put people to sleep. Keep your introduction on point and skip to the main content.

Write your videos – Don’t get in front of the camera and start talking. Plan your videos in advance and save them. This will ensure that you stay on point and cover the most important aspects of the topic without losing your ideas along the way.

Predict audience questions – One way to pique viewers’ curiosity is to address any questions they might have, which you’ll answer later in the video. Let’s say you make a tutorial on how to be more productive and you mention the Pomodoro technique at some point. Saying something like “You’re probably wondering what the Pomodoro technique is. I’ll get to that in a minute” will keep viewers interested in continuing to watch your video.

final thought

Give enough thought to video creation as just having content won’t be enough. You can do as much YouTube SEO as you can for your videos. If the content is bad, your videos will not rank.

When you have high-quality content and do some video SEO optimization, you will almost certainly rank YouTube videos on the first page.