How to Get More Views on YouTube – Experts Reveal their Secrets

We’ve asked successful YouTubers and video influencers to share their top tips on how to increase views on YouTube. From all the hundreds of tips, we’ve extracted 11 that kept repeating themselves and two that were a bit surprising.

Here’s the most important piece of advice you need to hear before you feast on the experts’ wisdom:

Focus on increasing your channel views, not views on individual videos. YouTube is more than a video platform, it’s a search engine, and your videos will rank better and get more exposure if your channel has a longer accumulated view time. In turn, each individual video will get more views.

The starter: 3 tips from an insider on how to get YouTube views

Robin Morley is Creative Director for Video at Similarweb and has over 20 years of experience creating and editing content for video and other media.

The main dish: 11 tips on how to boost YouTube views

These are the top tips on how to gain views on YouTube and grow your channel. The advice comes from people who’ve done it themselves. Some are small business owners, some marketing agencies, and some influencers and they come from a multitude of industries and niches. So, get ready to rock your audience.

1. Know your audience

You’re excited about what you want to share in your video, and that’s great. But that doesn’t get you any views. First, you should define who your audience is. Who are you trying to reach with your video content and would benefit from it?

Next, find out what they are looking for, how they are searching and what type of content works for them.

Amelia Munday, a Marketing Specialist at Custom Neon, a global manufacturer and retailer of custom-designed LED neon lights and signs puts it this way:

“Learn about the types of content that appeal to your target audience and work to improve on it by adding your own unique spin. “

Ryan Stewart, a marketing expert and the Managing Partner of The Blueprint Training has practical advice:

“It’s also important to keep in mind that different types of videos work for different audiences. If you’re trying to grow your audience, try experimenting with different types of content and see what works best for them.”

2. Do keyword research

Where and how do you start understanding your audience and what works for them? Keyword research. You’ll see that a lot of the tips circle back to doing research for video SEO and YouTube SEO.

It makes sense because you need to know how your audience is searching to optimize your videos. One way to get hints about it is through Youtube auto-suggest. This is a good start, but the results are limited. A keyword research tool gives you much more information.

Similarweb Digital Marketing Platform, for example, offers a Keyword generator specifically for YouTube.

Find high-traffic-driving keywords for YouTube with the Similarweb YouTube Keyword tool

Amelia Munday stresses the importance of keyword research:

“We quickly found that it was easy to target too broad of an audience, leading to a lot of empty impressions as the campaign was targeting people outside of our desired demographic. We remedied this by introducing more targeted keywords and negative keyword lists.”

Simon Owen, managing director of Manchester video production company, Standby Productions, gets more specific on YouTube keyword research and how to increase views on YouTube effectively:

“Basically, optimize your videos for SEO by doing your keyword research. What are your audience searching for and how? Use tools like, YouTube Suggest, and Similarweb to find the search terms that are popular around your video’s topic and tailor your title and description to it by including some keywords in.”

Both Amelia and Simon are marketers in large organizations. But is this relevant for smaller sites and companies that operate in a limited market?

“As a brand, if you want to try advertising on YouTube, you need to go slow, give yourself some time to think about how you can make the most of that YouTube promotion, be creative, and of course, do some market research.”

This comes from Brian Case, Director of E-commerce & Retail at Selkirk. His company operates in a very specific niche market focusing on a limited but clearly defined audience. With his YouTube marketing strategy, he may be on his way to becoming the market leader in his field.

3. Optimize titles and descriptions for search

Here’s where you implement the keywords you found in the research phase. Like any other search engine, YouTube ranks search results based on keywords the crawlers find in written content. Create your title around the main keyword and put it in your description. You can then add secondary keywords to the description and also in YouTube tags.

Simon Owen adds:

“Make sure your title is neat. Keep it precise with the search term keyword in that you want your video to appear most for, and then use a separator before putting your brand name in. “

Many of the video marketers we asked mentioned the importance of the title in different aspects. It’s one thing to rank and get found, it’s another thing to grab the target audience’s attention and curiosity.

Make sure the title isn’t focused around you, but on what the audience wants to see. Let them know how they benefit, and what answers they’ll get from your video.

4. Create captivating thumbnails

YouTube picks a random frame from your video as a thumbnail. It can be the most unfortunate and boring scene of the entire video. Instead of settling for this, YouTube also lets you add a thumbnail of your own. You can choose any other video scene from your video or create a completely new thumbnail.

Many YouTubers spend a considerable amount of time creating enticing thumbnails. Tools such as Canva make it easy and even offer templates. Some video marketers have professional designers working on each thumbnail.

Take a look at these amazing thumbnails. Would you guess that this is a channel about chess? Levy Rozman understood quickly that he needed to do something extreme if he wanted to get people’s attention. He created thumbnails that make you go: huh?

Chess isn’t the most compelling subject matter for a video, and Levy needed to find ways to create curiosity with his titles, as well as thumbnails.

He may use over-the-top or even absurd-sounding titles, but his important message is this:

“I never lie with the content that’s inside my video. Even if my thumbnail or my title is theatrical and exaggerated, you’re always going to get some good content. I never say something in the title that’s not in the video.

His channel GothamChess has over 1.5 million subscribers.

Here’s another successful YouTuber, whose top tip relates to thumbnails. Chris Grayson, social media expert and influencer coach runs a Youtube Channel with 163,000 subscribers as well as a Discord community of over 57,000 content creators, says:

“First of all, it’s important to spend time creating great thumbnails and titles for your videos. This is the first thing potential viewers will see, and it will make them decide whether or not to click on your video. We often spend over 2 hours on the thumbnail for our weekly video. Unfortunately, many beginners make the mistake of rushing this process and making a thumbnail in 5 minutes using a template.”

Eric Terranova, owner of the baseball YouTube channel EXE-Edits agrees:

“… If your video has an unappealing thumbnail, then it won’t matter what is in the video because people won’t click on it.”

Eric accumulated over 200,000 million YouTube views on his channel over the past six years.

These thumbnails are visually appealing and inform what’s in the video

5. Check what others do

Part of understanding what works for your audience can come from examining what works for your competitors. See what similar companies do on their channels, what type of video they offer, how long the videos are, and what kind of engagement they get. Get inspired by what your audience likes on competitors’ channels.

Use YouTube competitive analysis tactics to examine how competitors get more views on YouTube. Understand video strategies and the performance of their video marketing. Similarweb lets you analyze channel traffic and engagement metrics to help benchmark and set goals for yourself.

“You can gain insights and inspiration for your own campaigns, find alternative keywords to target, identify audience interests and preferences, and familiarize yourself with industry trends.

It’s also beneficial to evaluate your own video content in comparison to competitors. You know you are doing something right when they are all copying your creations.” said Amelia Mundey.

So, we checked what Custom Neon is doing, as an example, using Similarweb traffic analysis. You can see CustomNeon is generating by far the highest organic traffic volume

Amelia definitely did her keyword research. Look how much her organic traffic outperforms the competition. Also, traffic from display ads (including video) is trending up for Custom Neon.

What we found on the channel was a very original idea that ties in with our first tip of understanding what the audience is looking for. CustomNeon shows FAQ videos on their channel. These are super short videos that answer one single question about their company and products.

Notice the standardized on-brand design of CustomNeon’s FAQ videos

Simon Owen gives his reasons for investigating the competition:

“Make sure your content is a cut above the rest. Before you pick up a camera, act as the searcher first to see what other content is like and how you can make it better. Is the audio low quality? Are they doing a poor job of answering the query? Is the video just too long for the query?”

6. Share videos on social media and blog

Another effective way to get more eyes on your videos is to distribute them through additional marketing channels.

Here’s the inspiring story of Jeff Moriarty, Marketing Manager at the family business Moriaty’s Gem Art:

“Our family owns a jewelry business and have been working hard to build our Youtube channel.

One of the most successful ways we have built our Youtube Channel to over 80,000 followers has been through educational videos, even though we are a retail business. We don’t just post these videos on Youtube, we also post them on Reddit. Reddit is often overlooked, but shouldn’t be. Many of our videos have gone viral on that social platform. Our most successful educational video hit the homepage on Reddit, resulted in millions of views of our video on Youtube (over 6,000,000 views now), and an increase of 20% in followers in less than a couple months.

For Jeff’s type of business Reddit seems to have been the right choice. You should find out where your audience hangs out and share your Youtube videos on the relevant platform. For example, checking where competitors publish their videos is a good start.

Embedding videos in the blog and then promoting them on social media can also work exceptionally well for niche companies like this aquatics e-store called the Aquarium Store Depot. Each post on their blog features a video, and that’s what brings them the most views. In addition, CEO and Founder Mark Valderrama told us:

“Promoting and posting across numerous channels, in my opinion, not only yields more views but also a larger readership. [….] this cross-platform strategy offers three times as many opportunities for compensated views and for reaching new members of your desired audience.”

The video in the blog post adds color and movement to the blog post

7. Monitor view duration and other YouTube metrics.

The number of views is only one indicator of success. View duration is probably even more important to keep measuring, tracking, and benchmarking. The metric shows if your video content was truly valuable for the audience you attracted and is also a major ranking factor on YouTube.

Make sure to benchmark metrics against your competitors and your industry. A niche market like aquarium supplies or pickleball paddles has different averages than baseball or neon signs.

And Chris Grayson, of StreamScreemer shares his take on what metrics are important:

“Youtube rewards channels with a strong click-through rate and great video retention, so you should always review your analytics. Figure out what works through trial and error, and don’t be afraid to delete older videos that no longer match your channel. I often tell new Youtubers you shouldn’t expect to get any traction until you have 30 videos with great content. “

8. Engage with the audience, answer comments

Show your audience that you care. Answer comments to let your audience know you pay attention and appreciate their engagement.

Many marketers listed adding a CTA as one of their best practices. Encouraging feedback and answering comments have at least some impact on the views.

“When starting on Youtube, it’s essential to generate engagements by responding to each new comment. […] Engagements are a core signal in the youtube algorithm and can be the difference between getting 1,000 and 100,000 views on a new channel,” says Chris Grayson, from StreamScheme

Here’s a practical idea from Simon Owen on how to do that:

“A good idea is to encourage discussion and comments in your description, or you can create a pinned comment to do this”

9. Be consistent

Persistence may be the toughest hurdle for beginning YouTubers to tackle. When the initial enthusiasm wanes, so does the motivation. Viewers, on the other hand, like things they can rely on. They want to know that you’re here to stay.

Experienced YouTubers develop a strict routine and publishing schedule. The fashion influencer Jenn Im, who’s been doing videos for over twelve years and has gained over 3 million subscribers, committed to being consistent 11 years ago.

“One of the best ways to build trust is by showing up. Post videos…. So, figure out a schedule that gives you enough time to make a quality video with some effort. For me, that is once a week. This gives me enough time to really be creative and thoughtful with each video that I am producing. This is a promise that I made to myself back in 2011….I found that this commitment made me a better video creator because with each video I got better. So if you can create a quality video every two weeks, every month, every two months, just stick with that and in a year you’ll have a body of work that you feel proud of”

10. Create quality content

Quality is your best bet in keeping people on your video and coming back for more.

Video marketing is turning into a standard marketing tactic for digital companies. To keep up with the competition, you must also keep up with the quality they provide. Low video or sound quality can put off your viewers.

Simon Owen is a big believer in quality:

“Invest in some high-quality equipment to give yourself the best chance of beating out the competition and getting people to stay on your video. It’s all well and good to optimize right, but then your efforts will be wasted if your bounce rate is ridiculously high.”

Amelia Munday sounds very similar on the issue of quality. Here’s her advice:

“Make sure to present real value to your viewers, and answer their questions. Here’s where benchmarking is crucial. You want your videos to be a nick better than the rest. Find your top competitors and analyze video quality on different levels – audio, content, lighting, presentation, and length.”

“Consider investing in equipment to ensure quality. This can make the difference between someone noticing your video and watching it through to the end. The difference between a high and a low bounce rate and a view time.”

11. Create playlists

You want to keep viewers on your channel for a long time and view a lot of your content. When you create playlists, you can determine which video gets suggested to the viewer next.

This little trick increases the chance of a visitor viewing more than one video. The longer the view time, the higher YouTube regards your channel’s value, improving your ranking.

Almost all the channels quoted in this article have playlists, and you can see their videos suggested on the right of the currently playing video.

On the right side of the video, YouTube offers suggestions. Playlists increase your chances to get featured there.

Amelia Munday shares hands-on ideas on how to put your playlists together:

“Connect related topics and related themes. This can all be based on search analysis. Try to understand the pain points / issues / questions that drive people to search for your video content. Then organize them accordingly.”

In the end, it all circles back to research. Learn what your audience likes, learn what your competitors do and then leverage the tools that digital marketing offers. You’ll find that it’s often a matter of trial and error and you need to experiment a little to figure out what exactly works for you.

The dessert: 2 tips that will surprise you

12. Collaborate with others

YouTube is also a community, and many YouTubers mentioned how helpful getting tips from others have been. YouTubers turn to each other for inspiration and support.

Ryan Stewart from The Blueprint Training has similar advice:

“One thing I’ve found really helpful is interacting with other YouTubers in the same space as me by liking their videos, commenting on them, and sharing them with my own followers. This helps increase engagement rate and builds relationships with other creators which ultimately leads to more views on both ends!”

13. Bonus Tip from someone who identified specific audience needs

“Like other people, I have not had a large number of viewers after creating the channel. However, after translating the video titles and descriptions into different languages, the number of views and subscribers increased. I’ve seen a 1,000% increase in watch time.”

Burak Özdemir is the founder of Online Alarm Clock and this is one of the videos on his YouTube channel:

All videos show nothing more than a digital countdown, yet his channel has 22,000 subscribers.

Final Thoughts

If you thought that maybe video marketing isn’t right for your niche or business, our last story should encourage you. You can create your space when you find the right approach. Just keep researching and asking. That’s where Similarweb can help with the most accurate and current web traffic data.