What is a YouTube audit? If you have a YouTube channel, you must check and track its performance. Since the competition on YouTube is high and content creators upload engaging content daily, a YouTube channel audit is an excellent plan to improve your video’s probability of being discovered on the platform.
So, let’s understand why conducting a YouTube audit is essential and what measures you can take to evaluate the channel’s performance. You can track the performance in just a few steps by assessing your content, understanding your audience, reviewing your uploading schedule, and other metrics.
What Is YouTube Channel Audit?
Sometimes, even after following a clear and precise strategy for content creation for your channel, the growth of the channel and video may slow down, and you may not see new subscribers, likes, or comments.
At times like these, a thorough, in-depth analysis of the channel and videos can significantly push your channel toward an onward journey to get more views and subscribers.
So, a channel analysis or a YouTube audit can help you fix problem areas around your content if and when you encounter them.
Why Is It Essential To Conduct YouTube Channel Audit?
Now, let us understand why an audit of a YouTube channel is essential.
A YouTube audit is essential to tracking the channel’s overall performance because thousands of uploads are made on YouTube every minute. So, a YouTube channel audit is a must to stand out from the competition and make a lasting impression on viewers.
- An audit video on YouTube allows you to identify new opportunities
- It will enable you to focus on optimizing your content strategy
- YouTube audit lets you prepare a strategy that needs urgent attention on the channel. For example, video description, thumbnails, hashtags, etc.)
Steps On How To Conduct A YouTube Channel Audit
In this section, we will explain how to proceed with an audit of your YouTube videos:
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Evaluate The Channel As A Whole
The first step is to analyze your videos as a whole. Take a beat and check the following elements on the YT channel.
- Make sure you are targeting the right keywords.
- The channel’s description summarizes your brand so that the audiences understand who you are and the things you are aiming to achieve
- Also, the YouTube thumbnails, profile pictures, and banner art are mobile-friendly and engaging but not misleading. Additionally, the YouTube outros, end screens, etc., and YouTube CTAs must be consistent in all the videos so that the viewer stays on the channel, which increases viewership.
- Next, your channel’s playlists and featured videos need attention. You must organize your playlists and ensure your target audiences watch your recommended and suggested videos.
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Identify Click Through Rate(CTR)
CTR is often associated with thumbnails. It is the first thing the viewers see when deciding whether to click on the video. So, a higher CTR increases the watch time and the total number of views. It’s crucial to analyze the top-performing thumbnails with the highest click-through rates and create new thumbnails in a similar style to test their effectiveness.
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Optimize the Channel for Search
A key reason for conducting a thorough YouTube channel audit is to optimize the channel for search. To ensure the channel is discoverable by your community and new audiences, videos must appear on the YouTube SERP. This means the audience’s search terms should align with the video’s title and description.
Keywords and tags are essential. A YouTube channel audit also helps you recognize whether your channel is globally accessible. To improve your channel’s discoverability and, in turn, gain more subscribers and views, ensure you add subtitles and chapters to your videos so they are accessible to a broader audience.
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Evaluate The Uploaded Content
Once you analyze the channel as a whole, proceed step by step. Track which videos perform better and which do not through your YouTube studio. Examine the top-performing videos and determine why they perform better. Compare the data with other videos and try to optimize them accordingly.
Understanding the video’s strengths and weaknesses is essential to optimizing and fixing problems in your content strategy. It is crucial to analyze the types of videos that are performing well. Pay attention to the average watch time and recurring subscribers for your videos.
A great tip to attract views for videos that are not performing well is to buy YouTube views to boost engagement on particular videos that have the potential to do well.
Taking a trip down memory lane will help you provide data and insights into the outdated videos. Additionally, it can serve as a beneficial brainstorming session, allowing you to fill in gaps and tap into opportunities and ideas that competitors are publishing.
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Understand Your Audience
As you grow and evolve on the platform, it is natural that the audiences evolve, too. One of the solid parameters to evaluate the channel’s health is checking up on the demographics, age, gender, and target audience. It provides you with insight into what the audience prefers and likes so that you can generate content that hits the target.
Once you comprehend the audience better, promoting videos on YouTube with proper insights will be easier.
YouTube Analytics is a free tool for all YouTubers to better understand, track, evaluate, and optimize their channels.
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Study Your Competitors
Monitor your competition, which can help you develop a content strategy. See what channels and YouTubers your viewers are watching. This will help you better grasp the audience’s behavior. Pay attention to your channel’s growth metrics, such as video tags, title, layout, and visuals. Also, by judging your competitors’ videos, you can compare them and see if your channel covers a particular topic.
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Track Your Uploading And Posting Frequency
Staying consistent on YouTube is essential. Ensure you track your posting schedule. For your audience to remember you, you must post 1-2 times a week. The attention span on social media platforms is very short. So, to improve your channel’s visibility, you must upload engaging videos that allow you to interact with your audience.
A regular posting schedule will allow you to monetize your videos and get sponsorship deals as much as possible.
Essential Tools for Conducting a YouTube Channel Audit
YouTube Analytics is definitely a free, powerful tool designed to make the process of channel auditing easier. However, several other valuable audit tools are used to analyze the channel’s growth.
VidIQ
VidIQ is a popular analytical tool for optimizing YouTube growth. Its user interface is simple to use and has several features, making it a popular tool for video optimization. One benefit of using VidIQ is its in-depth insights into keyword opportunities, engagement metrics, competitor tracking, etc.
Canva
Canva is a must-have graphic design tool for enhancing video CTR. It is easy to use and includes several pre-designed templates and elements for thumbnail creation. Several design features enable quick, professional-looking channel art and thumbnails to build brand aesthetics.
Social Blade
A widespread tool for tracking, analyzing, and monitoring channel statistics and growth, this tool will help streamline the audit process. It can also provide valuable insights on subscriber growth, estimated earnings, competitor analysis, and other relevant information. This information makes optimizing content strategy and growing the YT channel effectively easier.
Conclusion
YouTube audit is not challenging but requires a lot of hard work. The real challenge is understanding your audience’s needs and expectations so that you can exceed their expectations with content that truly resonates with them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What is the SEO audit for YouTube channel?
An SEO audit of a YouTube channel optimizes its visibility and engagement on the SERP. Optimizing the videos’ metadata for better performance is crucial to improving discoverability and ranking on the SERP.
Q2. What are the key metrics to review during a YouTube channel audit?
Some of the most essential metrics to review during a YouTube channel audit are:
- View count
- Watch time
- CTR
- Subscriber growth
- Engagement rate
- Demographics
- Traffic source
Q3. How often should I conduct a YouTube channel audit?
Typically, a channel audit must be conducted every 3-6 months to track the channel’s growth and performance. Audits are essential to identify areas for improvement based on changing trends and audience preferences.