My SEO experiment...Thoughts?

Joey Mesa

Joey Mesa

Member
So, sometime in May of this year, in trying to grow my channel, I started using vidIQ. It seemed really helpful optimizing my videos as I uploaded them to Youtube. I started looking at some of my older videos and most had very little in the description and tag category.
Around June I started to tweak some that I felt were good videos but underperforming. Then I think I made a big error. I started adding tags and messing with the video descriptions on some of my well performing videos. The result was a pretty quick drop off of my suggested videos in traffic sources. Like a cut in half drop.
Screenshot (164).png
It took some time, but my search and external views grew, but overall, it was a definite setback of several months. It seems my suggested views are still not great and not getting much better. I've seen a few things on not messing with videos that were performing well, but that was after I was trying to figure out what was going wrong.
Anyone else make this mistake?
 
I moved this to the strategies discussion forum. :) The SEO sub-forum in the tutorials/articles section is more for how-to tutorials rather than open-ended discussions. ^_^
 
Most “gurus” will tell you that every time you hit “save” on the video description and details page, it’s like hitting reset on the video and the algo dumps all your past results (both good and bad) which is why this can be good for poorly performing videos and bad for videos that the algo seems to favor.

Interesting results. Thank you for posting and sharing.
 
A little update. After 4-5 months, my views and watch time have grown slightly and subscriber count is doing the best it's ever been, but my suggested video count is still struggling. YouTube's note on the impressions chart says "You can increase the chance of YouTube suggesting your content by increasing your click-through rate and your video watch time."
From what I understand, 2-10% is a good click through rate range. Mine is currently at 6.7% and my average view duration is 2:41. My current suggested videos in traffic sources is 18.6%. I'm just trying to understand how it could go from 50%+ for a couple of years to a hollow shell of that overnight.
If it's an algorithm change, I would suspect others to have the same issue? Maybe more competition in the subjects I use could be the cause? Just wondering if anyone else has had a suggested video fluctuation similar to mine.
 
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