Video

How VEED’s YouTube Channel Grew (in the early days)

By Diana Briceno,

Published on Jan 21, 2025   —   5 min read

Photo by Shubham Dhage / Unsplash

In the early days of VEED’s YouTube channel we were scrappy. Alec, our first video creator and video team lead, had to start from scratch with building our channel. Therefore, with no past data to work with, he didn’t yet have the specific insights for what would specifically work for VEED.

We also didn’t have the team of creators we now have allowing us to scale our content production efforts more easily.

Here’s the part most people get stuck on…

Perfection.

Cliche?
Yeah, it is.

But too many people get caught up in needing to have all these different things lined up before they can believe they have a shot of success.

Even worse is when they fear looking stupid meaning ::gasp:: you get only 10 views 😱

It’s fucking self-sabotage.

Soooo what do you do to avoid this?

When you have no data of your own to start with you need to just start 😆

I’m writing this an I’m laughing a bit because it’s so simple, it’s not rocket science. And I don’t say this to try and make anyone feel dumb. I say this because it’s really something so simple that separates a huge pool of people from being in that smaller pool of people who have a shot at winning.

If you want to make bolder, more precise content decisions to help you get leadership buy-in as you scale then you need to publish to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Fancy-looking shots and gear are great.

Not recording because you don’t have that shit is stupid.

VEED’s top video for years was shot on a freakin’ webcam in Alec’s attic with crap lighting. Alec👏got👏shit👏done.

Don’t allow yourself to overly-fixate too early on on things that you label as perfectionism that are truly just procrastination and fear. Yes, recording in higher quality and making your videos look sharp does matter but not having that figured out from the get go should never be the reason you don’t start publishing consistently.

In the early stages of content, there’s no room for perfectionism. Your content needs to go through the awkward stages before it has a glow-up.

What happened?

After a few months of posting at least 5 times and 5 days a week, we noticed 54% of organic traffic coming to our site from YouTube came from just 17 videos.

And from those 17 videos here are some obvious (or maybe not-so-obvious things) we noticed:

  • Video Result Keywords: Videos ranking on Google SERPS for a featured video result or video carousel brought in the most traffic.
  • Business Value: The more your product is truly the best product to help solve the viewer’s problem the better the quality of the traffic (great content will never help make a crap product great).
  • SEO-Friendly Scripts: When you incorporate related terms people search for you capture more search volume and have a better shot at ranking.
  • SRT Files: Scripting topics with SEO taken into consideration and then uploading the SRT subtitle file helps content perform better (all our top content had an SRT file and lower performers mostly did not)
  • Zero Fancy Intros: Not wasting time with a longwinded intro retains more viewers.

From there we made sure to prioritize covering high-business value topics with a video-result keyword and ensuring each video considered SEO with the viewer experience placed on a pedestal. Our channel became more intentional covering topics and their subtopics that we finally knew worked for us.

After about 1.5 years, The VEED channel was driving 40,000 to 50,000 organic visits resulting in over 200 monthly paid signups.

Quick Tip: Don’t forget to add a tracking link to pages linked your video descriptions. Our videos were also top sources of traffic to our blog and landing pages.

How you can apply our video content + SEO lessons to your own videos

Target video-result keywords when possible to rank on booth Google + YouTube

Using a tool like Ahrefs (or simply searching terms on Google) you can find which topics might contain a video-result keyword you can target. You can then use some of these terms to help you build chapters.

Go after topics with a high business value

It’s easy to get stuck in the virality trap of trendy topics that simply get you more engagement but don’t translate into getting results that will help you grow your business (and your video team if you want to scale). Reverse engineer what else people might be searching for before choosing to spend their money. You can then map out what question you need to answer for different hubs of videos and even group them into playlists for a better content experience.

You can use Ahref’s scale for business value which looks like this (quoted from their site):

  • “3”— our product is an irreplaceable solution for the problem;
  • “2” — our product helps quite a bit, but it’s not essential to solving the problem;
  • “1” — our product helps marginally;
  • “0” — our product doesn’t help solve or relate to the problem at all.

Nail search intent

Always look at content that’s already ranking and watch a few videos to make sure you’re not making assumptions about what the search intent is. By watching other videos doing well you can begin to pinpoint patterns in terms of:

  • what are some things these videos all seem to cover that you should cover?
  • And what are they not covering well or not at all that you have an opportunity to do better on?

It’s not about saying the same term 5,000 different ways. Think of it more like finding chapters and ideas that should be included in your video. For example, a video covering best live streaming equipment might find related terms like best cameras for streaming or best mics for streaming. You could use these terms as a way to split your video into chapters.

And inside a chapter like best mics for streaming you could mention other terms like popular brands (e.g. Shure SM7B) or create a subcategory based on a term like best mics under $100.

The simplest way to go about this, in my opinion, is:

  1. Write the first iteration of your script with just the keyword-rich chapters mapped out so you have a good “skeleton” to build off of. Don’t worry about adding terms beyond the chapters at this stage.
  2. Review and make sure you like the direction you’ve mapped out.
  3. Dive back in and plug in other terms

This also makes video editing simpler when using AI in the event it makes sense to break up the chapters as shorter-form video clips for other social platforms teasing the full-video.

Write a strong title and description with keyword-rich timestamped chapters

Before people watch your video your thumbnail, title, and description help invite them to click through.

Create and upload an SRT file

Use a tool like VEED to automatically generate subtitles and then download the SRT subtitle file to then upload on YouTube. You can also translate your subtitle file with VEED if you want to have other languages available for your video.

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