Tips For An Art YouTube Channel's SEO & Increasing Reach

In this blog, I will be discussing my experience of two years working with the YouTube algorithm with results from my art channel.

When I was looking for advice around the internet to successfully boot up my channel, nothing really felt truly helpful (to myself in particular). So, I will go through my experience on my art YouTube channel to show you what did well and what didn’t.

One piece of advice I have is to put your expectations very low. On average (according to other websites) it takes about 164 videos to get 1000 subscribers… but that’s only the average across all kinds of content. If I look at my own art channel so far, it has 30 subscribers after posting 40 videos for 2 years. I get on average 20 views a video. The most viewed video I have currently is ~ 500 views. Unless I hit a jackpot, it is still a long way from the monetization mark.

My art channel content is quite a niche, consisting of content such as:

- Artwork progress speed-paints (majority of my videos)

- Tutorials (especially webtoon comic related)

- Other (casual non-serious videos like art memes)

Now, let’s look at what factors and aspects of videos get the most views. Once you start posting, you can see all your videos’ data on your channel page (I know, we are taking all these people's data for free... that's another digital ethic issue to look at another time).

Particularly for my art channel, YouTube & Google searches make up 50% of my views. My content doesn’t follow trends very often, so I rely on people's searches. Here are some data on each specific topic my content consists of:

Speed-paints

A screenshot of one of my speed-paint videos

As mentioned above, 50% of views per speed-paint are from Youtube and Google searches. In these searches, the app I use to make the artwork is the most searched. Then the other searches are about the context of the artwork. But, for the very successful speed paints (i.e., the ones that get more than 50 views), the context made up the majority of the searches.

For example, in my most viewed speed-paint - 'Lord Dimitrescu’, the searches were mostly ‘Lord Dimitrescu’ and ‘Lady Dimitrescu’. The timing was also incredibly important because I posted this during the time Resident Evil Village’s character, Lady Dimitrescu, was trending on the internet. I did a gender-bend of her because my curiosity was piqued by how she’d look. Luck was a large factor in this because I hit the exact niche where it was high in searches, but had a low number of videos (i.e., high demand, low supply). As those strange YouTuber gurus would say – ‘that’s what you should be aiming for all the time!’

To set these searches to relate to your video, your video title and description text have a major role in this, so try to include all relevant words in those sections to reach these audiences.

Take another example of a speed-paint that had average views – ‘Drawing Yun Jin’, where the searches were mostly ‘speed paint’ and ‘Medibang’. The context (the most important factor) wasn’t anything trendy, so this video had average views.

So, as you can see, following the trends would guarantee you some views at least, but it’s stressful. So be mindful of that and go trendy when you want to. Make sure you enjoy yourself!

Tutorials

Another screenshot of a tutorial on backgrounds I made

My tutorials are the type of content I am absolutely guaranteed they’d do well – because people want the information! Retention and engagement levels are usually higher, and people search for them. YouTube and Google searches make up 40% of the views. Again, the context is the focus in tutorial-kind of videos.

Make sure to include all the keywords possible relating to your video in your title and description.

Other videos

A screenshot depicting one of my greatest artworks

Soon, I was planning to try out an ‘art challenge’ and see how well it does. When I do so, I will be sure to update this blog on how it goes! Most of the time in this category, I make random short videos that are art-related (like drawing a birb, an animation, and so on). I can’t predict how well they do. They are just fillers for when I am working on a larger video project or when I feel a little goofy and silly.

I hope this was helpful, and I will update it when I find more useful information.

Thanks for reading and take care!

#Youtube