Can’t Find Your YouTube Channel and Videos in Search Results? Here’s a Few Tips to Help you!

You just started a YouTube channel. You’re excited about being able to put out content that you love creating, and that you hope other people will love as well. You intend to put in all of the effort necessary to create interesting and well-made videos, and you dream of gathering a large enough fanbase you can connect with and that truly enjoys your stuff. But once you uploaded a few videos, you get mildly disappointed because the view-rate isn’t going as high as you expected. You search for your videos, or channel, and find out that neither of those appears among search results. What is happening? Is this the reason why your content is not getting enough recognition?

“Blowing up” on YouTube is not something that happens very easily. As a new YouTube creator, you upload video content that you want to succeed, but keep in mind that hundreds of thousands of people on the platform are doing the same. Thousands of videos get uploaded to YouTube every day, which amounts to about 300 hours of video uploaded every minute. This kind of explains why your videos or channel don’t show up on YouTube when you search for them: they might get buried under the insane number of video content uploaded by users from all over the world.

With that said, we would like to help you increase your videos’ and channel’s visibility and make it easier for you to find your own content on YouTube: let’s find out how to find your video or channel in search results on YouTube!

Why doesn’t YouTube show my videos/channel?

The reasons why YouTube won’t show your content in search results are mainly these:

– you don’t use video tags effectively, or you just don’t use them enough. Tags are very important because they make your content more easily accessible and findable

– your channel is age-restricted, meaning that the content you produce is deemed inappropriate or offensive by YouTube. In this case, it might be that one of your videos or multiple videos got flagged before by other users

– if your content deals with heavy topics, there’s a high chance that it won’t get recommended, or it will be “hidden”. To avoid this, don’t use slurs, heavy words like “death” or any type of foul language in your titles and description

At the end of the day, your videos’ and channel’s visibility comes down to marketability. YouTube tends to push back and not promote content that is not advertiser-friendly enough. Apart from not showing up on search results, this kind of content tends to be demonetized, meaning that the creator won’t get any money from it.

How to find your video

Now, let’s see what you can do to find one of your videos in search results. Try to:

– search for the exact video ID:

— sign in to YouTube

— click on your profile picture > Settings

— then, from the left Menu, select Advanced settings

— you’ll see now your channel’s user and channel IDs

– use filters to narrow down the search results

– as mentioned, improve video tags

Note: in case you recently changed your video, it could take a few days for uploaded videos to be reflected in YouTube search results. 

How to find your channel

Try doing this if you’re having a hard time finding your channel in YT’s search results:

 – search by your channel ID, rather than your channel name (check the paragraph above to find out how)

– use the FILTER option so that it only show channels

YouTube always tries to show you the most relevant results among content such as videos, channels, playlists, and live streams. If you struggle finding your channel at the top of the search results, maybe:

– you have a common channel name

– your YouTube channel is new

– your channel name is commonly used in video titles

– your channel name may not be appropriate to all audiences (age-restricted)

Note: in case your channel is new or you change your channel name, it could take a few days to show in YouTube search results.