- Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel,
and I'm here with Adam from viewership.com.
This is another episode of our Q&A Thursdays,
and today we're going to be going over
a really popular asked question that someone had.
So what is the question Adam?
- Here it is, this is from Ruan M. Marinho,
Neil, how will YouTube impact SEO in the coming years?
- Here's the thing about YouTube.
And you know this,
because your company specializes in YouTube marketing.
YouTube videos don't rank that well
or drive a ton of traffic from Google organic.
Yes, they're there.
Videos are ranking, right,
'cause now Google is including everything within search
from restaurants, to places to go,
to YouTube videos and whatever it may be, and blog posts.
- Sure.
- But here's the thing that most people don't know,
and you know this.
If you have a video on YouTube,
on a popular topic, it can get a ton of search.
YouTube is one of the most popular search engines out there.
And what people aren't doing
is optimizing for YouTube search.
So don't try to create a video
and worry about ranking on Google.
Create a video and worry about ranking on YouTube.
- Right.
- For example, I rank really high
for the term SEO on YouTube,
thanks to your help as well,
but that video does not rank on Google on page one for SEO,
and of course Google gets way more views,
but that video naturally gets like 400-500 views a day,
without assuming anything just because it ranks on YouTube.
So think of YouTube as a
separate search engine instead of Google,
and create video content to do really well on YouTube.
Now--
- Do you think that's gonna change?
Because I mean, it dropped.
But do you think in the future,
you know how Facebook's going mostly video.
Do you think Google organic search
is going to turn more video, as well?
- No, because if users wanted
on Google tons and tons of videos,
they would have been already pushing up the videos there.
- Right.
- Right, they're looking at all data and patterns,
so for that reason,
I don't see a big change in search
in which YouTube videos are going to dominate.
Yes, it's easy to get them rankings,
but that's not what people are looking for most of the time.
- Right.
- So if you want to rank really well on YouTube,
there's a few things you can do.
One, add transcripts.
Because if you add a transcript,
then YouTube really knows what the video's about.
It's not just about them going
Oh, they can already detect stuff,
and put it in the subtitles.
It's like, no, you need to upload a transcript manually.
And by the way, we keep saying YouTube SEO, YouTube SEO.
YouTube knows that we're talking about YouTube SEO,
and this is gonna get high on YouTube SEO.
- That's right.
- A little trick for you guys.
- Yes.
Another thing you need to do is make your videos longer.
Before I met you,
I was doing two minute videos, because I'm like,
oh, short, to the point,
that's what people love, quick in and out.
But what does YouTube hate?
Short, super short videos.
Yes, and then you told me to change my strategy
to five plus minute videos,
and it made the world of difference.
And you don't really need, I started analyzing the data,
and I know you analyze a lot of data as well,
but creating 20-30 minute videos
versus five minute videos doesn't really matter.
Anything above five minutes is pretty much good to go.
The other strategy with YouTube
is using the right key words.
If you don't use the right key words with the tagging,
and the headlines, and you know, with the description,
you're got always going to do the best with rankings.
With YouTube SEO, I know you're the master at this,
and you're better than me.
How do you find the right key words
and what tools do you use?
- I mean the biggest is really just looking
within your niche, and just seeing what's working.
Which is what most people don't do, and within YouTube,
you can really spy very easily on your competitors.
So, use this tool called vidIQ.
You can find it at vidiq.com, and you can literally,
for any search term, just find all the videos
that are doing well, see what tags they're using,
see what's working, what's not working.
And the best way to know if a term is really good
is if a video is ranking really high for a certain term,
but it doesn't have many subscribers, okay?
That means that, like, there's a lot of room
for other people to do well.
That means there's room for channels to do well
that have a lot of subscribers on it.
- So, and you got it right, and using that tool,
it'll help them do better.
Um, but that's pretty much it with YouTube SEO,
it's actually not that competitive.
And here's a cool part I learned through you,
I used to think YouTube SEO was like normal SEO,
in which you go out there, you create a video,
and over time it increases in rankings.
But with YouTube, the moment a video hits,
whatever does really well
in the first hour and first 24 hours,
that'll usually determine
if the video's gonna do really well over time.
So if in the first 24 hours, if you crush it,
you're gonna continually crush it.
If in the first 24 hours you video was a dud,
no matter what you do, yeah you can get
a bit more higher rankings and a bit more traffic,
but you're not gonna crush it.
You need the video to do really well
within the first 24 hours,
so whether it's email out to your lists, tweet it out,
and share it, and let everyone know about it,
the first 24 hours matter more than anything else.
- Alright, that's great.
So to answer the question,
it sounds like these are gonna
be separate things in the future, forever.
There's gonna be Google organic,
and there's gonna be YouTube organic,
and both should be a part of the strategy,
if I'm hearing right.
- That's correct.
If you can get Google organic, why not get more?
If you can get YouTube organic, why not get more as well?
In other words, do a bit of everything,
and don't worry about
oh, are my YouTube videos gonna rank high on Google?
If they don't, it's okay.
You can still rank high on YouTube,
and get a ton of traffic.
- There it is.
Alright, awesome, so if you guys enjoyed this
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- Yes, and we're responding.
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