- [Rob] YouTube SEO,
otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization.
More and more people want to learn
its secrets every single day.
But what is YouTube SEO in 2021?
Is it simply a case of stuffing
as many tags and keywords into your metadata as possible,
or does it go far beyond such simplicities?
Do I literally need to tell and show YouTube that?
This video is about YouTube SEO.
(ding)
Let me ask you a very simple question.
When was the last time you type something
into YouTube's search bar?
The answer likely is today or yesterday,
at the very least, in the last week.
And if you've never typed anything into YouTube search bar,
I'm sorry, you're lying.
The truth is many of us use YouTube search
just as much as we use Google search.
And I'm not gonna get into an argument about
whether or not YouTube is the second largest search engine
in the world.
But according to Forbes,
there are over three billion monthly searches on YouTube.
And again, according to Forbes,
the search volume on YouTube is comparable
to Yahoo, Bing, Ask,
and AOL combined,
which is pretty incredible.
But there is also a counter argument of this.
Search traffic will not build you a YouTube empire.
Let's explore that a little bit.
It is widely agreed upon
that you will grow a bigger YouTube channel
with a stronger community
when you get most of your views
from browse and suggested traffic sources.
YouTube publicly stated this more three years ago
when they said 70% of time watched
on YouTube isn't driven by search,
but instead by its own recommendations.
And this is all to do
with the viewers watching preferences and habits.
YouTube learns all of this over time
and then matches it with the right content on YouTube.
(dings)
As long as the viewer continues to be satisfied
by the content that is served up,
a very strong and powerful audience developed
for channels and creators,
even if the viewer themselves never actually subscribes
to the channel.
YouTube analytics even confirm this.
If your video send positive signals to YouTube,
then people don't necessarily need to go off
and search for the content,
YouTube will simply recommend it to the right audience.
And this free organic advertising of your content
on YouTube is ultimately what we're all after.
All of what we've just talked
about is the YouTube recommendation system
or classically known as the YouTube algorithm,
how you get discovered on the YouTube video platform.
It is likely in the future
that more and more views will come from browse
and suggested recommendation views,
especially with the advent of YouTube shows
which relies even less on search.
But that's not to say that search traffic is dead.
In my experience and opinion,
many small channels get their first big moment,
there starts, on YouTube through one video
or a collection of videos that rank highly in search.
We don't have to look any further
than our own channel to confirm this.
Of the 70 million views we've racked up
over the last five years,
more than 50% of those have come from search
and external links such as Google search.
When a viewer is looking to buy something
or learn something or fix something,
they probably don't care too much
about the source of the answer.
They definitely don't care about the creator in most cases.
And they probably don't even trust a particular creator
to give them the right answer.
However, over a decade and a half of searches,
what people do now trust is YouTube's answer
to those searches.
(dings)
And once the viewer has chosen one of those answers
from YouTube,
let's say your video,
then it is your job to go above and beyond the answer
to give the viewer even more.
This is something Peter McKinnon learned very quickly:
package a video in such a way
that it offers incredible value
to the viewer searching for the answer.
But do so in such a unique, stylistic, entertaining way
that oozes personality,
that when Peter McKinnon next publishes a video,
even if you didn't search for it,
you just have to watch it.
(dings)
And it is at this point where new viewers to your channel,
be it through search or any of a traffic source
turning to return viewers,
and you start to build a community.
So, let's start talking about these new viewers
and how you invite them into your content
through YouTube SEO.
Put simply, it's all about identifying opportunities.
Let me give you a quick example.
This is a city simulation game called "TheoTown".
I've never played it and likely never will,
but it was brought to my attention
during a recent channel audit we did here at vidIQ.
And the search results for this game hint
at a fantastic YouTube SEO opportunity.
First of all,
vidIQ's keyword score suggests a decent level of search,
but crucially not much video competition,
and this is backed up by the search results.
What you would typically see for almost any search
on YouTube is a bunch of huge channels
dominating the top of the search ranking.
But in this example,
with the exception of the top two results,
this search page is littered with small channels
who have seized this YouTube SEO opportunity.
The dead giveaway for this is
when a video has more views than subscribers
and a small of a channel,
the greater the opportunity for the search term.
I've got to be honest,
it's almost unprecedented to see so many small channels
getting thousands of views,
so high up the search rankings.
If I was a gaming channel
and I thought my target audience will be interested
in this style of at city simulation video game,
then I will be doing all sorts of extra research
to create content on this video topic.
And this is where YouTube SEO 101 comes into play,
the search bar.
As we've already said,
it's YouTube's job to serve the right content
to the viewer.
And if that viewer starts to search for something,
through what it already knows about both the viewer
and the video topic,
YouTube will start to make predictions.
And you can do some very simple things
to generate lots of keywords and ideas.
Simply going through the alphabet with a single letter
after a keyword search will drill down
into all the possible aspects of a topic.
Follow that up with phrases
such as "how to" will not only create ideas,
but generate simple titles for you to work with.
And if we just take one of these examples
and look at the results,
we see that tiny channels are gaining thousands of views
because, as vidIQ shows us,
there is virtually no video competition on YouTube.
Now, with any of these keywords,
you can also use vidIQ Inspector tool
to create a huge list of keywords and phrases
that are all being used within the video topic.
And how I want you to start thinking about all of this?
Within the context of YouTube SEO is that all of this
represents the language of your content.
There are a couple of ways I've been thinking
of how to describe this.
Your keyword universe or the common tongue
of all of the creators talking about a particular topic.
And there are no excuses here.
It doesn't matter what the video topic is.
There is always a language that surrounds it.
I know in this particular example,
we used a very specific video game,
but if you're talking about beauty products,
productivity apps, the latest piece of tech,
cooking, traveling,
there's always going to be a language
that you can explore within that topic.
This list of keywords is no longer simply
about copying and pasting them into your video tags.
Although, of course, you can still do that.
It's more about how all of this language is going to shape,
not only your video title,
not only our video description,
everything you say in the video,
but also what appears in the video.
Think about how all of this incorporates
into the production of your content.
The simple truth is all of this
no longer has any real impact on this,
but everything written here,
the title here,
the thumbnail over there,
and the words you say in your video content
do impact the success of your video
because viewers are actually engaging
with all of these touch points.
I mean, really, to be honest,
all video tags do these days is help to keep score,
to know whether a video is ranking
in search for a certain term.
That's why this vidIQ tool is free and always has been.
(upbeat music)
I recently showed you just how long I spend
on video tags these days.
I searched for what I want to rank for,
copy the best tags from an existing video
in the search results,
paste those tags into my own video,
and then delete the tags I don't need.
It's a 30-second job,
and that's as much time as I'm willing to spend on it.
(dings)
I mean, just in case you are not aware of this,
you can actually find videos on YouTube
through tags alone.
Try it for yourself.
Put this in your video tags
and then search for it on YouTube,
and I guarantee you, it won't show up.
If it does, then let me know.
When I think of YouTube SEO these days,
I feel as if it's somewhat of an antiquated term.
I now look at it more as YouTube CEO.
No, I'm not talking about her.
I mean, YouTube Content Engine Optimization.
You want me to try and explain this, don't you?
All right.
Well, let's start with video chapters.
These have been around for a while now.
If you want timestamps in your video descriptions,
they help viewers navigate around your videos
and they add more context to search results
in Google search.
This in itself isn't very new and exciting,
and it is very much a manual job.
But what if I told you that YouTube could watch your video
and automatically create chapters for you.
Well, that's exactly what YouTube just landed on us
with this automatic chapters tool
that you'll find in the video editor page of any video
in the YouTube studio.
It claims that if you switch this on,
YouTube will do all of the work for you,
and I'm fascinated to see if it actually works.
And it can only really do this
if somehow YouTube knows the actual physical,
visual, audio content of your videos,
and it's already proven that it can be do just that.
In a recent video,
I showed you how YouTube search is now taking
into account the captions on your videos.
We've all assumed that YouTube has done this for years,
but up until now,
I'd certainly never seen this directly referenced
in YouTube search.
But that's only the tip of the iceberg
because what I also discovered is that
YouTube is visually picking out texts
from within videos and using them as a reference point
for search results.
Now naturally, all of this peaked my curiosity,
and so I started doing some tests trying
to replicate these search results,
you know, having captions appear
as well as text detected in the video.
I even tried holding up a piece of paper for 20 seconds
and did an exact search on that text.
But alas, no search result was returned.
Now, I appreciate that this looks
like an utterly ridiculous idea as a testing method
and I must be insane to think this would actually work.
But, we already know Google can do this type of thing.
We know that through via Google Cloud Vision API
that can pick apart an image, including the text.
So this, combined with this,
and now combined with this,
tells me that YouTube is doing a lot more
than looking at the title, the description,
and the video tags.
Only time will tell whether or not I'm on the right track
with all of these observations.
But to prove I am fully committed to this,
check out the tag of this video.
(paper tearing)