Module 1 - The second largest search engine in the world (Massive awareness and reach)

Why is YouTube the second largest search engine?

YouTube has quietly become the second largest search engine on the planet, and personally I think it's set to become the number one search engine before the wider shift towards answer engines and devices like Google Home takes over.

Some of the more interesting commentary online calls Google "the queen" and YouTube "the princess". While working through YouTube ads, it's worth always thinking about ranking your videos in search too: optimising your settings, getting your descriptions right, making sure your meta information is correct, embedding videos on your own web pages. All of that makes a real difference, but the audience and the engagement rate matter over and above any of it.

A lot of what gets explained through a course like this relates to what's called TrueView, meaning you only pay for an in-stream ad once it's been watched for more than 29 seconds. That's a big difference compared with how Facebook charges for advertising, where you might be charged for someone watching three seconds of an ad, or scrolling past and pausing on it, and you'll definitely be charged if someone engages with it, which is also true on YouTube.

Moz, a site worth following for years, has talked about YouTube dominating video, and the Wall Street Journal has reported that YouTube results are popping up more and more inside search results, including question and answer style results. All of that points the same way: more and more video is going to keep appearing in search over the next couple of years.

How dominant is YouTube inside Google's own results?

YouTube is overwhelmingly dominant inside Google video results, because Google owns it and isn't going to prioritise serving anyone else's video ahead of its own.

Around 94 percent of video served inside Google comes from YouTube itself. "How to" content in particular is set to become enormous, making videos around the actual questions people ask. Is that a fluke? Obviously not, Google owns YouTube and is going to promote it constantly while you're producing ads, boosting your channel, ranking in search, and making sure your videos get regular views.

What's a good tactic for boosting a channel's views?

One favourite tactic is to run a video, optimise it, rank it in YouTube search, and then remarket to the people who've already watched a good percentage of it.

Boosting views on a video for as little as two or three dollars a day can bring in a thousand or more views on that video per day. Google ranks videos partly based on views per hour, so getting a thousand views a day works out at roughly 50 views an hour, which tends to be a decent rate to help push a video up in YouTube if people are also finding it genuinely interesting once they get there.

Why is this such an exciting time for SEO?

This is genuinely one of the most exciting times in 20-odd years of doing SEO, because quality content is what's rising to the top now, not the shortcuts that used to work.

The days of getting away with rubbish content, robot voiceovers and stock imagery are gone. Making good quality content that matches what your audience actually expects to see, served to the right audience, produces high engagement, and that engagement is what makes videos rank, which in turn brings the cost of advertising down. That's the direction the whole internet is heading in.

How much video is actually being uploaded, and why does that matter for advertisers?

More than 500 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute as of 2019, and that number is only growing, which is exactly why YouTube can't be filled up with ads the way a platform like Facebook can.

By the time of recording, that figure was probably at least 750 hours a minute. Because there's so much content, there's effectively no limit on how much advertising space is available, so the cost stays incredibly cheap. Facebook, by contrast, is a finite audience that's reached its limit, its ad costs are rising because the space and the volume of ads people see has plateaued. There's no sign of YouTube's opportunity plateauing in the same way, it might be another five or ten years before it does, which means an enormous opportunity right now to drive large volumes of views for a cost of one or two cents each.

What length should ads and content actually be?

The best length for an ad tends to be three to four minutes, while content people watch for its own sake tends to work best at eight to ten minutes.

If the audience, the cost per view, and the click-through rate are all right, the only remaining thing to worry about is the offer itself, whether people convert once they land on the site, which is covered elsewhere in the course. According to figures from the HubSpot blog, YouTube reaches more people in the 18 to 49 age group than TV does now, and 59 percent of executives say they prefer watching video to reading text, which is probably true of most people. The issue isn't demand, it's that people simply don't make enough video. Focus on engagement, focus on the audience, and make content a digestible length, not 30 or 45 seconds, but not hours either: three to four minutes for ads, eight to ten minutes for content, and longer still if the channel is monetised and needs room for in-stream ads to appear.