Module 12 - Ranking videos at the top of Google

Why is Google pushing video to the top of search?

Google is pushing video because it's genuinely worried about answer engines. I've worked on the web since before Google even existed, on things like Ask Jeeves, Lycos and MySpace, and all that time I've been fascinated with SEO, even though I don't sell it as a service nowadays other than through video.

The reason Google loves video is that Google is scared of Alexa, Siri and Cortana, which are answer engines. It's worried that in five years, ten years, or longer, those answer engines will be able to do the job properly: you'll be able to ask a question of a speaker rather than typing it into Google. At that point Google becomes one of four or five, no longer the automatic number one, because Alexa and particularly Siri are theoretically streets ahead on voice search at the moment. So how does Google defend itself? It defends itself using video.

How does Google decide which videos to promote?

Google promotes videos by watching engagement and using YouTube as a testing ground before it trusts a video enough to send it to the top of main search. If you started a website today your chance of getting to the top of Google in a competitive niche is pretty much zero, but you can get a video to the top of YouTube almost straight away, because Google wants to use YouTube to test how people react to content.

Once a video is shown to people, Google looks at engagement based on that person's profile. We're moving away from tracking individual devices with a cookie, which is unreliable anyway (my kids could use the same PC later in the day and confuse things), towards what are called federated cohorts, where people are tagged not individually but in groups. Google wants to understand people better and give them a better experience, because the best experience wins: that's why Google beat everyone else, and it's why Bing never really took off, no offence to anyone using it.

Within videos there are often questions, and if I watch a video and find the answer useful, Google can tag me as having found it useful. If lots of people in a cohort, say 40 year old men or 20 year old women, find a video useful, Google can see how well the answers fit that group's needs. The longer we watch, the more we engage, rewind, bookmark, like, share or comment, the more chance a video has of ending up at the top of Google. Equally, if it doesn't match what people expect and they skip it or choose something else, it gets demoted really quickly. Normal web pages never get treated this way: the top twenty results on Google tend to be stable, trusted sites that have built up links and social signals over time. That stability doesn't apply to YouTube, and that's your opportunity.

How long should a video be to rank well?

The video length that tends to work best at the moment is eight to ten minutes. People's attention spans make it hard to hold someone for that long, but over ten minutes seems to be genuinely hard to sustain, so eight to ten minutes is the sweet spot if you're trying to rank a video specifically, though your average YouTube ad is probably going to be two to four minutes.

Within that video, it helps to include a section of genuine questions and answers, maybe in the middle, where you ask a question and answer it in detail. You could even embed that video on a web page along with its transcript. What really matters, though, is the engagement: if people watch, you'll typically see initial traction near the top of YouTube, then in four to six weeks the video getting promoted to the top of main Google search. That's not months and months and thousands of pounds of traditional SEO, and once you're there it's all organic: Google hasn't put you there for any reason other than finding your video genuinely useful.

What does a real ranking case study look like?

Hi, it's Simon from s.media, and I wanted to show you a technique that's working incredibly well for us on YouTube SEO at the moment. This isn't a secret; it's something every SEO agency out there should be using. Over the last couple of months we've been putting videos together that answer people's questions, so that we can rank those questions in main Google. Many SEO agencies, and a lot of people, don't really know what they're doing here, so this is proof of how we've done it.

If I search YouTube for "YouTube marketing tutorial", a phrase we've been trying to rank for, our video comes up: there's my ugly mug, my business partner Andy, and Vince, who we work with and who deserves a lot of credit for showing me some of these ranking techniques. Inside that video we've added subtitles, a long detailed description, and time codes for questions such as, at 29 minutes 55 seconds, "should I use a specialist YouTube ads agency". That's not a massively searched question, but it's relevant to our business, and this is what Google is picking up on: quality answers to real questions.

Why does this matter to Google? Because the only thing that can ever put Google out of business is answer engines. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Bixby and the rest are all threats, and in five or ten years, when people search by voice instead of typing, Google risks becoming one of five or six options instead of the dominant one. So Google is letting video rank quickly at the top of search because it sees video as the bridge between text-based organic search and voice search, and it's using video to test how you and I engage with content, because the answers to people's questions live inside those videos. If two of us search the same question on main Google we get the same answer, but if we both search it on YouTube we get different videos, because Google is testing how different cohorts react.

The proof: our rankings went up 736 places in the last couple of months since we started making these videos. If I search "should I use a specialist YouTube ads agency", that's s.media as the featured snippet, and the video answering it, posted only a month earlier, now dominates out of 4.7 million results. We are number one within a month. I'm not saying we rank for every question we put up, but we're building a knowledge base of questions around the topic we want to be seen as experts in, and I'd suggest every business does the same, because within those questions you build trust and engagement, and your prospective client arrives already knowing you have the answer.

Using our ranking tool, agency analytics, you can see we've built up a list of these questions coming to the top of search, which supports our main search terms like "YouTube ad agency". We currently rank eighth for that, down one from yesterday, but fluctuation before a climb is typical. We also rank for terms like "YouTube ad specialist", "how much is it for an ad on YouTube", "back linking YouTube SEO" and "video ad cost", all questions people are actually asking on YouTube. If I search "how do I install a patio door" as another example, there's a video answer straight at the top, which shows this isn't unique to us. On our own search terms we hold the top three positions within a month: our page, our YouTube marketing tutorial video, and our expert YouTube advertising agency listing.

What results has this actually produced?

In terms of channel numbers, we've had 3,720 subscribers in total, 32,000 views in the last 48 hours, and nearly 200,000 views in the last month, though we do support this with some advertising too. We've had 13 and a half thousand watch time hours in total and gained 400 subscribers, having pretty much flatlined at the start of March before these videos started ranking. We went from an average of three or four thousand views a day to peaking at twenty thousand views a day.

Looking at one specific video published at the start of March 2021, it had a small blip of traction in its first fortnight, flatlined for a couple of weeks, and then took off once YouTube search picked it up and it moved through to main Google. That video ended up with 75,000 views, nearly ten thousand watch time hours, an average view duration of seven and a half minutes, and 127,000 impressions. Its impressions to click-through rate is two percent, which is really good, and click-through rate is one of the key indicators of how people are engaging with your content. If you take one thing away from this, it's that engagement rate is the key: you don't want your video shown to the wrong people, you want it found by the perfect audience, so that when they watch and find their answer, Google and YouTube promote it for you.

Overall, this is probably the number one SEO technique anyone should be talking about right now: build videos around genuine questions, write proper descriptions and time codes, and let engagement do the rest.