YouTube SEO Questions and Answers | Open Session with Simon Young

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is the next big thing in SEO, and a lot of the guys out there see it that way. At the moment you have got traditional PPC or text based search, so everybody is typing in words and then clicking on ads or on organic. Then you have got video, and then you have got voice. Where Google and Bing and all the other search engines want to go is voice. You have got Apple with Siri, you have got Cortana, Bing, Alexa, all of these.

The problem with voice search is that we are not there yet. If you ask a question to Cortana or Google Home, it may well just say I do not know.

The big thing that we are all trying to get to with video is video SEO, ranking videos on the front of Google. Google absolutely wants as much video as it can get at the moment in terms of fresh video, and moreover videos that answer questions.

How do you add SEO to YouTube?

It goes back to simple things like keywords: the words that are in the title and the description. There are loads of tools out there, but the simplest way goes back to that. I have been in SEO since day dot, and that would be seen as old school. What you are trying to do is get the keywords optimised, because a lot of people are not doing this yet. Loads of people are not doing it.

There are loads of tools out there that purport to do it and they will give you an idea, but most of those tools actually go and scrape the videos that are already on YouTube and already ranking. That gives you a false impression, because it is saying to you use this description, use this title, whereas those videos are there for different reasons. They are there mainly for engagement. It might be the number of views or the number of subscribers. It is typically a bit to do with the title and the description, but it is more to do with how the audience is engaging with that video.

We want people to watch all the way through. I talked in the last question about Google wanting to get to voice, and what they are trying to do is use video to bridge that gap. If you or I are watching a video that answers a question, and it is answering the question the way I want it to as a viewer, and I am watching and engaging and going all the way through that piece of content, Google is getting a signal that I am getting the answer I want. That will obviously promote videos up into search and suggested content, and that is what gets them to stick.

Are the tools that scrape rankings worth using?

To a level, but they are really there just to sell you a tool, and they are not doing the donkey work of a proper job on SEO. There are loads of tools that will do it.

We are in an industry, and in a world, where there are loads and loads of people taking advantage of the fact that people want to get into YouTube SEO. So somebody puts up a tool that says I can rank you within 24 hours at the top of YouTube, here is how it works, here is our tool. What it is doing is looking at how other people are doing it and making suggestions to you about titles and descriptions and everything.

Yes, if you take a long tail keyword that is not really optimised, it is a bit like old school SEO. If I was to try and rank our business for YouTube ads providers in Doncaster, you have got a good chance of coming up for that. But if we want to rank for YouTube ads, you are up against a massive number of people.

Is YouTube good for SEO?

I am not just going to say of course. I am going to say that I actually foresee YouTube SEO being the end of traditional SEO.

I am passionate about this. There is a massive number of agencies in the SEO space, and I think there is something like 80 billion a year spent on SEO. A lot of that money that gets spent by businesses results in nothing. They get promised the earth. You will be number one for this term, we will rank you for that term. Those terms do not fundamentally drive any return on investment for a business.

It takes a lot of work as well. It can take months and months and months of work to get to the top of Google, and that is how the agencies will sell it to you. It is a long old road, we will get there eventually, it is not our fault, Google has changed the algorithm. It is a lot of ongoing work.

The point of what we are trying to say here is that Google wants video. They made a statement, I think it was back in 2016, that they wanted the entirety of Google to be video. That still holds true. They want video at the top of search.

If you start searching for questions in particular, like how to do this and how to do that, try searching how to install a patio door, for example. I know that is a particular search term that will bring up a video as an answer to a question. But general questions are not coming up as a rule. When we are talking about going from traditional search to voice, the only way to get in there is with video, because they can measure how long people are watching the answers.

Is video SEO better than traditional SEO?

It will wipe out traditional SEO absolutely over the next couple of years, if not before. It will be the smart companies that jump on it now and use it as a tactic to build content around the questions, the emotional hooks and the problems that people have got.

That is where, if you come up as the suggested piece of content, you get the enquiries and you get the new customers. That is just because Google wants this content in video form rather than text. They do not want blogs and they do not want you going and building links any more. People are going there because they want an answer to a problem or a solution to it, and you want the quick answer and the right answer.

Why is YouTube SEO important?

Because it is the future, and because you can come to the top very, very quickly, in 24 hours or 48 hours. That is the thing we have not talked about in the previous answer. Because Google wants video so much, it ranks the videos quickly so that it can measure the engagement. It wants to see whether this is a good piece of content.

This is what does not happen with normal text based search. I could not spin up a website today, put a few blogs together and rank for a competitive term. If Google did that, people would be clicking on a popular term, let us say best barbecues. I am now ranking for best barbecues, people are clicking on it, Google is testing that piece of content, and my page is rubbish. That would give Google a bad name. Why is Google ranking this rubbish?

Whereas we are in a world now where Google wants to serve up video and test it, because it is not the flagship product. The flagship product is still traditional text based search with all the ads all over it. YouTube knows we do not want to read. We want to watch. A picture tells a thousand words, so what does a video do?

So they will serve these videos up quickly, and the most important thing is the engagement rate. You could make a video out of some slides or some stock footage you have got off Shutterstock, put it together, and it will probably rank for a bit if you do the job right. But it will fall down the rankings really quickly because the quality of the content is not engaging enough.

Providing the answers are engaging, people want to carry on watching, it is on the right topic, and you have coded it properly with the tags and the descriptions, then YouTube SEO is massively important for brands.

I actually see it as the route to wiping out all the rubbish. The people who scammed the search engines and did all the black hat stuff are creating loads and loads of content, but they are not the authority players within their market. Their stuff can come to the top at the moment in traditional search. That will not happen with video.

It would also flush out content for content's sake, the content mountains. There is so much content that is done for the sake of content and does not mean anything to anybody. This will flush that out in some ways, because only the good stuff is going to stick. That is good for creativity, good for the customers, good for everybody. It improves the whole search engine experience and the whole brand experience.

How do you index your YouTube channel for SEO?

Start with the tools inside YouTube itself. Google owns YouTube, it is no secret, and it will become their flagship product.

Once you have got a thousand subscribers you have got a community tab, and that is indexed so quickly. It is like Google's version of Snapchat or Twitter, but hardly anybody is using it. If you start posting into your community tab, you can take advantage of that.

The other way is to share the videos on your website, on your landing page, as embedded iframes on the page itself. And obviously share your videos on all of your other social media channels.

There is no hidden agenda here. We are a YouTube ads agency, we sit here talking about YouTube ads and the power of that, and the easiest way to get videos indexed is obviously to promote them and then let people come to the channel, gain subscribers, momentum, engagement, all that good stuff.