Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is ranking on YouTube is different than ranking on Google, and I specifically mean ranking your videos. So ranking on YouTube is very different than having your videos rank on Google.
The reason why I want to have this conversation today, we actually had to investigate this for one of our projects for one of our clients, they were finding that their videos are ranking really well on YouTube, but for some reason, their videos are not showing up on Google. So it's really fresh on my team's mind, and so we thought to film a quick video about it, but before we begin this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea, so I want to introduce the tea we have today, and we have a very special guest, Mei leaf. Mei leaf is one of, okay not one of, it is my favorite tea brand in the world.
They have helped educate me on a lot of my tea, and this is one of the teas that I have purchased from their collection. It's the Imperial green tea of 2019, and so this is a green tea I like to take out every so often. I'm not much of a green tea drinker anymore, but whenever I'm wanting something a little bit more, not so hot and a little bit more soothing, I drink this green tea, quite a bit, and this one's kind of nice, it's a little bit sweeter. It has this calming sweeter kind of taste to it. But if you want some really bomb tasting notes, you should go check out Mei leaf and they have an exponentially better video telling you about the tastes and everything, but let's go ahead and jump on in.
So ranking on YouTube and Google is different. So the first thing's first, I think ranking on YouTube is a much more well known kind of field of marketing than ranking your videos on Google is. So the thing is, a lot of people with YouTube, YouTube has been around for a while, and a lot of people have engaged in YouTube SEO, they know how to rank their videos and a lot of the ranking factors for YouTube tend to be engagement factors. So how many subscribers, how many likes, how many comments are on the video, and that's why you see so many videos, including my own, asking viewers, please like and subscribe to our videos and that way they can drive up their engagements, and then also they can go ahead and improve their rankings.
So with YouTube SEO, it is a lot driven by the popularity of the video, the engagement of the video in addition to, oh I guess and all those engagement factors, and then of course there is the title of the video, the description, does it match what someone's typing into YouTube and then another factor for YouTube and Brian Dean's kind of the one that made this more well known in the SEO industry, YouTube is a little bit more nuanced where it's not always a search engine style that you're trying to rank for.
For example, on Google, your whole strategy is to try and have your site show up in a Google search. But with YouTube SEO, there's also the recommended videos on the right side panel when you're watching videos, or if you're watching on mobile, it's on the bottom, where optimizing for those is just as good, because a lot of users find videos that way through the suggested videos, not the ones they're always searching for. So YouTube is its own beast in SEO, and I would tell a lot of people, it is very different from SEO, and so YouTube SEO is kind of in that [inaudible 00:03:17] Now, if you've engaged in video and you've went into YouTube and you find that you're doing okay on YouTube, then when you go onto Google, you feel like your videos are never showing up.
Right, so that's kind of where we start pivoting to our next conversation, ranking your videos on Google, and so I specifically mean is not Google videos, I'm specifically talking about, if you do a Google search in the normal Google search bar, and when you get the search results, sometimes you'll see video carousels come up and that's when they have the three videos and you can click to the right, and it'll kind of have three more and then three more, that's the video carousel.
A lot of studies, and I want to give credit to Stone Temple, who I believe they're now called proficient with Eric Enge or however you say his name, who had a study come out about tracking YouTube rankings versus Google video rankings, and they found that they were very different.
Videos that ranked number one on YouTube, tend to not even be visible with videos on Google, so therefore, it has already been well known the last handful of years that it's been very different. Now, what we have found in studies is that all the YouTube engagement factors that help you rank on YouTube, don't seem to translate over to Google. So saying the likes, subscribers, freshness of the video, number of subscribers. When we've analyzed that, and I've looked at different studies, including [inaudible 00:04:41] and like the ones that are from Stone Temple I just mentioned, and in addition to my own team's observations, we have found that those YouTube engagement factors don't seem to have any influence on the videos that are ranking on Google. So even such that the videos that have high likes, high comments, high subscriber counts, they can still be beat out by a video orders of magnitude lower in terms of YouTube engagement.
So what we have found, and our assumption right now, and again, I want to put a disclaimer, ranking videos on Google is still such a nascent field that there's very little known about it, but I want to talk about the observations that we've seen, and if you've seen something different or you know of something that we might be incorrect, please let us know.
But what we have found is that ranking videos on Google takes a more traditional SEO route. Now, what I mean by that is, when we analyze the videos, we found that the two things that really influenced the rankings is, number one is intent. It seems like, and we have other videos about intent on our channel, but that's a more traditional Google search, but when we talk about video, what we have found is that for every Google search, when the videos come out, there's always about nine or 10 that come out and of those nine or 10, there are different intents that come up.
So for example, you might have of the 10 videos, three of them are best of videos, two are how to, two more are purely entertainment, and then two more might be what is that thing that you're looking up, right? And so what we have found is the best way that we think that we can rank for these, is to identify the intent. So do you have a best of video, do you have a how to video, do you have a what is video, if you have a corresponding video to the matched intent of a video that's already ranking in that slot, then you've done the step well, you've matched intent.
Now, second thing is you need to then analyze the traditional SEO, how many links and referring domains are being driven to that video. What we have found in our studies is that the videos that are ranking on the carousel tend to have more referring domains and backlinks pointing to them, whereas the videos that are not, don't have any, and so the reason why this is kind of interesting is that a lot of link building and building referring domains has always been to your website.
So a lot of people have ignored their YouTube videos because YouTube videos are often embedded on your site. But actually what we're seeing is that there actually might be value to driving links and referring domains to the YouTube URL itself, to help show that it's more powerful, it's more endorsable, and therefore the video can then be on the carousel. So right now these are just nascent observations, but this is a test that we're running, and this is something that we've just seen, and my team is going to start testing these things to identify matching intent, trying to rank the videos on Google. If you're watching this and you have seen something different or you have other findings, please let us know.
But all in all, just understand, ranking your videos on YouTube and Google are completely different, and even traditional SEO to videos on Google and then YouTube SEO seemed to be three pretty different styles of SEO, and it's just important to understand what you're getting into with each different [inaudible 00:07:43].
But I'm going a little bit long on this video, but I think that the conversation warrants it. But I want to go ahead and cut it short. Now, if you have any questions or again, [inaudible 00:07:52] please let us know. If you guys liked what you saw today, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour out my first tea of the day and hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.