Is YouTube SEO Dead in 2021?
– [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).
