🏆 Welcome to our How To Rank Youtube Videos On Google Video!
What is video SEO? Video SEO is the process of getting more video views from Google and utilizing videos to increase organic traffic to your website.
In this video, we’ll focus mainly on the first part: getting more views from Google.
Getting YouTube videos indexed and ranking in Google search is, essentially, extremely straightforward. There are two steps you need to take. Step 1 is uploading your videos to YouTube and step 2 is setting the visibility to public. And… that’s it! Just by having your videos uploaded on YouTube and publicly available, they’ll be eligible to rank in Google search. However, getting those videos ranking well for relevant queries is a bigger challenge. That’s what we’ll delve into in this video!
Pointing to YouTube vs pointing to your website The most important question before you begin optimizing your videos is this: would you rather send users to your video on YouTube.com, or the embedded version of the video on your website?
There is no hard and fast rule for the right approach here. It all depends how much you care about building an audience on YouTube, vs driving traffic to your website.
Is your preference is to drive traffic to your video on YouTube? Then all your optimization will take place within the YouTube platform infrastructure. If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, then you’ll need to additionally implement video SEO on your website.
Luckily, this can be scaled and automated using the Yoast Video SEO plugin! So check this out to start with if you haven’t already.
Note that Google will automatically determine whether to rank the version of the video on your website vs the version on YouTube based on which it deems to be the most algorithmically authoritative. So there’s no guarantee that your website will rank above YouTube, even if this is your preference.
The precise factors which determine which version of the video will rank (YouTube vs embedded) are unknown. What we do know is they are tied to a huge amount of machine learning. There is some correlation with links to the page, click-through-rate on the search results page, domain strength, YouTube channel strength (i.e. number & quality of views and subscribers).
It does not appear, however, that the location of the video views has a particular bearing upon which version of the video ranks. The YouTube and Google algorithms are likely sufficiently distinct so as not to take this data into account.
In general, Google tends to use video results for these types of keywords:
How-to keywords (“how to make cold brew coffee”) Reviews (“beats by Dre review”) Tutorials (“Setting up WordPress”) Anything fitness or sports related (“Cardio kickboxing”) Funny videos (“Cute animals”) Why is this important?
Well, let’s say you optimize your video around a keyword that doesn’t have any video results in Google. In that case, you’ll ONLY get traffic from people searching on YouTube.
But if you optimize for a video keyword, you’ll also get targeted traffic to your video directly from Google’s first page.
