YouTube SEO for Beginners: Would Google Love Video Content in 2023?

Are you interested in a guide to YouTube SEO for beginners?

There’s no question that video content is powerful. Whether you’re hiring one of the best animation companies or you’re doing live action, if you don’t include video content in your overall marketing strategy, you are missing enormous opportunities. 

That also leaves some people wondering whether Google actually prefers video content, in which case, the video shouldn’t just be part of your larger marketing strategy but also, more specifically, your SEO strategy. 

YouTube SEO for beginners is a topic we discuss below. 

YouTube SEO for Beginners

The Role of YouTube

Google owns YouTube, and Google will, according to some speculation, push YouTube results ahead of others in results. The Wall Street Journal did its own research and found that YouTube winds up being the first result in the Google Search engine video carousel more often than not. 

This doesn’t necessarily mean video is altogether more important to Google in search engines, but rather it does appear to show that video content on YouTube is prioritized.

While it may appear that Google is pushing YouTube videos upward, there’s not necessarily any way to confirm that. What can be confirmed is that video is an important part of a complete SEO strategy. 

First of all, any marketer should upload their videos to YouTube to make sure they have the best chance of getting them seen. Even if you’re uploading a video on Facebook, for example, you should also upload it to YouTube, and the same goes for any other place you’re putting your videos. 

Unless your video is on YouTube, there’s a strong chance that it’s going to underperform on a Google search. 

The fact that Google may or may not be prioritizing YouTube videos is just one part of the puzzle as far as search engines, SEO, and video and how they intersect with one another. 

There is evidence that generally, even outside of YouTube, the Google algorithm likes multimedia and favors it. 

User Experience

One reason video is such an important part of marketing is that they improve the user experience. For years, marketers tended to worry they would negatively impact user experience, but the reality is that they attract traffic along with engaging users for longer periods of time on a web page, and they boost rankings and SEO as a result. 

According to one study, users spend, on average, 88% more time on a page when it has video content. 

Web pages that have at least one video are a whopping 45 times more likely to rank on the search results page, and compared to a text-based call-to-action, more than 95% of people say they could recall the CTA in a video. 

Videos give viewers the unique opportunity to feel like they’re in control over their consumption of content. They’re easy to use, and they can decide what they want to watch, when, and how much of the video content to watch, which, again, is a boost to user experience. 

Google, in fact, prioritizes content that prioritizes audience engagement. 

Let’s learn more about YouTube SEO for beginners.

The Backlink Factor

According to Moz, if a webpage has a video, it gets around 300% more inbound links. If you have high-quality inbound links, it positions you as an authority. These pages are shared more often, and they receive more traffic. When you have more creditability and authority, it’s going to help your rankings.

Backlinks and how authoritative your site is, are considered among the most important ranking factors. 

Using Video to Drive Traffic from Other Social Channels

YouTube has millions of users every day, and it’s the second-most popular search engine behind only Google. If you have a strong video content strategy, you can harness your views on YouTube and turn them into visitors to your site. 

If you want to stand out on YouTube among the millions of other videos, you do want to make sure you’re optimizing your content here, just like you do on your site. For example, focus on the keywords you use in your title and description. You should also include a call-to-action directing people back to your site. 

Tips for Leveraging Video Content for SEO

Some best practices for using video content as part of your SEO strategy include:

• Again, make sure that you’re adding videos onto your website, as well as posting them on YouTube and other social sites. You want to ensure when you’re adding videos to your content that they’re relevant to the rest of the page. Your videos need to have content that people can’t find anywhere else, and they need to be professional and well done. 
• Just like you optimize your videos for YouTube searches on that platform, optimize them on your web pages as well. For example, add a descriptive title and a description of your video, and you can also add timestamps that will help people navigate it. You can add a bit of copy that highlights the core elements of your video. 
• Transcripts and closed captions are good features to add to videos. Around 83% of consumers say they watch videos on mute, and 80% of people are more likely to watch a video completely if it has captions. Closed captions are valuable, but a video transcription can also help your SEO rankings. Google crawlers will scan for keywords, ranking your page based on them. This also helps you with voice search traffic. 
• Design engaging thumbnails for all of your videos that will grab attention right off the bat. 
• Make sure that you aren’t competing against yourself. You should avoid adding videos that are the same to more than one webpage or uploading multiple videos to the same page. You should also embed the video you want to rank first at the top of your page, too, because search engines might not index more than one video if you do have multiple on a page. 

Now is absolutely the time to dive into video marketing if you haven’t already. Online videos in 2022 account for around 82% of all internet traffic, and you want to win some of that. 

YouTube SEO for Beginners: Frequently Asked Questions

How do you do SEO on YouTube?

Use a keyword tool like TubeBuddy or Ahrefs. Find a keyword your video can rank for. Make a video around that topic. Include an engaging cover.

Which SEO tool is best for YouTube?

I found success with TubeBuddy and Ahrefs. VidIQ also has a strong reputation as a YouTube SEO tool.

Wrapping Up: YouTube SEO for Beginners

In closing, this article provided an action plan you can implement when boosting the SEO of your YouTube videos.

Readers, please share these strategies so video marketers can boost their YouTube SEO in 2023.

I look forward to your views in the comments section. Do you have more ideas we can add to a guide on YouTube SEO for beginners not already included in this article?

This post was contributed and made possible by the support of our readers.