YouTube Helps My Google Ranking!

More and more small businesses are seeing the value in creating YouTube videos to promote their products and services.  The videos work well because they show consumer how your products work or how good your services are.  They may also be video testimonials from customers recommending your business.  These videos don’t have to be professionally produced to be effective.  In fact, they may be more convincing and persuasive if they are not too polished.  So YouTube videos can be a very effective marketing tool, but how can they help your Google or search engine rankings?  In other words, how can YouTube videos on your website help your business rank well in search results for the keyword phrases prospective customers would use?

Search results for “Dennys Wharton TX”

1. YouTube Gives Your Business A Reserved Spot High in Search Results.  What do I mean by this?  Google often provides search results in segments — pictures, videos, and websites.  It might be difficult for your website alone to appear at the top of website search results, but if your business videos are tagged with your best keywords, the videos will appear high in the search results rankings in the video spot.  There’s much less competition for top spots in video search results than in website search results.  However, people will click on your videos, and if they like what they see, they’ll follow that path back to your website.  A new Denny’s restaurant recently opened in Wharton, TX, and I wrote an article about the ribbon-cutting for my blog, Wharton Texas Proud.  If someone searches for “Dennys Wharton TX”, my blog post appears on the first page of results, but the video of the ribbon-cutting appears above the listing for my blog post.  That’s because the video is titled and tagged for “Denny’s Wharton TX” and Google displays videos high in the search results listings for this keyword phrase.  See the screenshot of the search results listing above.
2. YouTube Videos Keep Site Visitors on Your Web Pages Longer.  When people visit your website and they see a video, they’ll often watch it.  If your video is a couple of minutes long, they’ll spend a couple of minutes watching the video.  That keeps them on your web page for a couple of minutes.  Google and the other search engines track the amount of time people spend on your web page and your website gets “points” when visitors spend a few minutes on your pages.  More videos on your website and more people spending more time on your site will result in higher website rankings from Google and the other search engines.
3. YouTube Videos Are Easy to Label with Keywords.  Many times when I’m working to help a website rank better in search results, it involves creating new page text and working relevant keyword phrases into that page text.  This work has to be done — you have to have substantial, relevant text on your web pages.  Doing the same work with videos is so much easier because the writing consists of preparing a short title and description of the videos and then adding video keyword tags.  Yet it’s surprising that most YouTube videos are not tagged and titled with good keyword phrases.  Take the time to do this right to get the most out of the time and effort spent getting the videos in the first place.  If you’ve already created some YouTube videos and you didn’t tag them with your relevant keywords, it’s very easy to go back in your YouTube account and update the tags.  Do it — it’s worth it!

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• Great Content is the Foundation of SEO – Search Engine Optimization – Wharton TX (houstontexasseo.com)
• Don’t Focus on Google Rankings! (houstontexasseo.com)
• YouTube as a search engine (marketing.yell.com)