5 Reasons Your Business Should Be Making YouTube Videos

We all know Google is the biggest search engine in the world. But what’s the second biggest? If you said Bing, you might be wrong. Everyone’s favorite video site, YouTube, could actually get more searches—which means that ranking your content on YouTube is both vital, and challenging. That’s the perspective behind an insanely helpful new article by Tony Edward, all about how to rank your videos on YouTube.

Why YouTube Ranking Matters

If you’re already doing well in the regular Google results—or at least moving up the chain—does it really matter whether you have video content, and how discoverable it is on YouTube? We strongly believe the answer is yes. Here are a few of the reasons why:

1. YouTube is a massive traffic driver. A good YouTube strategy doesn’t just build a strong channel on YouTube itself. It also sends traffic to your site in droves. This includes people who may never have run a regular search at all—their first and only search was for videos. That’s traffic your regular SEO strategy literally cannot get you.
2. Your videos directly contribute to regular SEO. Focusing on video content or SEO is not an either/or. Links from videos on YouTube are trusted, quality backlinks. And a successful video will also lead to more links from individual viewers.
3. Videos rank well in regular searches. If there’s a video relevant to a search query, Google wants to show it. Video results with a rich snippet (a tiny visual of your video) get lots of clicks. And as Tony points out, almost all video snippets in Google results come from Youtube (92 percent compared to 2 percent for the next closest competitor). That means a single YouTube video can easily outrank your competitor’s main website, while driving more clicks.
4. Video content is more engaging. There are people out there who would rather read text than watch a video (I’m one of them). But we’re the minority. Video content is more engaging to the typical user. It gets their attention more (visual) and holds it longer (it’s more like TV or a good conversation). Using this medium means getting customers you’d miss otherwise, and connecting more with existing customers.
5. YouTube is social. You would never dream of killing your company’s Facebook account, right? Facebook simply has too many people, who are all constantly sharing and liking and generating buzz. But YouTube works exactly the same way. While not all viewers interact with videos by “liking” or sharing them, many do. And YouTube videos are sticky and frequently get shared across other social media. Arguably, YouTube is a more important social channel than other contenders like Twitter or Pinterest.

First Steps

Okay, so YouTube matters. But how do you get your videos to be successful? Tony has tips for that too, and I’ll dive into those as well as some of our own in the next feature. Meanwhile, if you want to see how a single video can boost your SEO immediately, check out our complete video SEO guide.