So What? Revisiting Video SEO tactics

So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live

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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on Video SEO tactics. We walk through how generative AI has changed video SEO, the top video SEO tips and where video SEO should factor into your 2024 plan. Catch the replay here:

In this episode you’ll learn:

How generative AI has changed video SEO
Top video SEO tips
Where video SEO should factor into your 2024 plan

Upcoming Episodes:

Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/

AI-Generated Transcript:

Katie Robbert 0:40
Well, hey everyone, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show I’m Katie joined by Chris and John, how’s it going are

John Wall 0:50
fantastic.

Katie Robbert 0:52
I don’t know if you were really confident about that job come across. This week we’re talking about revisiting Video SEO tactics. So this came about because one of our clients recently asked us about their YouTube channel and what they could be doing for Video SEO. So naturally, we started to share some of our resources and realize that we haven’t talked about video SEO in about two years, and quite a lot has changed, both with video and with SEO. And then when you bring them together like Voltron, you have video SEO.

John Wall 1:31
Ready to go.

Katie Robbert 1:33
So we want to talk about how generative AI has changed Video SEO, some top video SEO tips and where video SEO should factor into your 2024 plan. Because we know that not enough companies think about video as part of their marketing strategy. So, Chris, where would you like to start today?

Christopher Penn 1:56
Okay, let’s talk first about video platforms. So if well, actually, let’s rewind. Let’s start with the five P’s and purpose. Sure, Video SEO is contingent upon video. Right? So what is the purpose of video? For a lot of companies, the main purpose of video is building brand. Right there, a lot of folks will say, Oh, it’s lead gen or it’s clicks and traffic to the website, but video in the way most people use it is typically about brand. So it’s building your brand by creating brand reinforcement. And sometimes, pe will use it for traffic generation. So a lot of how to videos, and we’ll talk about the strategy when we get to the process part. But that’s the main purpose. So Katie, as the CEO, and John, you can answer this as the as the chief creator of marketing over coffee, what is your purpose? What is your user story for the video you guys create?

Katie Robbert 2:54
So the user story, to step back for a second, a user story is a simple sentence composed of three parts as a persona, I want to so that persona, being who you are your audience, the want to be in your action, and the so that being your intention, and that maps to the five Ps. So as the CEO, I want to create video so that I can drive awareness for what Trust Insights does. You know, to expand upon that, I think that it’s depending on who you ask, it’s more challenging to demonstrate what we do, because analysis sometimes feels like a black box. And that’s a lot of what we do. So how do we creatively demonstrate what it is that we do so that people understand Oh, okay, now I get it. Now I can hire Trust Insights. And so I feel like the video content needs to drive awareness to Trust Insights through a variety of different types of videos, through speaking through proof of concepts through, you know, live streams like this, it needs to, you know, give a well rounded perspective so that people understand what the company does.

John Wall 4:10
Yeah, it’s interesting. I have kind of two fronts. I mean, one is, you know, creating content talking about marketing tactics. So as a producer, I want to keep track of which video channels are actually improving, because that we have two major buckets, right? It’s like, what’s happening on YouTube takes most of the oxygen out of the room. But still, what’s going on with YouTube shorts and Tiktok. And other places where you can put video is something that we have to stay in front of. And then yeah, for marketing over coffee, it’s, you know, yeah, I guess we would have to consider it branding too, because it doesn’t get the same kind of take at all that the audio does, you know, I mean, being able to location and time shift on audio is where the traffic is, and I have not found any other B2B podcasts that like do really well on video. You know, you get a lot of the Joe Rogan’s and you know, the bigger cast with celebrities that people want to see the video and see the stars, but yeah, people are not too not as much interest in sitting down for an hour and watching a video about email tactics or something like that.

Christopher Penn 5:12
Got it? Okay, I think those are good. I mean, I know certainly for my own YouTube channel as an independent Creator as well. My goal is really all about awareness wants you to follow watch the videos, because we do a lot of cross promotion. This live stream is on my YouTube channel, as well as the Trust Insights you shaman, I want to make sure that people were following me on my channel, also see Trust Insights content, right, the goal is to promote the company what we do. So that’s that is the purpose. Here’s the challenge for a lot of companies and brands and stuff when it comes to the people side of things video in the last three years is, because the last time we did a video SEO show, I believe is 2020. The bar is much higher. For quality video, now the bar is much, much higher, partly because of technology. For example, I’m shooting this on the new iPhone 15, which has a phenomenal camera, it is almost cinematic quality, you know, for true productions, you’re still going to use it but at a minimum, a DSLR. Probably, you might use a RED camera or something like that. But for the average creator, you can you can use this technology, but the output is much more polished. And so there’s three different skill sets now for YouTube and Tiktok. And Instagram, there’s the creator, the creative skills, there’s the editing side of things, which is making turning the raw footage and cleaning it up. And then there is the promotion. And these three things are different. We’re talking video SEO, all three parts have to be involved. So you need to have that almost a purpose statement and maybe even a user story, or video, to say the purpose of this video is an audience to attract an audience was interested in generative AI purposes, videos to attract people who are interested in video SEO. And as an independent creator, I will say that takes a lot of time, they don’t really want to spend preparatory work.

Katie Robbert 7:11
But I do feel like that it’s you know, if you if creation, content creation, video creation is a large part of your brand, you should be taking the time to make sure that you are doing things intentionally. And not just oh, I saw this trend on Tiktok. Let me do one. Well, does that fit with your brand? Does it make sense? Is it going to drive? You know, am I going to pick up John and swing him around in a circle to a Taylor Swift song? Probably not. I mean, I could. But I don’t know what that would do for our brand. Other than, you know, we hop into the conversation because it’s something that was trending. And so I think at the very least, every video should have a user story. So maybe not going through all of the five fees in depth. But a user story does cover all of the five P’s. So a persona is your people want to is your process and your platform. So that is your purpose and your performance. And so for every video, you should at least have an idea of why you’re creating it. And so you know, as a creator, I want to develop a video series about generative AI so that my audience can get a better understanding, I would say then you also just want to make sure that you’re creating one from the perspective of your audience. As a subscriber of Chris’s YouTube channel, I want to find content around how generative AI works, so that I can either do it myself, or hire Chris to do the thing for me. And so making sure that you have those intentions in mind when creating the content will help you create content. That’s purposeful.

Christopher Penn 8:56
Exactly. And so here’s a set of processes to think through. As you’re going to create that video, you start with the user story, then you go into the keyword tool of your choice, SEMrush H refs, baz, you name it, whatever doesn’t matter. Almost all them will have a video section or a YouTube section, you can take your existing keyword list if you’ve already got one. If you don’t have one, tick the topics that you’d want to maybe do video about, stick them in and see what are the top ranking terms for, in this case, YouTube. And then look at the results. So for example, one of the top terms right now in general AI for YouTube, unsurprisingly is ChatGPT. So the question then becomes, okay, well, how do we then figure out what the content we’re going to create around ChatGPT should be so that we can we can create videos that have a unique take, but at the same time, are are likely to do well? And this system I recommend for this is a little messy. But let me go ahead and just talk through the process, you’re going to take your keyword list, take your top ranking term, and you’ll go to YouTube or Instagram or Tiktok, or whatever. Ideally, though, if it’s if it’s YouTube, this will work really well. You’ll go into your list, you’re going to filter for stuff, usually within the last year or so you probably don’t want to use stuff that’s much older that because it’s just not been great. And then you’re going to want to look, take a look at the top performing videos by views how many people have gotten good views on the videos, and we’re looking for a couple things. One, this is a really good example, if you screw the chair back. Can you tell what the video is about Justin the thumbnail? Right, some of these, there’s some really good obvious thumbnails like the text is really easy to see some of these not less. So the second thing you’re going to want to do. And this is where you’re going to want to use some some generative AI, if you have access to it, you will want to take these videos and grab the transcripts. There’s closed captions files, and YouTube has closed caption files, you can download those or you can use the transcription AI tool of your choice and export all the transcripts for the top performing videos. And then, using a tool like ChatGPT or Claude, you can say, what are the top 10 topics or ideas from these top performing videos, that’s going to give you so you have keyword, you have video transcripts. And now you have concepts from which you can start building out an editorial calendar for your videos that are gonna that’s going to perform well, because you’re using what is already known to perform well. and turning it into to next steps to train that to that video content. So that’s from the Creator side. Because remember, we’re create, edit, promote are the three steps, you’ve got to have that concept. From there, you’ll want to have well what is what’s our thumbnail gonna look like? Right? One of the things to look at is, how easy is it to even see what your videos are about. So if I go to the Trust Insights, YouTube channel, and we just take a look here, you can see there’s a bunch of videos. It’s off just from a thumbnail that size. Well, yeah, that you might want to

Katie Robbert 12:35
that’s much smaller than the example you were giving before.

Christopher Penn 12:37
Exactly. So if we go back to regular YouTube, let’s go to youtube.com. And let’s look up Trust Insights. As an example. These are pretty easy to read, right, you can tell what that video is going to be about you we might want to think about even bigger text, even even just like obnoxiously large. So here’s an example this is popping up because all of our feeds are connected. The template I use for some of my videos has even bigger letters so that in a thumbnail particularly on a mobile device, the thumbnail is easy to read and and it makes it appealing people go okay, if I want the answer to you know Keasbey B2B influencer marketing success, I’m going to tap on that video I want to make it as stupid easy as possible. So we have keyword, we have top performing videos, brand scripts, topics, now two thumbnails and the creation of the actual video. So this whole process of of building out the content that you want to start creating.

Katie Robbert 13:41
It’s interesting because when you think of the term SEO, so search engine optimization, Historically and traditionally we think of okay, that’s keywords that’s content like text. When we’re talking about video SEO, we’re talking about visuals we’re talking about in terms of search engine optimization in a search engine that is video based, we need to be thinking about more than just a text. And I think that that is probably a big missed opportunity.

Christopher Penn 14:18
It is having even though even the way you shoot video is going to matter visually one of the things that is is each is a trend in media in general and you can see this you compare video from the 90s the 2000s 2010s to now the speed of cut gets faster and faster every decade like you used to have you go back and watch old episodes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer for example. You will have you would have sustained shots by 2530 seconds. Now in a in a modern show the jump cuts to like three to five seconds apart. You The only time really see character sent no longer shots is on like long dialogue expositions, people are used to seeing boom, boom, boom, boom, faster and faster cuts. If you watch some of the top creators on YouTube, their cuts are just as fast because they’re using it to keep videos visually appealing to keep people watching. You watch like Marcus Brownlee, for example, his his jump cuts are super fast, even when the shot itself isn’t changing. One of the things that you’ll see a lot is Katie, you actually referenced this earlier in the week on the Trust Insights podcast, that sort of Max Headroom style cut that is super popular is that is like the popular way of doing video now.

Katie Robbert 15:43
I hate it. I hate it. I’m gonna show my age, I hate it. The other trend that I see is that everything commercials, TV shows are meant to look like they’re being shot from a crappy cell phone. Or a not like so everything is like, jiggly. And like everything is just kind of moving around. And it gets showing my age. It makes me nauseous to watch. And so I find it personally harder to watch Tiktok videos and modern, you know, TV shows, because of the quick cuts because of how jerky the movements are. There’s no more Steadicam everything is like, on a handheld. John back me up here. Which,

John Wall 16:27
yeah, well, that’s, you know, that’s just like the relentless pace of it all. I mean, you know, you cannot go all the way back to say, well, they ruined it at Star Wars, you know, like the first movie when chasing after another, you know, like every movie before that you’ll now see as boring and difficult to sit there. And yeah, it is weird in that, it. It’s painful and difficult to watch. But you don’t realize how you’re being moved forward. And like Chris said, if you go back and look at stuff from five years ago, or 10 years ago, you’re gonna be like, Oh, my God, how can I stand this pace like this is insane. And so much of YouTube is, you know, they know where the drop offs are. So they do have to maintain that relentless march of like every four or five seconds changing it up because they don’t want to lose the traffic, you know, further in the funnel. The other thing that’s crazy, too, is the thumbnail stuff. I’ve had been talking with a group that does a lot of analysis of the top 100 YouTube accounts. And they were saying that some of those have teams that are spending half their time on the thumbnail, like nailing the thumbnail has such huge results for driving traffic in the long run for stuff like we’re doing where it’s branding, and it’s specialized topics. It’s not the same as you know what Mr. Beast is doing when he’s got his you know, 50 videos and is trying to drive certain ones to the top but yeah, it’s so much of it rides on that thumbnail the image of it, it’s it’s just insane.

Christopher Penn 17:46
Yep. thumbnails, different casing letter in within titles. Katie, you’re gonna hate this. I can’t wait. Emoji in video? No, yes.

Katie Robbert 18:02
I am not the right audience for this.

Christopher Penn 18:06
But it’s different in visual appeal. It is all about, you know, like you said, it’s a visual medium. So if you can do anything that visually stands out, particularly in search results in YouTube, you are going to do better. John, something that you said is really, really important. The YouTube algorithm has changed substantially in the last year. So it used to just be views. How many views does the video get, the more views it gets, the more views it gets spread piles on a number of creators. And the last three to four months have said the math seems to be changing to two metrics one impression to view the aka click through rate, the more that you get clicks, the better your your videos seem to do in the rankings. And again, this lot this makes logical sense, right? YouTube can’t show an ad until it gets click right until the video starts playing. And they can do that your pre roll. So if you’re get if you’re not getting that click through if not getting the user to to tap or click, they can’t make as much money. So of course, they’re gonna prioritize that. And the second is watch time completion. How many users make it all the way to the end of the video as a way of saying, Okay, this video got a lot of watch time was promoted more. Again, logical, the more video watch time is the more ads they can throw in. And so those two metrics have really become sort of the the North Stars by which a lot of creators start now prioritize. How do we get people to watch the end of the video? Hey, it’s Jumpcut time. And how do we get people to even click through and start watching? Because again, YouTube wants you glued to their app. They know they are competing with Tiktok. And they’re competing with Instagram reels, and hence why YouTube shorts are such a huge focus. And we’ll talk about that in a second. But those two measures are really important. So from the process perspective, and the performance perspective and the five P’s. Those are the kinds of things that you need to focus a lot on that thumbnail is so important. And that title is so important just to get that tap.

Katie Robbert 20:08
I don’t want to get too far off topic, but I think we should at least acknowledge it. So, you know, YouTube is a search engine. That’s, we’ve talked about that a lot. And YouTube is owned by Google. Google, people had questions about how generative AI generated content would perform on a Google search, do creators need to worry about AI generated content on a YouTube search?

Christopher Penn 20:37
So Google’s position, and I think this is a very interesting position is they don’t care. They care about? Is the content helpful? Does the audience want to engage with it? Can Google show more ads with it? Right? So if an AI generated piece of content, gets more clicks, and views and and helps Google sell more ads, Google will be like, cool, we’ll take that. If it’s crap, and it and it dissuades people from using the app like, oh, I watched his video was terrible, then you get is gonna get deprioritize simply because it’s not helping Google meet its commercial goals. So the short answer is, if it’s good content, Google will like it, regardless of who made it. We’re now you’re starting to see stuff like runway ml can now generate about 18 seconds of video, their Northstar is they want to eventually be able to have a text generated prompt generate a two hour movie. So absolutely, as time goes on, you’re going to see more and more AI generated content I was playing around with Hey, Jen, last week, which is the video avatar service, that I had to do a couple of videos where it has, like rearranges my mouth to have me speak other languages that I put up a video of me speaking Polish up on Instagram. It is good. Like there’s a couple of artifacts, but you otherwise, I sent it to some native polish because they’re like, Okay, yeah, we could tell that you were basically an American who spoke very good polish. That’s AI generated, I loaded a video of me speaking English, I did no other work just loaded the video and it spit back me speaking Polish, you could have it do these other languages and things. It’s AI generated. Now, does Google care? No, it only cares if the content itself is good or not. And this speaks to a very, very important opportunity for Video SEO in 2023, and 2024. With these tools, now, if you’re willing to invest, because it was gonna cost you a couple 100 bucks a month for the size plan, you need your podcast, your video channel, your videos, your YouTube shorts, you could publish in multiple languages, right, you could publish your podcast in Spanish, in Chinese in Polish in Czech. And in doing so with those transcripts, you would then produce right the closed captions files, you could be marketing to audiences that a bunch of the world is ignoring, because they don’t have the capability to market this language. Now, to be clear, your company would then have to go to do business in that language. Right? But at the very least, if you just want eyes on channel, that would be a really compelling way to use generative AI to boost your your YouTube channel results.

Katie Robbert 23:24
What do you think Johnny? You’re gonna start producing marketing over coffee and Sanskrit

John Wall 23:28
in 12. Different? Yeah. As of right now, the sponsors aren’t as interested in skin Sanskrit versions of email programs and things like that. So I think we’re good for now. But, you know, Spanish, or Indian and Mandarin? I mean, yeah, those are all interesting. Opportunities. You know, that is something I would even, you know, the thing to do would be is pull 10 episodes and just throw them and just do those and see what kind of lift that gets, you know, see if it gets any action. Definitely be up for testing it.

Christopher Penn 24:00
Yeah. All the ones you listed Spanish and E and Hindi would be the two languages I would I would suggest. And the reason for that is, obviously there’s a tremendous number of people speak them. Chinese not as much because YouTube is not. YouTube is somewhat restricted in China. So the obviously there are a lot of people outside of China who also speak Chinese. But there’s also a tremendous these very large populations. Now again, you’d want to do research go into your Google Analytics account. See what are the top countries that are getting you’re getting traffic from right now. And then you don’t need to do it for UK. It may be France I Katie is extremely popular in France. We might want to have a French version.

Katie Robbert 24:43
I have zero idea why. But you spoke well. And no, I know. And I still don’t know why. But remind me Can you hook up your YouTube channel to your Search Console or to your Google Analytics,

Christopher Penn 25:01
you can hook it up to Google Analytics, you can get some video search data, but not a ton in Search Console. However, your best bet is just to use the YouTube analytics itself. YouTube analytics is very robust. You can slice and dice your data, 8 million different ways. And you can hook it up to Looker studio and build reports straight from your YouTube channel in there as well.

Katie Robbert 25:21
And I think that, you know, that’s a really good way to approach making some of these decisions, especially about your video, SEO moving into 2024. As we sort of talked about at the top of the show, you want to have an idea of why you’re doing these things. And so, you know, I see a lot of a lot of people, a lot of companies say, Well, I have to start creating videos, I need a YouTube channel with no real semblance of why or what content would go on there. So we have a fairly new client, Chris, and you asked me earlier in the week, when we were doing our planning, will do they have a YouTube channel? And I said, No, not yet. And my wheels started spinning up like, well, what would they even put on there? What makes sense. And so it would be I would assume, a duplication of any reels that they put on Instagram, but they would have to have video. And they tend to have static shots. And so it would have to change their social media strategy, in order to start accommodating platforms like YouTube. And so you know, as a social media manager, I want to start creating video so that I can branch out onto other social platforms that are better for video versus just static images. You know, threads is still a fairly new platform. And it’s still a little wonky in terms of posting images and videos and even, you know, GIFs if you want to include those, like it’s very cumbersome. But it’s something that people should be paying attention to. And so thinking into, like what comes next year? That’s where you start need to start to think about where does video play a part. You had mentioned, you know, YouTube is up against tick tock and Instagram and other video sites. I think that it’s an important thing to mention that when we’re talking about video SEO, we’re not strictly talking about YouTube. It’s all of these different platforms that accommodate video very well.

Christopher Penn 27:24
Exactly. And so there’s two important components here that we need to consider. One is what your video content strategy is YouTube created now almost 10 years ago, and it’s still relevant today. A three part strategy it’s called Hero hub help, aka big medium small. And what this strategy is, is it says once irregularly probably like once a quarter you’re gonna have a big video, some kind of thing you spend a lot of money on, you’re gonna spend promotional money on it. It’s some kind of big why conceptual thought leadership piece. Once a month, you’re gonna have a what video something that is a deep dive, and then you got to put some ad budget behind but not a ton, right? It’s not gonna be a cornerstone of your marketing, but you’ll still do some cross promotion and things of it. And then you’re gonna have your help video. And this is your weekly or even daily video content, where you’re explaining how to write and that’s the way the grist for a lot of the search engine portion of YouTube and another services, how to upload an email list in Hubspot, how to deduplicate things how to use whisper dot cpp to do your transcripts from with generative AI whatever the thing is, and this strategy of big medium small, why what how hero hum help will help you create the stuff now going back at to what you’re saying our friends over at the marketing AI Institute surfaced a tool that I tried out last week and I’m impressed enough with them saying you know, we might have to buy as it’s a tool called Opus Pro, then what you do is you load a long form piece of content into the system. And then it generates the short form content 10 pieces of short form content from it. So I loaded it last week’s podcast in and I said I want I want minute minute pieces are left. And it went through and it started slicing up our podcast and choose it and it would this was really cool. It actually reordered our screen from stream yard into some portraits style videos. And then it does the closed captions right on the the videos themselves. If we wanted to dramatically increase the amount of social media content we posted on YouTube shorts, on Tiktok, on Instagram, etc. This is the way to do it because it will produce all 10 clips for us. We obviously couldn’t inspect them and say like no, this was a stupid edit. But then once that’s available, download them load them into your content management system. And now if we think about the three part framework, we’re starting to create, edit, promote, it’s done a lot of the edit and gotten the materials ready for promote for us using GIMP don’t have AI.

Katie Robbert 30:01
That is a super unflattering clip right there.

Christopher Penn 30:05
These just the previews? Well, I

Katie Robbert 30:07
know but like, but those previews are what people see first. And that’s something that goes back to making sure you have the right thumbnail. Like if I see two people, like, if you go back to that, as much as I hate it, if you go back to that really unflattering one, if you didn’t know who we were, I probably wouldn’t pick this one. Because this doesn’t to me look like something, I would want to pay attention to it like, Oh, God, they’re probably just ranting and raving about something, you know, like a political newscast or something like that’s what this looks like to me. So I wouldn’t click on it. And so even with these tools, being mindful of picking something that makes more sense, like, I look like I’m in the middle of a rant, which I probably am, and you look like you’re about to fall asleep, which you probably were.

Christopher Penn 30:57
So the again, the advantage of a tool like that is it gives you a ton of options. So you can go through and say, okay, you know, this one, maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not good. But because it goes through so much of the slicing for you, it can really it can streamline that part of your workflow. So a key part of your YouTube SEO strategy is also looking for tools that can simplify the creating edit portion, so that you can spend more time on the Promote portions.

Katie Robbert 31:25
The tools like this give you any styling at abilities.

Christopher Penn 31:32
They do. In fact, there’s a whole brand template, you can spend some time, what is your brand? What are your colors? What’s your logos, all that stuff?

Katie Robbert 31:39
Oh, perfect. You know, because I was looking at, you know, the previews, and I was like, Wow, that’s some neon green that doesn’t belong in our brand, like, for example. And so making sure that you are not only utilizing these tools, but then also making sure they go back to aligning with your brand, which goes back to your overall video strategy. And so, you know, again, I could you know, pick up, John is swinging around to a Taylor Swift song. But that doesn’t really align with Brent, John, I keep saying it, because we’ll probably just make it happen. At some point,

John Wall 32:13
it will have to catch the movie this weekend for missing the launch.

Christopher Penn 32:20
And this is an important part of the SEO portion of the strategy, because YouTube shorts, and Tiktok, and Instagram and whatever other formats of short form video, these are essentially feeders for your video content, right. So if someone watches that short, they are likely to then go and and they like it, they are then likely to go check out the whole video itself. If they see it on Tiktok, they can go through and find their way to it. Again, impressions to click through rate. And video views are our measures. So if we can get eyeballs to our content and get them watching through all the way to the end, our videos will then show up better in those search results. Part of the challenge and part of what’s different about the mindset for YouTube in 2023, and 2024, as opposed to 2020 Is that because it’s so crowded now, because it’s so noisy, you need to have two things, you need to have one a niche, you know, go back to the old sales, adage, the niches are riches. And to the you have to spend a lot of time promoting off of YouTube outside of YouTube to get people to YouTube, or the channel of your choice. So that you get those you can rack up those views. So for example, one of the things that I do in the almost timely newsletter is I will embed that YouTube video on the blog post on my website, when I move that that newsletter sub stack out can have the native YouTube player, put it right there. And if I can get people to view that video a lot through the newsletter that will help that video perform better in overall searches. We were talking earlier this week on the podcast about moving the Trust Insights newsletter to substack as well, again, native YouTube player, I could we could discuss what would it look like to redo part of inbox insights to feature here’s the video from the podcast that week, here’s the video from the livestream the previous week, have those videos be in our newsletter and get more views on them to get our channel performing better? Right.

Katie Robbert 34:25
This might I might already know the answer to this question and this so I’m just going to ask it so when I’m thinking about content creation so you think about visuals you think about you know, the content itself. What about things like background music so you know, we record this live stream we record the podcast, and there’s no music carrying it along. Does that factor into video SEO at all? Like is it just a choice that people make in terms of like this is this would be engaged meant, or is it? You know, does it like does it matter? Like if we were to put in like, you know background music, like let’s just say you have feeding the ducks, which is part of yard? Would that make a difference?

Christopher Penn 35:15
So there’s there’s a very complicated answer to this in two parts one. Some creators, a couple of creators have said that they have seen substantial differences in the performance, their videos showing up in searches into recommendations, when they improve their audio quality in general, right, so YouTube seems at least a couple of a couple of creators seems to be noticing the quality of audio, and suggesting videos have better quality audio versus worse. And I’ve noticed this myself, in looking at good I like to follow like 90s and 2000s cover bands. And I’ve seen those bands that have better sound quality, outperforming those that do not. So that’s one aspect is if, in general audio matters, make it as good as possible. But if YouTube may or may not be taking that. Second is from a neuroscience perspective. So background music percussion in particular can stimulate the brain in different ways. So if you were to, to if you have certain sounds within your video, that are not distracting from the conversation, but are suddenly engaging the brain, you might be able to essentially put someone’s brain in a biochemical state that encourages them to keep watching because they feel good, right? He has maybe a quiet subtle, but very fast 140 beats per minute, percussion underneath your talk track, that, in turn, could get people to watch longer, right? Because it’s a more pleasant experience. And therefore, if they watch longer, your video shows up better in search results.

Katie Robbert 36:55
So it really is more about engagement versus the SEO like the the what we think about as traditional SEO. So the SEO, in this instance being you know, the thumbnail, the titles, the content itself, but then when you get into the details of the content in terms of like the quick cuts, the coloring the music, that’s less about SEO more about just keeping people engaged in the video itself.

Christopher Penn 37:18
Yes. And the note so the neuroscience is the sort of the hack to get people to stick around longer, which then feeds the recommendation algorithm to make your video show up better.

John Wall 37:32
And I’ve seen a lot of videos though, with bad music beds, you know, screw up to you need to be careful. It can’t overpower the vocals are you’re going to totally lose it.

Christopher Penn 37:45
Exactly. There’s there’s limits to all this stuff. I mean, it’s kind of like there’s there’s so many different hacks that you can try out. The best advice there is to experiment. Do some A B testing, roll out some stuff, see how it performs? Ask your audience Hey, did you like this? Because yeah, for some people, it’s kind of like, design, right? You know, earlier in the week on the Trust Insights podcast, I was showing Katie a slide gives Oh,

Katie Robbert 38:09
I physically couldn’t read the slide.

Christopher Penn 38:13
So that’s that’s bad design. A bad design means the information doesn’t get conveyed as well. It’s not received well by the other person. So with things like backing audio tracks, you’ll have to play with the dials and see like, Okay, well, at what point does this now detract from the experience as opposed to enhance the experience? Right?

Katie Robbert 38:33
Ah, it’s a lot to think about. And so, yeah,

Christopher Penn 38:37
that’s a lot to think is, and there’s even more. Wait, there’s

Katie Robbert 38:41
more.

Christopher Penn 38:43
There’s more. You want to pay attention on your analytics, especially to completions of YouTube shorts, because YouTube shorts do boost the booster channel overall. And because they’re under 60 seconds, if if someone’s dropping off into YouTube short before 60 seconds, your content needs some work. So take a look at your watch times and see what the breakpoints are in your shorts. Second is if you’re willing to invest the money and this is more of a on the creative side of things. tools, like vid IQ and to buddy can not only give you recommendations for your own content, but vid IQ in particular can look at top performing competing channels in your space and infer some of the metrics and say okay, here’s the you know, this video has the highest click through rate of say, insights trust the our arch enemy. A competing firm I’m just making this up. But we could then look at their videos and say, Okay, well what are the things that they’re doing that on their high performing videos that we should at least be aware of topics and keywords and things like that?

Katie Robbert 39:50
So if you could summarize into three things that people need to do for their video SEO 20 A 24 plan, what are three things people should be doing?

Christopher Penn 40:05
Follow the process from keyword creation that we outlined earlier. So that you’re producing content that people are actually searching for. That’s number one, right? And that’s kind of a no brainer. Number two, is make sure you are using all of the neuroscience hacks and just good video production processes, right? No one wants to watch crap video, and no one has to anymore. There’s a gazillion choices. So your content has got to be as good or better than the next thing in someone’s recommendation fee. And three, focus on impression of you click the rate and focus on a stream yards doing the little emoji and in our stream. Let’s try to figure out what that Yep, focus on impressions. So click the rate and focus on total watch time as you Northstars for measurement if people are not watching the videos all the way to the end, figure out why.

Katie Robbert 41:05
John, what do you think?

John Wall 41:07
Yeah, it’s a lot of work but you have no alternative if you want to cut through the clutter. Get to it.

Katie Robbert 41:14
Coming soon marketing over coffee and Spanish. See? Well, as per usual, I am appropriately overwhelmed with the things that I need to start thinking about so great job.

Christopher Penn 41:31
The bonus fourth item is Be on the lookout for for AI based tools that can help streamline the create, edit, promote process, because as we’ve talked about, this is a lot of work. Being a creator is a full time profession. It can be a full time profession. There are a lot of people who don’t that is this is their job. They you know, you look at Shawn Evans on hot ones, right? That is his full time job now, along with his team of 27 other employees making a show about eating spicy chicken wings. You look at somebody like Gary Vaynerchuk for as much as people love or hate him. His job is a good chunk of his job and the 31 people that follow him around is creating content look at someone like Marques Brownlee, him and his team have I think like 10 or 15 people, that is their job. So being a creator, is a career can be an entire department of your company. But if your audience is there, it’s probably worth the investment. So I think that was a good place to wrap up for the week. We will talk to you all next time. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at trust insights.ai/t AI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trust insights.ai/newsletter Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at trust insights.ai/analytics for marketers See you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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