How To Rank YouTube Videos In Google Search With Justin Briggs of Briggsby

Table of Contents

Last updated on June 15th, 2024

Sure, YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, but Google is 15x larger, and can drive a lot of traffic to your YouTube videos. Justin Briggs from Briggsby is an expert in ranking business YouTube videos on Google search, and today he gives us some of his secrets.

GUEST: Justin Briggs of Briggsby. Read his presentation “Using Search To Grow Your YouTube Audience.” Find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

HOST: The VidAction Podcast is hosted by Dane Golden of VidAction | LinkedIn | | YouTube

SPONSORS: This episode is brought to you by our affiliate partners, including: TubeBuddy, VidIQ, MorningFame, Rev.com, and other products and services we recommend.

PRODUCER: Jason Perrier of Phizzy Studios

THE GOAL:

Drive more traffic to your YouTube videos through Google Search.

WHY DO THIS?

You can drive a lot of traffic to your YouTube videos from Google Search. While YouTube.com is the world’s second-largest search engine, Google is, of course the largest search engine, 15x larger than YouTube. And YouTube and Google are part of the same company, so they work hand-in-hand.

THE TIPS:

You can drive a lot of traffic to your YouTube videos from Google Search.
Most traffic on YouTube still comes from three main sources: Search, Suggested Videos, and Browse Features
The number one factor that drives views on YouTube is Suggested Videos.
One of the often-missed factors of YouTube traffic is that we can use Google Search to send views to our YouTube videos.
Google is really good at using data at scale to determine why a user is searching for what they’re searching for and what their goal is.
The search engine marketing tool SEMrush has a really large database with with they monitor rankings on approximately 180 million keywords. Those results track who is ranking for a particular search term and which search features appear on the relevant Google search page.
The main Google Search page can potentially show YouTube videos in three different ways:
1. The Video Carousel
2. A link to an embedded video in a web page.
3. Suggested Clips
Suggested Clips is a pretty rare situation. In Suggested Clips, a YouTube video shows up on page 1 of Google already ready to play within the page. The playhead is already cued to somewhere within the video where the how-to steps begin. Once good example is when you Google “how to paint a room” and a videos shows up ready to play.
You can better rank your YouTube videos on Google by:
1. Making sure you do a manual transcript of your video. If you don’t do a manual transcript, Google will use YouTube’s own automatic transcript, if available. But these can be of varying quality.
2. Having a blog post that embeds the video.
3. Structure the blog post with clear, simple declarative sentences. Clearly outline the steps needed to accomplish the process you’re describing. Use step numbers combined with either the HTML list function (<ol> and <li> tags) or <h2> tags, or both.
4. Link to the blog post from the video.
It’s very important to prepare the outline structure of your video script in advance, so that you can be sure to say the steps very clearly.
Importantly, while Google Search is usually not the top traffic source for YouTube videos, many searchers will begin their research on Google before finding YouTube links and transitioning to YouTube for further inquiries.
If you’re already producing quality videos and want to get more traction, optimizing your videos for Google is a great way to get extra visibility.

RESULTS:

You now have a better understanding of how to drive more traffic to your YouTube videos using Google Search, and how to increase your ranking in the Google search engine.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dane Golden:
It’s time for the Video Marketing Value podcast from HEY.com. This is the podcast where we help marketers and business owners just like you get more value out of your video marketing efforts. My name is Dane Golden, and today we have Justin Briggs of Briggsby, our special guest.

Justin Briggs:
Hi, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Dane Golden:
Welcome, Justin. I am so glad to have you. I asked you on today because I have been very interested in your blog posts, and I think it was at your VidCon talks where we met, and about how valuable it is to rank your YouTube videos, but on Google, and we haven’t talked a lot about this on this podcast. I’m very interested in all the tactics that go into that. We won’t be able to cover all of it, but does that sound good for you? Can we talk about that?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, that sounds great.

Dane Golden:
Okay, here we go. Question number one, we say, generally, people say this a lot, YouTube is the second largest search engine. It’s the second largest search engine, and we all know Google’s number one, and they’re related. How big is second?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that the statement’s true, but it’s a little misleading, because YouTube is a walled garden, so you’re kind of only searching content within that platform, whereas Google is kind of a different sort of search engine because it tends to drive traffic out from Google to other websites. I think that’s becoming more and more rare. Google just kind of went over kind of the tipping point of 50% of searches do not initiate a click. A lot of that’s coming from kind of in-app or voice-based searches.

Justin Briggs:
But in terms of kind of how big is YouTube, to kind of give some prospective, Google is about 15 times bigger than YouTube, so YouTube is the second largest, but there’s a large distance between the size of Google and the size of YouTube. One of the challenges there, though, is that most of the data that we have comes from something called clickstream data. This is kind of Internet service provider or toolbars share aggregated information about how people use the Internet. We use that to collect kind of URLs and see how frequently people search on different platforms. But that information tends to be limited to web searches, and that means that information that happens inside mobile and app-based usage might be hidden or harder to get to.

Justin Briggs:
A lot of the data that you’re looking at when you see people compare the two, it’s really looking at desktop-based differences. There’s a little less information to kind of understand mobile, which I think is important for YouTube, because I think a lot of the usage on YouTube comes from the mobile app experience itself, so it might be even larger than is reported in some of those reports.

Justin Briggs:
I think my favorite report that I’ve seen about it recently is SparkToro, which is a company that was founded by Rand Fishkin, who founded Moz, formerly SEOmoz. He did a study, and he’s done several studies like this that are in partnership with Jumpshot. Jumpshot has clickstream data. They’ve gone through and they’ve done analysis on the proportion of searches that go to each kind of platform and the relative share of voice of each of those over time. That’s where that kind of 15X stat that I’m sharing is coming from, is really looking at proportional difference. The hard part is it’s hard to actually have information on how many searches are occurring, because you’re looking within a sample data set. So within that sample data set they can say, “Hey, 2% or 3% of searches might go to a particular source,” but they may not be able to project out what’s the actual number.

Dane Golden:
Right. But generally if we were to say out of 100 searches, if you just took the two search engines, Google and YouTube, we wouldn’t be too far off to say five searches would be on YouTube and 95 would be on Google.

Justin Briggs:
Yeah. I’m trying to remember the data off the top of my head, but I think it was like 1% to 3% but yeah, so like one to five probably of every 100 probably go to somewhere else.

Dane Golden:
Okay. Most traffic on YouTube still comes from three main sources. Usually, search is usually not number one, but usually it’s suggested videos, which is what comes up next to or below the video, and then browse features, which is generally what comes up on the homepage or the front page of the app, and then comes YouTube search. However, there’s more and more ways now that YouTube can get more traffic from Google. If you have a YouTube video, you can get more traffic from Google. There’s the carousel, which is when you see YouTube videos pop up that you can link to directly, that’s the most visible. Could you explain what it is and what are some of the ways we can get our videos in it, because I don’t think it’s just the number one ranked video on YouTube goes in there?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, absolutely. I think kind of the first part kind of, when we’re looking at kind of what are the top traffic sources or channels for videos, an aggregate suggested on YouTube is by far kind of the most powerful driver. But I think that it’s important to kind of make some distinction-

Dane Golden:
Let me stop you there, because I want to make sure I heard you right. I want to make sure, so people heard you right. Did you say that the number one that gets you on Google is suggested or the number one that drives traffic on YouTube is suggested?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, the number one that drives views on YouTube is suggested.

Dane Golden:
Okay. All right.

Justin Briggs:
I would actually probably say that it is the number one driver of views in aggregate across all sources, including coming from Google. But I think one of the things to kind of keep in mind there is, it really depends on the life cycle of the channel and also the type of content that you create. I’ve seen channels where, maybe even some things that are more B2B-oriented, may end up having a much larger proportion that comes from search. Some channels depending on kind of where they’re at in their life cycle, if they’re new, or well-established, or the type of content that they create can have a very different kind of profile in terms of where they’re getting their views from. Those that do more educational how-to or even some B2B may have a lot more views coming in through search.

Justin Briggs:
I think that when I look at YouTube strategies, one of the often missed components is that we can use Google search to draw views into our YouTube videos. That brings us to kind of the video carousel. The video carousel is what we call a SERP feature. It means that there’s some type of visual distinction or it’s a niche-type of result. This is different than what we would call kind of the traditional 10 blue links.

Dane Golden:
For the people who come totally from YouTube, could you explain what SERP is?

Justin Briggs:
Yes. Yeah. Sorry. SERP is a Search Engine Result Page, so whenever you perform a search, everything that you’re kind of seeing included there. Then you have kind of your traditional websites, and then they start bringing in different types of what we call SERP features. That could be the map. That could be the knowledge graph, which appears on the right hand side for entities, people, places, and things. One of those is the video SERP feature. Historically, it was called the video rich snippet, which was a traditional web result that had a thumbnail. On mobile, you had a carousel any time that that thumbnail would appear on desktop, but they’ve now used the same design on both mobile and desktop. You have a carousel that kind of scrolls side-to-side of videos that are relevant to that query. Where those are actually coming from is from Google’s video vertical search. Across the top when you search, you could click video, and it will give you video-only results. The carousel is effectively kind of blending those results in.

Justin Briggs:
What happens is they identify when a searcher’s intent is to find video content. When that’s the case, they try to populate the first page with multiple types of content. You’ll have your traditional web pages, but if they identify that users in some instances want videos, they bring those video results in from video search, and they present them as a carousel. This is really great, because it’s an opportunity for you to often rank in position like three, four, five with the video and get additional attention and visibility in the search results.

Dane Golden:
That can happen in a day sometimes. You can rank on the front page with a video in a day.

Justin Briggs:
Absolutely. Just like other types of verticals and things like news and stuff like that, if something’s really relevant, if it’s trending, or they use something called QDF, which is Query Deserves Freshness, that can really kind of trigger the result to start ranking kind of fresh new content.

Dane Golden:
Justin, do we have any idea when you see that carousel, and I see it generally with three videos, do we have any idea how often positions one, two, three, four, five, six are clicked? Is it usually number one? Any data on that whatsoever?

Justin Briggs:
I don’t have any aggregate data to share. We’ve seen a little bit of stuff with some of our clients, but there’s no good information about it. I would say generally, the SERP feature is not clicked that often. If it’s beyond the first one-to-three videos they’re showing, it’s a lot like everything else kind of in the search space. If you’re not within that above-the-fold first cut, usually 70% to 90% of clicks are going to go to what’s immediately visible, because even when you’re looking at traditional web results, typically less than 10% of people ever make it to page two. Those who are appearing in positions four, five, six or beyond within the video space, it really is kind of a winner-takes-all type of a situation. You really want to kind of focus on how you can appear kind of at the top of those results.

Dane Golden:
What are some of the ways you can determine in advance if a topic that you’re working on for YouTube video is likely to get shown in a carousel, or if that general topic gets shown in a carousel at all? How do you find this out other than doing a search for every single topic?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, that’s a great question. Then maybe too, if you want later to, we can jump a little bit into kind of how the video search works, because I feel like we kind of answered a little bit kind of what it is, but that kind of begs the question, “Well, how do I get into that number one position?” But in terms of kind of figuring out where they’re at and whether or not you had them, obviously the one that you mentioned, honestly kind of your best tool is just to perform that search to see whether or not it’s there, but that doesn’t scale very well.

Justin Briggs:
There’s kind of two ways that I would recommend scaling this. The first one is to be thinking about searcher intent. What Google’s really good at is using data at scale to determine why a user is searching for what they’re searching for, what’s their goal, what’s their need, what are they looking for. They use usage data, so they’ll kind of test different results, see what works. They can use machine learning, as well, to try to figure out, “This is what’s ideal.” It’s really kind of replicating, kind of figuring out what humans want. It would be kind of the same thing as surveying people, like, “Why are you searching for this?” But it’s doing it at scale with more qualitative data or quantitative data.

Justin Briggs:
But what we can kind of do, is kind of as we get familiar with our niche, we get really familiar about the types of content that people are looking for video content for. I can say kind of right out, kind of thinking about it, some of it’s kind of obvious. People like videos for things like entertainment, reviews, demonstrations, how-tos. These are going to be the types of subjects when you find a good keyword using traditional SEO keyword research and has high search volume. It might not be good for video if you kind of put yourself in the mindset of the person who’s searching for that and saying, “What might they be looking for?” If what they’re looking for has something to do with demonstration, or visual intent, or they want to see a product, those types of things can work really well, so how to tie a tie, how to paint a room, a demo of a new backpack, or a hiking pack, or something like that. Those can all work really well from a video space perspective.

Justin Briggs:
You can get data on this, too. There are tools like S-E-M-rush or SEMrush, I’m not sure which one’s the correct pronunciation of it. What they do is they have a really large database. I think it’s like 150, 180 million keywords, that they monitor all the rankings on, on a regular basis. They parse out from those results not only who’s ranking, but what search features appeared on that page. I could go to SEMrush, for example, and I could do a reverse look-up on youtube.com. That’s going to give me all the keywords where youtube.com is ranking on. It’s like 60 million keywords, so it’s a really large robust data set. From that sample of 60 million keywords, I can start to filter that list by those that have video rich snippets.

Justin Briggs:
What they have in there is they actually tag each keyword based off the SERP features that appeared. One of them that they’ll tag with is video. You can actually do an export and then actually filter that in Excel. You wouldn’t work from the entire 60 million keywords set. You’d probably do some filtering in advance. You might say, “Hey, return all the keywords that include the word, coffee, because I create content about coffee. Then I’m going to export that CSV, and then I’m going to filter down to video intent.” You can actually just filter directly within the tool itself.

Dane Golden:
For our listeners that wonder how much work could actually go into choosing topics and wanting to win topics on YouTube, this is what the top pros do. Just listen to that part of the podcast over again, because that’s amazing what you did with SEMrush. Also, by the way, for our listeners going to link to some of your blog posts that are relevant to this. They should go to the show notes. They’ll just look for Google HEY and Justin Briggs, and you’ll see the show notes. Could you explain also what is a suggested clip? Now this is not suggested videos on YouTube. This is suggested clips on Google, something that you occasionally see. You’re like, “Hey, how does that happen?” Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, absolutely. Suggested clips is kind of one of the three different ways that videos can appear in Google. We’ve kind of already talked about the carousel, the other one being just an embedded video on a traditional webpage. The third would be the suggested clip. Suggested clip is what we call a featured snippet subtype. A featured snippet is a type of SERP feature that appears at the very top of the search results. You typically will see these if you search for a question that has a very distinct answer. What temperature do I cook chicken at? It will reply back 165 degrees Fahrenheit. If that answer appears at the top of the results, that’s considered to be a feature snippet. We call that position zero, because it kind of ranks above everything else where Google is trying to extract a specific answer from an article and show that answer directly in search results. That’s kind of the foundation of the idea behind suggested clip.

Justin Briggs:
They take that logic and they abstract it to the video space. Let’s see if this answer exists in the middle of a video. A suggested clip is a video result that appears at the very top of the search results. It’s large size, so it’s like the video is embedded at the top of the search results. When you hit play, it drops you in on a minute mark far into the video where the answer is given. It might skip past the intro. It might even go two, three, four, five minutes into the video to find the exact spot within that video where the answer is given.

Dane Golden:
I think you’ve used an example how to paint a room from Lowe’s. If you look up how to paint a room on Google, you’ll get one of these.

Justin Briggs:
Correct. Yeah. It’s really great, because then a person can actually play it directly from the search results. They don’t have to click through. It’s a way of kind of getting that additional real estate. As we kind of talked about, it’s a bit of a winner-takes-all situation, where if you really do dominate the top of the search results, you’re going to not only grab more of those to use for yourself, but one of the really nice things about Google is the zero sum game nature of it. Anyone else who brings below you is therefore getting less. It’s a way for you to kind of carve out a search result and kind of dominate it a little bit stronger.

Justin Briggs:
I think this is really going to change the way that search works. I don’t see them doing this yet on YouTube, but the fact that this technology exists on Google means that it may make its way over into YouTube search eventually, but right now we tend to search videos as if they’re these closed black boxes. There is a box, and there’s some contents on the inside of it, and we write on the outside of it what it’s about. We kind of go through, and we sort those boxes based on what we know from the outside. This kind of search actually opens that box up, and kind of rifles through the material inside, and can say, “Hey, I don’t need the full 10-minute video. I just need the two and a half minutes that starts at five minutes to answer this question.” I think that really changes the way that search is going to function, and may even eventually kind of change users’ expectations on how they interact with video.

Dane Golden:
What they’re essentially doing is there’s a feature within embedding a YouTube clip on a webpage that allows you to customize a start and end point. That can be done on any video. They used to permit it with playlists. You could sort of DJ a playlist where you could have a custom start and end point, but to my knowledge, that’s not allowed any more, but you can do this type of thing on your own webpage. You can embed it to start and end at a certain point. I think that that’s what they’re doing, essentially. But if somebody does a search for a certain term on Google, and your video is taking up the entire page, that sounds like a pretty good signal that you’ve done very well in that video in optimizing it.

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, absolutely. We can get a little bit into kind of how they select those and how you can get those yourself. But even if you do everything right, it’s worth noting that still doesn’t guarantee you anything. We kind of go back to how I was talking about Google is this kind of intent engine that they really accumulate a lot of data. They might put up a suggested clip for a limited period of time and collect data about how often users engage with it. If they collect data that suggests that people don’t really like the video, or they skip it, and they just scroll past it, and go ahead and click the other results, and that happens enough times, that sends a signal to them that, “Hey, maybe users don’t want a suggested clip, or the suggested clip that we thought was good wasn’t really that helpful.” They might turn that back off.

Justin Briggs:
There could be cases where you kind of do everything right, and you’re still doing a really good job. Don’t get discouraged if you find yourself kind of hammering away at trying to get one of these. It can be a little discouraging, because it can take a lot of trial and error. We find this a lot with text-based feature snippets. It’s a lot of just having a hypothesis about what you think Google might like, trying it out, finding out that it doesn’t work, and just continue to iterate on that.

Dane Golden:
Let’s just talk on a couple of the things that may influence this. It doesn’t necessarily mean that this means that it’s the type of video that is… How should I put it? It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an exciting video. It’s a helpful video, but in a certain way, it’s helpful. Would that be correct?

Justin Briggs:
I think that’s true. Yeah. You tend to see these most on what I would call process-based queries. That is something that you’re doing that has a series of ordered steps where you’re walking a person through how to do something. I think that this could expand to different types of videos later on, but this is kind of the area that they’re testing us first. Kind of the way that they kind of figure out whether or not you’re giving that process, is the first thing that they do is they get a transcript of your video, whether or not you’ve provided one or they create an automatic transcript. From this, they’ll map the video to an existing text-based article. To be clear on that, that means you’ve published a blog post, or an article, or a resource page on your own website, and they have said, “Hey, this video is associated with this article.”

Dane Golden:
Okay. Okay. Let me understand this, what you’re saying here. The first step is they look at whatever transcript is, and that is either what’s Google’s automated, or if you’ve done through Rev, or some other party, or manually on your own, and you’ve uploaded a manual transcript to YouTube, then they want to see if there is an additional piece of data that might be a blog post that sort of elaborates on this information. Have I got it right so far?

Justin Briggs:
That is correct. Yeah. I wouldn’t say that you have to upload your own transcript. They can have an automatic one that they kind of do themselves. Yeah, they’re looking for the text-based article because what it does is it gives them two separate text-based sources and higher confidence. What they’re doing is they’re comparing the blog post to the actual contents of the video, and finding similarities, and trying to find the steps in both of them. Once they’ve built that relationship between the video and the article, and the question is how do you get that relationship. There are a couple of ways. I would link from the description of the YouTube video to the actual blog post on your website. You would want to embed the video on that blog post. We don’t have to get into the details on it, but look up video site maps, and video structured data, and the Yoast Video SEO plugin for WordPress, if you use it. Those are kind of technical ways that you can kind of help Google make those connections between the two.

Justin Briggs:
Once they’ve made the connections between the two, and they say, “Okay, this video aligns with this article,” they use what’s called natural language processing or NLP to read “the content.” What NLP is, if you go back to second to fourth grade, and you look at sentence diagramming, they are breaking down sentences to try to understand their meaning.

Dane Golden:
Wait a second, you’re getting us into grammar here. We didn’t pass grammar. We’re all video people. We don’t want to write anything. No, go ahead. Go ahead.

Justin Briggs:
Yeah. I mean, the only thing you have to remember from a grammar perspective, so on Briggsby we’ve written a lot of content about how you can use their ability to [inaudible 00:24:06] crawl grammar to extract meaning. There are some real simple rules, and it would be, Write like a fifth grader, and if you were to ask your Google home a question-

Dane Golden:
Meaning basically, when you say write like a fifth, write in very basic sentences.

Justin Briggs:
Yeah, very straightforward, what we would call X is Y. If I were to ask you, “What temperature do I cook chicken at,” you would say, “The ideal temperature to cook chicken at is 165 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Dane Golden:
Or you might even pretend you’re talking like a robot, “The ideal temperature is to cook it at 400 degrees Fahrenheit,” that type of thing.

Justin Briggs:
Yep. You invert the question. You take part of the question, you put that as the beginning of the sentence, and that becomes the X, and then is Y, becomes the answer. Another way to think about this is if you were to ask your Google home a question, what type of response do you think it should give you back? This means that one sentence, two sentences. Oftentimes what will happen is a person will try to answer a question, and they might talk for a paragraph or two. I tend to talk that way, so I have to work really, really hard to say that I need to give a very succinct answer to it.

Justin Briggs:
The other thing that they’re looking at is list. List suggest process or an ordered list of things, especially if they’re numbered or you’re using HTML-ordered list. It shows a one, two, three process. Now it doesn’t have to be an order list. You can also use things like H2 headings with a number in front of it. They can see that pattern and say, “Hey, you’ve outlined the steps.” If I were talking about how to tie a tie, I might be, one, put it around your neck, two, cross it over. There’s going to be kind of those steps. That allows them to kind of extract those out.

Justin Briggs:
Then the last thing from a grammar perspective, this is going to go a little nerdy, is you want to write-

Dane Golden:
Wait a second. It’s already gotten nerdy. How much more nerdy can it be?

Justin Briggs:
Well, saying things like you have to write in the imperative mood. For those who are less familiar with the imperative mood, it’s really talking about direct actions and commands, saying something like, “Click the upload button.” That has a very clear verb and a very clear noun that you’re applying that verb to. Once they have that, they basically say, “Okay, here. I have extracted from the blog post a list of simplified ordered steps. I’m going to take that list that I’ve extracted, and I’m going to go look for them in the transcript of the video.”

Dane Golden:
What I hear from you is very precise, no extraneous other information, exactly something that easily could be translated and not be confused. Then using HTML, the one, two, three, or the bullets, or the types of HTML like the H2 header, that really structure things. Is that correct?

Justin Briggs:
Absolutely. Yeah. I can also send you a deck that my business partner and wife presented at Moz con, where she kind of talks through some examples of how to kind of do this. Yeah, you can go more verbose and robust if you use structure to your favor. For example, if the headings are your clear imperative mood commands, then the paragraph that would follow the heading could have all the extra details, but the headings themselves become the simplified list items. Once they extract that, they go and they find those verbs and those nouns in the actual video text. Now it doesn’t have to be exactly. They understand that words are similar and that there are different variants of ways of saying stuff. But this is why I think it’s really important to kind of think about your outline structure before you write your script for your video, because then you can make sure that you’re very clearly articulating that step. You actually use that phrase at some point in your video, and you use similar phrasing as you’ve used in your actual blog post.

Dane Golden:
I want to tell you, Justin, since finding out about your writing and studies that you’ve been doing, last year reading your blogs, I’ve been adopting some of your techniques. While I haven’t gotten any suggested clips, I have gotten, sometimes combined with my blog, and my YouTube video, the carousel, and a blog post, I have gotten on, for many searches I’ve gotten on the first page twice, once for the blog and once for the video, and the video often ranks much higher on Google than on YouTube, I think because I’ve been following your directions. Now, it hasn’t exploded my YouTube channel. You really need to still get the suggested et cetera, but what it does is it really raises the profile and gets those first clicks.

Justin Briggs:
Absolutely. I think there’s a couple of things there. One, I would say at this point, suggested clip is a theory-based interesting thing because it’s on the very progressive edge of what Google is doing with video search. It’s exceptionally rare. It doesn’t pop up all that often. If you’re looking for a suggested clip to kind of be the really strong strategic thing, I don’t think it’s quite there yet, but I think that it’s helpful to understand, because I think it’s where search is going be in the next year or two. I think that’s helpful from there. In terms of the… Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Dane Golden:
I think it’s also important to note that a lot of first inquiries will start on Google and then move to YouTube. While it’s important that you do all the other things on YouTube with optimization and getting traffic from, not suggested clips, but suggested videos and browse features, et cetera, I think that the idea that you could make yourself a little bit higher on the educational funnel by doing all the things that you’re saying is very valuable.

Justin Briggs:
Yeah. I think there’s a couple of things. I’ve talked to a couple of people before and they’re like, “Well, I’m not getting a huge volume from Google.” I think that’s true. I think there’s a couple of things to think about. One, I think that SEO is really good for very particular types of content. It can drive tens of thousands of views for some particular content types, and tens, or just a couple of hundreds for other types of content. Really trying to find those places where suggested clip is really, really high or the carousel is very, very high in the search results is, I think, very powerful.

Justin Briggs:
Also, it’s one of those types of channels that’s really valuable for I need to grow and develop my channel. I think a lot of smaller, newer YouTubers are saying, “Okay. I know I need to drive watch time, but how do I go get it?” They’ve kind of done all the things that everyone talks about, and they’re still not kind of growing. How do I go out and find that audience? Google continues to be kind of one of those places where you can go to, to find that audience.

Justin Briggs:
Then the last thing, and this is some of the work that I’ve been doing, is when you look at kind of well-established YouTubers, they kind of only think myopically about just the YouTube platform. Google is a way to extend the brand or the media company out of YouTube and to have visibility as a brand outside of YouTube only. I think there is value in getting visits coming to blog posts and not necessarily coming into YouTube. You can use your YouTube work as the supplement to that text-based content. You can turn that video content into text-based content and can gain more scale from it. I think it has a little bit more to kind of do with that type of opportunity, as well, where, how can an established YouTube channel kind of expand themselves into different types of channels that they’re driving traffic from. A lot of-

Dane Golden:
Amazing.

Justin Briggs:
… the clients that I’ve worked with traditionally aren’t YouTube first, then content second. They tend to be text-based content first, and YouTube second. An eCommerce website that has a really strong, robust, education-oriented, text-based strategy, that’s going to be the first most important thing that they want to do. They want to rank that blog post for a particular keyword phrase. Once they’ve ranked number one for that particular keyword phrase, the question then becomes how can we lock down this search result. Well, then we could create a video, and then we can grab the carousel. We could perhaps grab a suggested clip. It’s more about how do we extend from the text-based strategy into a video-based strategy, as well. I think sometimes with new to community, we kind of think YouTube first, but a lot of the stuff I’m talking about is also really helpful for those who have an established content marketing program, and how can we use video to supplement that.

Dane Golden:
Absolutely. This has been a real treat. Justin Briggs, how can people find out more about you and Briggsby?

Justin Briggs:
Yeah. I guess the best way is to check out our website. It’s briggsby.com, B-R-I-G-G-S-B-Y.com. I blog there kind of infrequently. I also am on Twitter at justinrbriggs. The other way would probably be, I regularly speak at conferences, so I do have a SlideShare. You search for Justin Briggs SlideShare, you should be able to find it, or you can come to some of the different types of conferences. I think the next one I’m speaking at is VidCon London, so I’ll be there in person if anyone’s there.

Dane Golden:
Great. Yeah. I saw you at VidCon. It was incredible, packed house, and well-deserved, because I was sitting in the front row, and it was fantastic info. Thank you, Justin Briggs. People can find this episode by searching for HEY and Justin Briggs. His last name is spelled B-R-I-G-G-S.

Dane Golden:
My name is Dane Golden. I want to thank you, the listener, for joining us today. I do this podcast, the Video Marketing Value podcast from HEY.com and the videos, because I love helping marketers and business owners just like you grow your customer community through helpful how-to videos. Because when you share your expertise in a way that helps customers live their lives better or do their jobs better, you will earn their loyalty, and their trust, and their business. Thanks to our special guest, Justin Briggs. Till next week, here’s to helping you help your customers through video.