Last updated on June 14th, 2024
Here’s how you can rank twice on the first page of Google using YouTube combined with a blog post.
THE STEPS
- Find a helpful how-to YouTube topic you can rank for.
- Make a helpful video that answers the question as quickly as possible.
- In editing, remove the fluff. Make the video only as long as it has to be.
- Make a clear, enticing, accurate thumbnail that gets clicks.
- Add clear steps in the YouTube description.
- On your blog, create a post with the YouTube video at or near the top.
- Write the same clear steps on the blog post, using the word “Steps” in some way
- Use helpful HTML code in the blog post such as “headline 2” (<h2>) and “ordered lists” (<ol> and <li>)
LINKS FOR THIS VIDEO:
To test what I’m talking about, you can check out these two links.
- This is a Google search for “how to make a linkedin thumbnail”. It will probably work in regular Google but for unbiased results, do a search using Incognito window.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+make+a+linkedin+video+thumbnail - This is a YouTube search for “how to make a linkedin thumbnail”. While it helps to come up first in YouTube search to come up first in the Google video carousel, sometimes the order is different on Google than YouTube if Google thinks it fits a Google searcher better than a YouTube searcher.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=how+to+make+a+linkedin+video+thumbnail
Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google. But what if I told you you could be on twice by using both YouTube and your blog embedding a YouTube video into your blog post? Well, today I’m going to tell you how to get on Google homepage twice. Coming up!
Hey, it’s Dane Golden from VidAction.tv. This is the channel where we show marketers and businesses, just like you, how to grow a loyal audience on YouTube. Loyal customers, isn’t that what everyone wants?
What if I told you you could get on the homepage of Google using YouTube and a combination of your blog post? Well, you can.
I did this with a LinkedIn post. It was a video about LinkedIn thumbnails. I found a small topic that was being underserved, and I found it on Morning Fame and Tube Buddy and vidIQ, that LinkedIn video thumbnails were being searched on more than the results were being found. I made a video about how to do a LinkedIn thumbnail and I embedded it on a blog post on VidAction.tv. This came up twice on the homepage of Google for this topic. Isn’t that great? It comes up twice on the homepage. Fantastic! We did it! Doesn’t everyone want to do that?
Many YouTube videos now are coming up on the homepage of Google, and you don’t have to understand anything about Google SEO to get your YouTube videos ranking. But if you do what I’m suggesting with both the website and YouTube, you can get both the YouTube video and your website ranking on the homepage of Google. That’s two rankings for the same content.
You may know that Google is now doing a video carousel of mostly YouTube videos but they can be videos from any platform here on some homepages. And in this case my LinkedIn video thumbnail video is the first one searched. It’s also the first on YouTube. And so here we have it. I can link directly from the Google homepage to YouTube, and this is how it’s getting actually most of its traffic, which is very unusual for a YouTube video.
This is for a more specific search here in incognito mode, how to make a LinkedIn video thumbnail, same video is coming up. But there’s an additional snippet that’s coming up from my blog post. You can see here I’ve made steps within my blog post and it’s coming up right here as the first search after the paid LinkedIn search. It’s coming up first and with a link to my website. And down below, again, we have the LinkedIn video thumbnail coming up first in the video carousel, and then in the normal webpage searches I’ve come up first.
How has this all happened? Well, first let’s talk about this special thing called featured snippets and this very rarely happens. Usually, with this process you might be able to get featured on the Google homepage twice but in this case it’s a third time for some searches.
And what are these featured snippets? Google describes featured snippets in search like this. When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the webpage, the page title and the URL. A featured snippet might look something like this. So it’s showing that comes up at the top of the page and that is indeed what’s happening for us, and then other results below.
We can see the area that it’s showing in the snippet, it’s this area under “The Steps.” And it even showed the words The Steps, so we know that it looked for, it looked within this webpage and it looked through all this other information and said let’s find the thing that says the steps, and then it showed all of the steps.
This is a pattern that I’m trying to repeat. I haven’t done it a lot yet but it’s starting to happen. So I’m looking to how I can repeat steps to get Google to index my webpages and my videos more.
Here is the YouTube video that’s relevant here and we can see that it’s named exactly what people might be searching for, which is How To Make A LinkedIn Video Thumbnail. And in the description I’ve added the same steps. Before You Begin, What You’ll Need, and of course the area that says The Steps. So if someone is searching for LinkedIn video thumbnail, these steps here help it rank high.
You can imagine since YouTube and Google are in the same company, that a lot of their searching is done very similar. And you can see in YouTube search, this is in incognito window, that this video comes up first for LinkedIn video thumbnail. So, that’s a good indicator that it’s also going to come up first on Google. It doesn’t always happen.
Now, you can see this is not a huge video. This is a very niche topic, only 650 views so far over the course of three months. But this is likely where you’re going to win something like this is in a niche topic.
- Step 1: find a helpful how-to YouTube topic that you can rank for.
- Step 2: make a helpful video that answers the questions as quickly as possible.
- Step 3: in editing remove the fluff. Make the video only as long as it has to be.
- Step 4: make it a clear, enticing, accurate thumbnail that gets clicks.
- Step 5: add clear steps in the YouTube description.
- Step 6: on your blog create a post with the YouTube video at or near the top.
- Step 7: write the same clear steps on the blog using the word steps in some way.
- Step 8: use helpful formatting like headlines and lists.
Here’s a zoomed-in version of my webpage and you can see that I’ve done some special formatting to make sure the numbers show up and the headlines show up, and this is The Steps area here. And you can actually over time, you can optimize this and change it around a bit, and update it, and it will continue to rank highly if you do it right. If you’re looking for how the HTML looks, it’s very simple. If you’re a geek like me, you might like to even hand-code your HTML and use OLs and LIs and H2s, and those help the webpage rank.
How do I know that in this video we’ve removed the fluff? Well, when you see something above 50% average percentage viewed, then you start to know that it’s actually a video that’s really watched mostly to the end. And we can see here that very seldom there’s this dip below half the audience, which means that more than half of the audience thinks that this video is valuable almost all the way through until it dips at the very end. So this is how you know that you’re cutting out the fluff.
Where is the traffic coming from for this video? Well, it’s very unusual in that most of the traffic is coming from the external area. So 71% of the watch time minutes is coming from external, and what the heck does that mean? Well, often that means a website or Google. So, let’s take a look at what Google is in this case.
Also you’ll note I did a small amount of advertising, about 100 views at the beginning of the video. But I don’t think that this was a factor in getting it to rank. I just wanted to see what would happen if I could make sure it was top of search.
What we’re seeing here is the results for Google Search. It does very well. This is more than half of the views of the entire, not just of the external sources, this is of all sources, and those viewers are watching it for 62% of the time. So they’re actually searching on Google and finding a YouTube video and watching it for most of the time. This is very unusual. Mostly your traffic sources should come from YouTube.
Technically this is actually not that healthy a video because it’s not getting enough traffic from YouTube. But what I’ve found is a topic that’s not being searched on YouTube very much but it’s being searched on on Google. And we’ve won the day thereby finding the right type of video to make about this topic. Here’s the thumbnail that we did. Now, we’ve been changing this thumbnail up a bit so it doesn’t always appear the same ’cause we’re testing out new thumbnails. This is a successful video and we want to see how we can continue to evolve the thumbnail. But this is the thumbnail. It’s quite to the point. It’s noticeable, it’s clickable. It explains what it is. And this is actually, LinkedIn video thumbnails is exactly the term that it’s winning for.
And how did I determine what the topic was going to be? I had an idea about a video and Morning Fame said well, it’s not really searched on that much but your channel can have a high relevance for this topic.
Now, let’s see if we can get this video ranking on the Google by clicking on the following video because when you click on the next video this video’s ranking goes up on YouTube, which makes it go up on Google. So actually clicking on this next video will help this video rank on Google.