YouTube Changes and How They Affect Your SEO

With the popularity of YouTube growing every year and over 4 billion video views every day now, the site has had to change and adapt to people’s requirements. Video SEO experts are happy about the changes, which place a greater emphasis on the link juice provided by YouTube to your website rankings in Google.

Here are some reasons YouTube’s latest changes are affecting your search engine rankings, and how you can take advantage!

1. Stickiness for your site visitors.

A visitor to your website will spend an average of two minutes longer browsing a website with videos than one without. This is obviously a huge difference, and can help turn a few of your short visits into longer ones. It improves your quality score and enhances the engagement of your users with your site, which search engines will recognize and reward. By simply posting videos on your website, you can reap these SEO benefits.

2. Video thumbnails.

Now that YouTube videos are listed in search engine rankings much more frequently, you’ll find yourself with much less competition for search engine rankings. You get an expanded search result (more screen space taken up than text-only results and a still thumbnail of your video on the search page), and you won’t have to compete against just any text site. By posting videos with proper keyword optimization, you get more screen space and attention from users.

3. Extra effort is rewarded.

It takes more effort to create a video than an article in most cases, which is one reason why the increased emphasis on relevant videos linking to your website is good for you. It’s also good for Google, because your site is less likely to be a spam-filled wasteland. If you create such relevant videos, your effort will be rewarded far more than simply writing a few more articles.

4. Titles, keywords and tags really work.

Now that more people are understanding how to properly use keywords and tags, YouTube and Google are using them on search engine results pages. You need to include relevant keywords in your video title and description. When writing your title, include keywords at the beginning and branding such as your business name at the end of your title.

5. Closed captions are indexed.

Though the introduction of closed captions was recent, YouTube has already recognized it as a fantastic way to describe what your video is really about. After all, what people hear is typically what the video is about, so captions get around the sticky issue of misleading keywords and tag stuffing. Upload a script and YouTube will time it and synchronize it properly for you, or create a closed caption file yourself with manual timing and you’ll benefit not only from the SERP boost, but from foreign and hard of hearing audiences who wouldn’t otherwise watch your videos.

6. Regular publishing is rewarded.

The YouTube Creator Playbook details some of the changes made in the search algorithms, and one such change was the fact that regular publishing is rewarded. If you publish videos only once in a while, you won’t rank as high as someone who releases videos regularly, so set up a schedule to publish videos once a week, once a day, or with some regular frequency that works for you.

These are a few of the changes that YouTube has revealed in its ranking algorithms, and some of the changes noticed by webmasters who use YouTube videos to improve their SEO. They’re easy to take advantage of, no matter whether you’re a small business or a large one, and you can reap these benefits and boost your search engine rankings by taking advantage of some of these steps.