So What? Revisiting Video SEO tactics

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?

Hello. Fantastic. I don't know if you were really confident about that, John. So we'll just come across to 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 realized 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. Okay, let's talk first about video platforms. So, if well, actually, let's rewind. Let's start with the five Ps and purpose. Um, 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 are a lot of folks who say, like, oh no, it's 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.

Um, and sometimes uh you will use it for uh traffic generation. So a lot of how to videos. 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 uh as the chief creator of marketing over coffee. What is your purpose?

What is your user story for the video you guys create? So the user story, uh, to step back for a second, a user story is a simple sentence composed of three parts. As a persona, I want to sew that persona being who you are, your audience, the want-to being your action, and the so that being your intention, and that maps to the five Ps. Um, so as the CEO, I want to create video so that I can drive awareness for what Trust Insights does. Um, 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.

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 it 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.

Um, and then yeah, for marketing over coffee, it's a 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 I have 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 um, you know, the the bigger cast with celebrities that people want to see the video and see the stars, but yeah, people are not too uh not as much interest in sitting down for an hour and watching uh a video about email tactics or something like that. Got it.

Okay, I think those are good. I mean, I know certainly for my own YouTube channel as an in independent creator as well. My goal is really all about awareness. I want you to follow and watch the videos because we do a lot of cross-promotion. Um, you know, this live stream is on my YouTube channel as well as the Trust Insights YouTube channel.

And I want to make sure that people who are following me on my channel also see Trust Insights content, right? The goal is to promote the company and what we do. So that's the that is the purpose. Um 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 we because the last time we did a video SEO show, I believe was 2020.

Um the bar is much higher for quality of video now. The bar is much, much higher, partly because of technology. Um, for example, I'm shooting this on the new iPhone 15, uh, which has a phenomenal camera. Um, it is almost cinematic quality. Uh, you you know, for for true productions, you're still gonna use at the at a minimum a DSLR.

Um, probably you might use a red camera or something like that. But for the average creator, you can you you can use this technology, but um, 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 create skills, there's the editing side of things, um, which is making turning the raw footage and and cleaning it up, and then there is the promotion. Uh, and these three things are different.

When we're talking video SEO, all three parts have to be involved. So you need to have that uh almost a purpose statement and maybe even a user story per video to say the purpose of this video is an audience to attract an audience who's interested in generative AI. Um, the purpose of this video is to attract people who are interested in video SEO. And I as an independent creator, I will say that takes a lot of time. They don't really want to spend doing preparatory work.

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, uh, 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 gonna drive, you know, am I gonna 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 you maybe not going through all of the five Ps in depth, but a user story does cover all of the five Ps. 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. 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, HRIFS, Moz, you name it, whatever, it doesn't matter. Almost all of them will have a video section or a YouTube section. You can uh take your existing keyword list if you've already got one.

If you don't have one, take 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 generative AI for YouTube, unsurprisingly, is chat GPT. So the question then becomes okay, well, how do we then figure out what the content we're gonna create around chat GPT should be so that we can we can create videos that have a unique uh take, but at the same time are are likely to do well. And the system I recommend for this is a little messy. Um, but let me go ahead and just talk through the process.

You're gonna take your keyword list, take your top uh ranking term, and you'll go to YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. Ideally, though, if it's if it's YouTube, um, this will work really well. Um, you'll go into your list, you're gonna filter for stuff, but usually within the last year or so. You probably don't want to use stuff that's much older than that because it's just not been great. And then you're gonna want to look, take a look at the top performing videos uh by views.

How many people have have uh gotten good views on the videos? And we're looking for a couple things. One, um, this is a really good example. If you scoot your chair back, can you tell what the video is about just from the thumbnail? Right?

Some of these, there's some really good, obvious thumbnails, like the text is really easy to see. Um, some of these not less so. The second thing you're gonna want to do, and this is where you're gonna want to use some some generative AI if you have access to it. Um you will want to take these videos and grab the transcripts. Um there's closed captions files, YouTube has closed captions files, you can download those, or you can use the the transcription AI tool of your choice and export all the transcripts for the top performing videos, and then using a tool like Chat GPT or Claude, you can say, what are the top 10 topics or ideas from these top performing videos?

That's gonna give you so you have keyword, you have video transcripts, and now you have concepts from which you can start to build out an editorial calendar for your videos that are gonna that's gonna perform well because you're using what is already known to perform well and turning it into to next steps into turning that to that video content. So that's from the creator side, because remember we're create, edit, remote 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 uh if I go to the Trust Insights uh YouTube channel, and we just uh take a look here, you can see there's a bunch of our videos.

It's tough just from a thumbnail that size to you might want to that's much smaller than the example you were giving before. Exactly. So if we go back to regular YouTube, uh let's go to YouTube.com and let's look up um Rusty 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 just like obnoxiously large. So here's an example. This is popping up because we're uh all of our feeds are connected. Um 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 it makes it appealing. People go, okay, if I want the answer to you know, keys to B2B influencer marketing success, I'm gonna tap on that video.

I want to make it as as stupid and easy as possible. So we have keyword, we have top-performing videos, transcripts, topics now to thumbnails and the creation of the actual video. So there's this whole process of of of building out the content that you want to start creating. 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 con 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 uh the text. And I think that that is probably a big missed opportunity. It is having even the even the way you shoot video is gonna matter visually. One of the things that is a tr is a trend just in media in general, and you can see this if you compare video from the 90s, the 2000s, the 2010s to now, the speed of cut gets faster and faster every decade. Like you used to have, if you go back and watch old episodes of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, you'll have you would have sustained shots like 25, 30 seconds.

Now, in a in a modern show, the jump cuts are like three to five seconds apart. Um, you the only time you really see character center, you know, longer shots is on like uh long dialogue exposition stuff. 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 uh visually appealing to keep people watching. You watch like uh Marcus Brownley, for example, his his jump cuts are super fast, even when the shot itself isn't changing.

Uh one of the things that you'll see a lot is Katie, you actually referenced this um uh earlier in the week on the The Trust Insights podcast. Uh, that sort of max headroom style you know uh cut, that is super popular. It is that is like the popular way of doing video now. I hate it. I'm gonna show my age.

I hate it. Um 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 again showing my age, it makes me nauseous to watch. And so it 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 study game.

Everything is like on a handheld. John, back me up here, would you? Yeah. Well, that's you know, that's just like the relentless pace of it all. I mean, you know, you can go all the way back to say, well, they ruined it at Star Wars, you know, like the first movie, the one chase scene after another, you know, like every movie before that you'll now see as boring and difficult to sit through.

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 ten years ago, you're gonna be you know, you'd be like, oh my god, this 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. You know, 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 uh a group that does a lot of analysis of, you know, the top hundred 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. Yeah, and 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, fifty videos and is trying to drive certain ones to the top. But yeah, uh so much of it rides on that thumbnail, the image of it.

It's um it's just insane. Yep. Thumbnails, different casing of letter uh in within titles. Uh Katie, you're gonna hate this. Um I can't wait.

Emoji in video titles. No. Yes. Uh again. I I am not the right audience for this.

But it's different in 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, um, 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.

Um, so it used to just be you know, views. How many views could does a video get? The more views it gets, the more views it gets. Fred piles on. A number of creators in the last three to four months have said the the math seems to be changing to two metrics.

One, impression to view, the aka click-through rate. Um, the more that you you get clicks, the better your view 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 a click, right? Until the video starts playing and they can do the your pre-roll.

So if you're get if you're not getting that click-through, if not getting the user 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. Um, 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, let's promote it more.

Again, logical, the more video and watch time there's the more ads they can throw in. Um so those two metrics have really become sort of the the north stars by which a lot of creators are starting to prioritize how do we get people to watch the end of the video? Hey, it's jump cut time. Uh 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 so are such a huge focus. And we'll talk about that in a sec. But those two measures are really important. So from the process perspective and the performance perspective in the five Ps, those are the kinds of things that you need to focus a lot on.

And that thumbnail is so important, and that title is so important just to get that tap. 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. Um, 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? 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 helps Google sell more ads, Google will be like, cool, we'll take that. Uh, if it's crap and it and it dissuades people from using the app, like, oh, I watched this video, it was terrible. Then you it's gonna get deprioritized just 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. When now you're starting to see stuff like Runway ML can now generate about 18 seconds of video.

Their North Star 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 gonna see more and more AI generated content. I was playing around with Hey Gen um last week, which is the video avatar service. That um I had it do a couple of videos where it has it like rearranges my mouth to have me speak other languages. I put up a video on of me speaking Polish up on Instagram.

It is good. Like there's a couple of artifacts, but you otherwise uh I send it to some native Polish speakers, and they're like, okay, yeah, we we could tell that you were basically an American who spoke very good Polish. Um that's AI generated, right? 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, they only care is 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's gonna cost you a couple hundred bucks a month for the 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 caption space, you could be marketing to audiences that a bunch of the world is ignoring because they don't have the capability to market those languages. Now, to be clear, your company would then have to be able 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.

What do you think, John? Are you going to start producing marketing over coffee and Sanskrit? In 12 different uh, yeah. As of right now, the sponsors aren't as interested in you know skin Sanskrit versions of email programs and things like that. So I think we're good for now.

But I, you know, Spanish or Indian and Mandarin. I mean, yeah, those are all interesting uh 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 and definitely be up for testing it. Yeah. Of 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 who speak them. Um Chinese, not as much because YouTube is not uh YouTube is somewhat restricted in China. Um so you know, the obviously there are a lot of people outside of China who also speak Chinese. Um, but there's also a tremendous these very large populations. Now again, you'd want to do research, go into your Google Analytics account and see what are the top countries that are getting you're getting traffic from right now, and then you know you don't need to do one for UK.

But if maybe France, like Katie is extremely popular in France, um, we might want to have a French version of the podcast. I have zero idea why. Um but you spoke and no, I know, and I still don't know why. But um remind me, can you hook up your YouTube channel to your Search Console or to your Google Analytics? You can hook it up to Google Analytics.

Um 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. Uh YouTube analytics is very robust. Um you can slice and dice your data eight million different ways, and you can hook it up to Look or Studio and build reports straight from your YouTube channel in there as well. And I think that you know, that's a really good way to approach making some of these decisions, especially about your video uh 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 uh earlier in the week when we were doing our planning, well, do they have a YouTube channel? And I said, No, not yet. And my wheels started spinning of 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, uh, 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. Um, 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 gifts if you want to include those. Like it's very cumbersome, but it's something that people should be 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.

Uh, you had mentioned, you know, YouTube is up against TikTok 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. 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, uh, aka big, medium, small. And what this strategy is it says once irregularly, probably like once a quarter, you're gonna have a big video, some kind of thing. You're gonna spend a lot of money on it, 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. Something you're gonna 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. This is your weekly or even daily video content where you're explaining how to, right? And that's the gonna be the grist for a lot of the search engine portion of YouTube and other services.

Uh, how to upload an email list in HubSpot, how to de-duplicate things, how to uh use whisper.cpp to do your transcripts from with generative AI, whatever the thing is. And this strategy of big, medium, small, why, what, how, hero hub help, uh, will help you create this stuff. Now, going back, Katie, to what you're saying, our friends over at the Marketing AI Institute uh surfaced a tool that I tried out last week, and I'm impressed enough with it. I'm saying, you know, we might have to buy us. Um, it's a tool called Opus Pro.

And 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 you know, minute uh minute pieces are left. And it went through and it started slicing up our podcast and choosing and it would this was I thought really cool. It actually reordered you know our our screen from uh StreamYard into some um portrait uh style videos, and then it does the closed captions right on 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 could obviously can inspect them and say, like, no, this was a stupid edit. Um, 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 started, create, edit, promote, it's done a lot of the edit and gotten the materials ready for promote for us using generative AI. That is a super unflattering clip right there.

These are just the previews. 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, is 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. I'm 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 it 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. 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 uh maybe is good, maybe is not good.

But because it goes through so much of the slicing for you, it can would 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 create and edit portions so that you can spend more time on the promote portions. Do tools like this give you any uh styling at uh abilities? 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. Oh, perfect.

Uh, 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 and swing them around to a Taylor Swift song, but that doesn't really align with brand. John, I keep saying it because we'll probably just make it happen at some point. We'll have to catch the movie this weekend where already buying epoch from missing the launch.

Um and this is an important part of the SEO portion of the strategy because YouTube Shorts and TikTok and Instagram and uh 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. Um they are then likely to go check out the whole video itself. Uh if they see it on TikTok, they can go through and and and find their way to it. Again, impressions to click-through rate and video views are our 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 uh sales adage, niches are riches. Um, and two, 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 uh the almost timely newsletter is I will embed that YouTube video on the blog post of my website when I move uh that that newsletter to Substack I can have the native YouTube player put it right there and if I can get people to view that video a lot um through the newsletter that will help that video perform better in overall searches you know 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 live stream the previous week have those videos be in our newsletter and get more views on them to get our channel performing better right this might I might already know the answer to this question and this uh so I'm just gonna ask it so what 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 uh video SEO at all like is it just a choice that people make in terms of like this is this would be an engagement 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 we have feeding the ducks, which is part of stream yard.

Would that make a difference? So there's there's a very complicated answer to this in two parts. One creators, a couple of creators have said that they have seen substantial differences in the performance their videos showing up in searches and the recommendations when they improve their audio quality in general, right? So YouTube seems at least a couple to a couple of creators, seems to be noticing the quality of audio and and suggesting videos that have better quality audio versus worse. And I've noticed this myself in looking at because I like to follow like 90s and 2000s cover bands.

Um and I've seen those bands that have better sound quality outperforming those that do not. Um so that's one aspect is if uh in general audio matters, make it as good as possible. But if uh YouTube may or may not be uh taking that to account. Second is from a neuroscience perspective. So background music, percussion in particular, can stimulate the brain in different ways.

So if you were to have to if you have certain sounds within your video that are not distracting from the conversation, but are subtly 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? Yeah, maybe a uh a quiet, subtle but very fast uh 140 beat per minute percussion underneath your talk track that in turn could get people to watch longer, right? Because it's that's a more pleasant experience, and therefore, if they watch longer, your video shows up better in search results. So it really is more about engagement versus the SE, 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. Yes. And the 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. Yeah, I don't know. I've seen a lot of videos though with bad music beds, you know.

Yeah, you can screw up too. You need to be careful. It can't overpower the vocals or you're gonna totally lose it. Exactly. Um there's there's limits to all the 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. Um 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, um, it's kind of like uh design, right? You know, uh earlier in the week on the Trust Insights podcast, I was showing Katie a slide and Katie's like, oh my eyes.

I could I I I physically couldn't read the slide. Right. So that's but that's bad design. 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 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. It's a lot to think about. And so, yeah, it's a lot to think about. And there's even more. And wait, there's more.

Wait, there's more. Um, you want to pay attention on your analytics, especially to completions of YouTube Shorts. Because YouTube Shorts do boost the boost your channel overall. Um, and because they're under 60 seconds, if if someone's dropping off in a 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.

Um, second is if you're willing to invest the money, and this is more of a on the creator side of things, um, tools like vidIQ and TubeBuddy can not only give you recommendations for your own content, but vidIQ in particular can look at top performing competing channels in your space and uh infer some of the metrics and say, okay, here's the you know, this video has the highest click-through rate of say um, you know, insights trust, the our our arch enemy 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? So if you could summarize into three things that people need to do for their video SEO 2024 plan, what are three things people should be doing? 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? That's that's that's kind of a no-brainer. Number two is make sure you're using all of the neuroscience hacks and just good video production uh 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 feed. And three, focus on the impression to view, click the rate, and focus on stream yards doing the little emoji in the stream. Let's try to figure out what that was. Yep.

Focus on impressions to click the rate and focus on uh total watch time as your north stars for measurement. If people are not watching your videos all the way to the end, figure out why. John, what do you think? Yeah, it's a lot of work, but you have no alternative if you want to cut through the clutter. Get to it.

Coming soon, marketing over coffee in Spanish. C well, uh, per usual, I am appropriately overwhelmed with the things that I need to start thinking about. So, you know, great job. 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 are you know that is this is their job. They, you know, uh, you look at Sean 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 uh 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 Marcus Brownley, him and his team of I think like 10 or 15 people, that is their job. So being a creator is a career, it 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.

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