SEO bigwigs and online marketers worldwide are painstakingly trying to boost the search engine position of their businesses and brands. The majority are spending countless hours on guest posts, blog comments, reciprocal links and creating exceptional online content in order to please those complex Google algorithms and climb up the search rankings.
So, what if you found out that those long and relentless strategies were actually rather futile? What if you found out you could get a good Page 1 Google search engine placement by using just one website? What if you found out that there was a media so popular it could actually get your Page 1 placement and more click throughs than any other position? Well you’re just about to find out.

1. Being Number Two ‘Is’ A Big Deal
Lets not beat around the bush, being the world’s second largest search engine is a huge achievement and that is exactly what YouTube is. YouTube is also an incredibly popular site, receiving over 2 billion views a day on its online video content. Using YouTube as an online marketing resource is absolutely essential, whether you’re launching an online video marketing campaign or an SEO strategy. YouTube’s popularity is not to be ignored or down-played, it is a ridiculously big deal, and you should be using it to your full marketing advantage at every turn.


2. YouTube Search Is An SEO Fight Anyone Can Win

Considering YouTube is as huge as it is, it’s remarkably easy to compete for keywords and phrases on. You can get into the YouTube top spots in terms of search rankings with a lot less effort than it’d take to break into the first page of Google search results. So let’s put it to the test.
Type into both Google and YouTube search engines the keyword phrase – hire car. When you do so, YouTube shows up 10,900 results for that particular phrase. That may seem like a lot of results, but when you compare it to the fact that Google shows up “About 429,000,000†it suddenly becomes a pocket-sized amount of results by comparison. Such results actually make Google over 40,000 times more difficult to get a number one search ranking on, as a hire car company, than it does on YouTube. This example isn’t just a one off occurrence, search your own keywords in both search engines and see the staggering differences in competition.
As YouTube has such little competition by comparison to Google, it makes it a completely unsaturated SEO resource. Not only does YouTube allow an easier SEO fight, because it is the second largest search engine in the world, it is still an incredibly dominant search engine. This makes it fantastically viable as a marketing platform, no matter the size or niche of your brand or business.
3. You Can Get A Page 1 Google Ranking Much Easier
Way back in 2007 Google launched ‘Universal’ searches on its website. This meant that its search results were now bringing in images, news, local listings and of course videos into its Page 1 search results. The videos coming into this search more often than not will be YouTube videos. That means that your video on YouTube can leapfrog the entire SEO competition and secure a Page 1 Google listing without having to do any SEO to improve your Google ranking. I appreciate you may be a bit sceptical about this idea, so let’s do another test.
Open Google and search the keyword phrase – tennis lessons. On Page 1 of Google you should see a YouTube video called “Tennis Lessons for Beginner Players: How To Grip A Tennis Racketâ€, which is ranked in position 4. Yes that’s right a YouTube video, in a Google search, at position 4. This would be a fantastic position for sports coaches, sporting goods stores and sports clubs.
Let’s try one more search. Type the following keyword into your Google search bar – dancing. At position 9 you will see a YouTube video called “Where The Hell Is Matt? (2008) and at position 10 you will see a YouTube video titled “Evolution Of Dance By Judson Laipplyâ€. That’s two ‘dancing’ YouTube videos on Page 1 of Google, which would be incredible placements for dancing instructors, dance schools, dance halls and dance shows.
Those are just two examples of YouTube videos made by users/organisations that have leapfrogged their entire Google competition to a Page 1 Google placement. Just to put it in perspective our “tennis lesson’ video came at position 4 out of “About 26,700,000†results, and our two ‘dancing’ videos came at positions 9 and 10 out of “About 603,000,000†results. To jump those entire results to receive a Page 1 Google search engine ranking just from such users, businesses and brands using YouTube and YouTube video content, instead of using SEO strategies on Google, is utterly incredible.


4. Videos In Search Results Get A Higher Click Through Rate
Looking at those particular examples you may find yourself torn. Sure a position 4 ranking is impressive, but a position 9 or 10 ranking? Despite a 9 or 10 ranking being on Page 1 of Google, you might think it’s still not quite a rank of 1, 2 or 3. Normally, that would be the case, but the power of online video can make a position 10 search result be just as powerful as any result in the 1, 2 or 3 positions.
Aim Clear (aimclearblog.com) produced a study in March 2011 that concluded “Videos in universal search results have a 41% higher click through rate than plain text“. This gives real academic merit to the power of online video. The ability a video search result has to become a stronger and more popular search result than plain text results (in any position) is an attribute Internet marketers and SEO corporates should be using to their full advantage.
What this all indicates is that our position 9 and 10 video rankings could be just as popular in terms of click through rates as our position 4 video, and all three YouTube video results could be more popular than any result in positions 1, 2 or 3. This would give you all the incredible traffic and conversion power of being within the top 3 results, without having to spend months or even years on relentless and taxing Google SEO campaigns.
Summary

YouTube and online video content has the incredible power of impacting both Google and YouTube search engines in a way that will no doubt change the SEO strategies of brands and businesses for some time to come. It still won’t be an easy feat to get to the top of the YouTube search rankings and begin to influence those coveted Page 1 Google placements. Although, it will definitely be at least 40,000 times easier (for hire car companies anyway…) to leapfrog your competition and pick up vital SEO value, then it would be trying to beat the Google rankings using arduous Google SEO strategies alone.


This is a guest post from Andy Havard of online video production.