How to RANK YouTube Videos on FIRST PAGE of Google — 5 Tips

- Getting a video to rank on the first page of YouTube, and really even better, the first page of Google, can really change your life, your business, and your brand. And what's crazy is last year, Think Media content got over 1,179,000 views from Google, not from YouTube, but from videos ranking on Google. And in this video, I'm actually gonna be sharing five tips on how you can get your videos to rank on the first page of Google, plus how you can connect different monetization strategies at the end of the video, so definitely get ready to stick through the whole training for everything that is coming up. And, you can see right here, this is a first page, number one spot ranking for one of my videos that also happens to be years old, and so every single year, it gets more views, more subscribers, more growth, and more awareness, and so just imagine a few of your videos in these spots and what that could do for you. And I wanna give you a power tip, right up front, what you you say and Google sees in your video can help you rank. The words you're actually saying, and what Google, who owns YouTube, is seeing in the video, can help you rank. But, hey if we're just meeting, my name is Sean Cannell, and my passion is helping you with the best tips and tools for building your influence with online video. I'm the coauthor of the book "YouTube Secrets," and I'm so fired up for the training today, because it's really all about how to rank YouTube videos on the first page of Google. And if we're just meeting, it's been a blessing to have a couple different YouTube channels, whether that's Think Media, we recently crossed a million subscribers, or Video Influencers, we're on our way to 600,000, plus we get to work with a lot of people in our community, and many students, and people that are a part of some of our trainings, really getting to test and experiment in a lot of different ways when it comes to creating YouTube content.

But hey, if you already go value out of that power tip, can you smash the Like button? If you're ready for this training, you might wanna grab something to take notes with, and I wanna say what's up to Andrea, and Heather, and Stella for being here live, but if you're on the replay, you're gonna love the value that we have, so let's get into it straightaway. And, I'm also the creator of Video Ranking Academy. I've been actually helping people for over four years learn video SEO, search engine optimization, and how to build highly influential and profitable YouTube channels, and that's kind of our signature training program that thousands of students absolutely love and have gotten crazy results from. And here's the thing, Google is really the holy grail right? When you think about any business, any brand, especially now, as physical real estate is kind of being disrupted, digital real estate is more valuable than ever before. And what's more valuable than that first page of Google? That first spot? And what's crazy is there's a lot of new ranking opportunities for them, to be specific, when it comes to ranking content on Google. The first one, of course, is just a number one rank in top search results on Google, right? That's getting one of your videos to just show up either number one, or hey, if you're in the top two, three, four, five, you're gonna be getting a lot of traffic. Of course, number one is that ideal, and that's just what's been happening over the last few years. But there's a couple others as well. This is another one of those top ranking spots, but what you're noticing here is that videos are showing up in different ways. And so, the second one is suggested clips. The first one's just like a first page ranking, the second one is actually when Google does a suggested clip. If you notice this text right here, it says suggested clip, 79 seconds. So, Google is analyzing the video, the YouTube video, and actually saying, an answer to this audience question, the intent of the audience here, we want to jump you straight to 79 seconds, so when someone presses play,

Google is kind of seeing what's in the video and bringing people straight to that. In the five tips that we're gonna be sharing, we're gonna be talking about how Google can discern that, and ways you can influence that to get kind of that suggested clip. Here's another one of our videos ranking for a suggested clip, and how that shows up on Google. Now the next one is a Google video carousel. You can see here, two different videos that are in a carousel on the first page of Google. If you click to the right, you're potentially grouped together with multiple different videos for a particular search query, and this video itself has gotten 13,215 views just from Google Search. You can go into your YouTube Studio, look at your traffic sources, and actually see if you're getting traffic from Google. How crazy is that? Yes, this video's crushing, with Heather Torres from the Think Media team on YouTube, and it's in suggested, and that's a whole conversation for another day, but on Google, this video has gotten 13,000 organic views just from ranking in a top search result. And then the next one's key moments. This shows up in mobile, I don't believe this shows up in desktop, and this is super-crazy. So my video, "Best Cheap Cameras for YouTube," notice how Google is creating this, skip to 1:55, to 2:06, and it even has the name of the camera, and the key moments, right, of the video, so people can skip around. So tell me in the comments if you've noticed when you're searching for content on Google, these different results. Have you noticed just, of course top video rankings, key moments, carousels, suggested clips? These are all the different opportunities for getting your content to rank. Now, here's another one, Google Key Moments, where I talk about the best copyright free music

for YouTube videos. And you have the YouTube Audio Library, YouTube Channels, Read the Terms of Use, even the Question of the Day, right? How crazy that Google's algorithms and robots are seeing this kind of detail. And Tubular Insights told us this, videos appear for 55% of Google keyword searches, and 82% of the results are from YouTube. Think about that. So, right now Google is serving up videos for over half of what people are searching for. But 82% of the videos they're serving up are from YouTube, my friend. So it's good you're on YouTube checking out this video right now, and I hope you're building your YouTube channel, investing in YouTube. In fact, just a couple quick conclusions from this, right now is the time to go all-in on YouTube. Number one, if you already have a YouTube channel, go all-in and double down, triple down, creators create, be creating content. Number two, it's easier to rank for competitive terms with YouTube videos versus web pages. So knowing some of these strategies, you can rank for competitive terms by creating smart YouTube videos, in addition to maybe optimizing a web page, having a blog. Number three, your views and traffic that you get from Google, think about it, it's targeted, it's free, and it's consistent. Like, it's based on a query that tells you exactly who the searcher is, the target audience is, the person that's looking for a specific question. It's free. You put a little bit of hustle, a little bit of elbow grease into this, and it's building your business, your brand, on autopilot, and consistent. And I'll show you an example of how consistent it can be, and then plus, number four, Google's always adding new features, so there's new, all these videos I did years ago are now benefiting from key moments, or benefiting from video snippets, and things like that, and Google's always changing things around, but when you're giving Google what it wants, new features can boost your old content, and so we're gonna be talking about five proven tips

for how to position YouTube videos to rank on Google, but here's kind of an example that I want you to see. This video, "Best Cheap Cameras for YouTube," came out in 2016, over four years ago. And the result of that, in just one year, just 2019, so a year ago, at the time of recording this, this video got 14,704 views from Google Search. Crazy, right? The video's four years old, but last year, I had forgot about this video, man, you know, it's in the past, but yet, it got over 14,000 views just from Google, and it also got an additional 345,000 views from YouTube, and it's over 1,506 days old. I mean, can we just have a pause for the cause right now? I mean that's, it's pretty crazy, right? And this is the power of a ranked video. We really believe here at Think Media that you are one ranked video away from changing your life and business. One video that gets ranked in search, as well as getting suggested through the YouTube algorithm, and it's still getting traffic, it's still building my brand. So just imagine that for, again, your brand. I always wanna encourage you on the hustle, on putting out content, on making sure you're posting consistently, and being smart, and not just working harder, but working smarter, and thinking about the power of that consistent, free, organic traffic that is highly targeted, right? And so, quick question for you, do you already have a YouTube channel? And what niche is your YouTube channel in? Let me know, and maybe how long have you been a part of our Think Media community here? Did you just discover us? If you want to, if you're not subscribed, definitely subscribe for more content like this. I've got these five tips so you can optimize your videos for this, but what niche are you in? What's kinda the topic that you're creating? Are you a business owner, are you a hobby YouTuber? Definitely let me know in the comments, and I would love to connect with you. I see some people that are in, like, dogs, travel, drifting, I wonder if that's car drifting

or drifting in the sense of travel? We've got people doing movies, we have people doing gaming, we have people doing paintless, church videos, music content, cinematic content, food, the cool thing is, fitness, hockey, you know, these are all topics that people are searching for and wanting information on. Youth ministry, like so many different things, and so, that's awesome. And think about this, what questions are the people you're trying to reach asking YouTube and Google? You wanna be answering specific questions, right? And so let's get into tip number one, research before you press record. Research before you press record. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is they press record, and they're like, "I'm gonna record a video, "I'm not really gonna think it through, "I'm gonna shoot it." Then they sit down, and like, "Okay, so now let's title this thing. "Let's do the keyword research, "let's do the tags." And I honestly wanna say, you can have some success that way, but like, you kinda missed your chance. It's already too late. You did things in the wrong order. You always wanna research first, record second. So what I'm talking about is keyword research, like what topics and terms are people searching for consistently in your niche? And then Google research, what kind of content is Google ranking for the search term. Now, for specifically, why this matters on Google, is for some topics, you actually wanna go see if Google is already ranking videos or not. Make sense? Because some topics, they're not actually gonna really rank videos, like maybe if it's a shopping topic, it's gonna be like a carousel of clothes that go to websites, it's gonna be images, it's gonna be blogs, and if videos aren't already there, it actually probably means you're not gonna be able to get your video to rank. This is how to rank YouTube videos on Google. However, if Google wants to serve up video content to that, that's why you're taking your topic, you're doing keyword research, and then you're going to Google to get some insights and some feedback, that's kind of that tip at kind of a 101 level. So for example here, even best camera for YouTube, the stop suggestions are kind of these, this is actually a YouTube video, but it's presented sort of as a blog, it's shopping suggestions, right? That might be ranked number one. And then even this snippet of the questions that people ask, whereas over here, I had to scroll down, so what you're seeing is on the first side, you really don't see like a carousel of videos until one, two, three, like four posts down. Which is fine, but you're just, you're going to Google first, you haven't even recorded a video, to see, okay, where would videos be, and so then I have some ranked videos here, but they're a little bit down the page, they're actually not ranked right at the top where they're gonna get as much traffic, if that makes sense. And so the first one's like shopping, the second one, actually, is a YouTube video, but kind of done a little bit different, and the people ask these questions, and then is the carousel, and I've got a couple videos in there. So go research Google, because if you really want to take one video, and say, "Okay, I wanna rank this video "on the first page of Google," it may not even have a shot if videos don't rank for that search term. Tip two, you wanna create an optimized video for ranking. You wanna create a video that's optimized for ranking. So, you wanna optimize a video for watch time, minutes matter most, that's why YouTube's telling us about view duration, things like that, right? You wanna talk about your script. Check this out, what you say in your video matters. Now, I don't script my videos and read them off a teleprompter, but I do sit down and outline them, and this speaks to researching and planning before you record. Again, you don't just wanna shoot from the hip here, because Google is listening. Let's not forget that Google and YouTube are text-based platforms. "No Sean, YouTube's a video platform." Fair, but they're listening to your words. Google's search engine is thinking about the closed captions, the words, what you're saying in your videos,

so if you wanna be ranking for something specific, what you say matters. So you're planning out, "Okay, I'm gonna optimize this video "to keep people watching, "I'm gonna optimize what I say, "I'm also gonna optimize the visuals." Literally, what is shown on screen, Google is getting super-smart now, like it can tell if people are in things, it can tell if cameras are in things, so there's even a point to the B-roll in your video, or the visuals in your video, to Google saying, here's what they wanna do, they wanna serve up the best answer for the question. So they're watching the actual video, robots are, algorithms, right, are watching it, and the visuals matter, and then of course, the metadata, your title, your description, your tags. What we've learned this year is that tags matter a little bit less, but they're very important for really, reverse engineering and strategically positioning your video, but the title and the description carry more weight. Tip number three, add closed captions, and this is a no-miss tip, because Google is listening, but they give more weight to professionally produced captions. So, your first option is you can just use automatic captioning, which YouTube does anyways, and you could go in there, and maybe fix it up. But listen to what Google themselves say, "These automatic captions are generated "by machine learning algorithms, "so the quality of the captions may vary. "We encourage creators to provide "professional captions first. "YouTube is constantly improving "its speech recognition technology, "however, automatic captions might misrepresent "the spoken content due to mispronunciations, "accents, dialects, or background noise. "You should always review the automatic captions, "and edit any parts that haven't been properly transcribed." So you either need to be going in there and reviewing, or uploading professional captions. Tell me in the comments, do you caption your videos? Do you upload videos? If you wanna rank a YouTube video on the first page of YouTube,

but also of Google, captions really, really matter. Again, at a 101 level you could do automatic, but you also can do professional. So, the second option is to use something like Rev.com, and Rev.com's somebody we've worked with, and we're actually an affiliate for them, but we love them. I mean, we have done, all of our videos have gone through Rev over the last three, four years now, five years, and so you can see kind of in the back end here of our Rev, here's the videos, and it says the status is complete. So when we finish a video, we upload it to Rev.com, or just have our Rev.com connected, and it's really easy to get captions for $1.25 per minute. So if you think you got a seven minute YouTube video, a 12 minute YouTube video, that's gonna cost you around $15, right, to do a 12 minute YouTube video. And you're gonna have professional captions. So what's really cool about this is, again, you can connect the account, you have the ability to then get that video straight to YouTube. The editing interface is super-cool, but there's also like some professional tools. We've messed around with some of the other services that try to kinda like undercut on price, but they slowed us down at a major way. The cool think about Rev, is it's all about speed, it's all about getting done, and the fact that they have like, 99.9% accuracy, and so what's cool is, you can actually, you can change atmospherics, so you can actually describe important sounds, it's like music playing, or clapping, or background noise, that can help for the hard of hearing, and yo, YouTube appreciates these things, right? Because it wants to serve the best answer to the question. It can replace casual words with formal words, so if you're like me, and you sometimes say, "I'm gonna," it can actually have the captions say, "I'm going to." It can replace U.S. words with U.K. spelling, so a lot of really, really powerful features, that's why you've probably already heard of Rev.com, because they're the absolute best in the industry. So anyways, just shout out, because this is super-important, this is our affiliate link, right, and we actually have the opportunity for you to get $10 off your first order from Rev, so you could at least give it a try. If you go to ThinkMediaRev.com, or there's a link in the description below, literally, we use it every single day in our business, for our Think Marketing podcast, for all of our YouTube videos, and then we leverage the power of that caption to even use it on other social media platforms, because once you have that perfectly professional produced caption, you can download it in multiple different formats, then you're able to like, just drop that, if you upload something to LinkedIn, one of your videos, or Facebook, and these other platforms, and really leverage what you've invested in. So definitely check that out, link in the description below. But remember, what you say, and what Google sees in your videos help your video rank. So then think about what you say, and then when you caption it, and now, Google says, "Okay, this is not just our auto-captioning, this is a professional caption file," and the words you're using, even if you're saying certain keyword phrases, now you're not trying to just like, repeat the phrase, how to rank YouTube videos on the first page of Google, which I just repeated the phrase and the title of this video, whether that's gonna carry wait or not, like I mean, sure, because think about it this way, if you never say, or you don't articulate the very phrases and thoughts, and really articulation of what the viewer is searching, then Google will be like, "Well, is this video even really about "what you say it's about, "or how much teaching and reinforcement is there on that?" But let's go into tip number four, and if you're getting value out of this video, can you hit the like button? And let's look at tip number four, add timestamps. Add timestamps. So now, think about Google Key Moments, you know what Google Key Moments is seeing is certain times in your video, so one of the powerful things you could do by adding timestamps, is at least give Google more information

about what's happening in your video at different times. So recently we did a video on video production gear that we used at one of our deeper trainings that we do here in Vegas, and we do it online, for just like a small group of business owners, entrepreneurs, YouTube creators, and this was the behind-the-scenes of all the gear we use, so how we set this live event up, and what we do for audio, and our road podcaster, and whatever else. So, this is how you add timestamps, you just put them in the description, and see it says Video Timecodes, and you just type the number. So when you just type, and what I did is I broke it down to the audio sections, here's the audio, here's the video, here's the lighting, so if people wanna skip straight to the Shure Microphone Handheld Wireless System, boom, they can click right there. If they wanna skip straight to the RodeCaster, bang, that timestamp is clickable. So, this definitely takes some time and energy, but what's cool about it is that you are giving Google some more insight, in the description, about the content in your video. Now, I also pinned this in the top comment, just to also serve the viewer at a better level. So when I do timestamps, you got these video timecodes, they can skip to that part of the video by just clicking those, so I write it one time, and then I do it twice, if that makes sense, right? I do it two different times. I put it in the comment, and I put it in the description down below. And so, okay, next one. Next one is, that was the example, the video we did it on here, it's just an example of seeing them, timestamps in the YouTube description, and then optional timestamps in the pinned comment, and that is, we still have tip number five in just a second, but I also wanna share a case study with you, and how we monetize, and some things like that. But let me know, do you add timestamps to your video? Have you ever? It's one of the things that I'm trying to, you know, it takes more intentionality, it takes more thoughtfulness, and this takes you all the way back to when you're preparing your content itself.

Again, Google wants to serve up the best answer to the viewer's question, and so you wanna be really intentional about the fact that you organize your content in a strong way, and really just serving the viewers, right? And so, we're gonna get to that fifth tip in just a second, but if you actually have not seen our free web class, obviously I'm just hitting some of these concepts at a high level, on the web class, we're gonna talk specifically about how to title your videos, how to tag your videos, what to write in the descriptions. At the end of the class, we talk about our premier YouTube coaching program, called Video Ranking Academy, but whether or not you wanna be a part of that is entirely up to you. At Think Media, we just always wanna be transparent and let you know how you can go to another level, get deeper training, be a part of a community of like-minded business owners, entrepreneurs, and business-minded content creators that really wanna crush it on YouTube with the things that are working, and so you can watch this web class entirely for free to find the actual video ideas that will rank. By the way, some things have so much competition, you might wanna be going after the right video ideas. What are the best keyword research tools, we talk about that, and then how to rank videos step-by-step. So that's at ThinkMasterClass.com, and there's a link in the description below if you wanna check that out as well. But tip number five, here's five things to optimize on every video if you want your YouTube videos to rank on the first page in YouTube. So the first one is the title, right? You wanna optimize your title, really important, probably the most important from YouTube's perspective. This is of course influencing click-through rate as well. Then your thumbnail, right? Very important, because that's gonna influence click-through rate. Your description, and I hope you haven't been being lazy on your descriptions, but this is definitely, I think, an opportunity, and a missed opportunity of a lot, specifically for giving Google good information about what's in your video. Your tags, but your topic, I would say, is the most important. I'm mean, they all matter, and they all work together, but you wanna make sure you're talking about the right topics at the right time, and seeing the video idea opportunities, right, for ranking videos. So here's a case study. Here's like, again, it's the topic, it's the thumbnail, it's the title, but I did a video called Best Lighting, and I told you I was gonna show you how you can monetize content. "Best Lighting for YouTube Videos Under $150?" And it ranks on a carousel right here, on the first page of Google, as well as on YouTube, and the interesting thing, right, was by putting out a good video, it didn't really blow up at first, this is in YouTube Studio, it just kinda was doing okay, but it really blew up at, it started to rise around day 20, was performing above average at day 32, but by day 48, it started to go on this crazy rise. It's kinda interesting, because we've been noticing in all of the multiple YouTube channels we run, and our Video Ranking Academy Master Coaches run different channels and all the things we see, so we're getting all this data, and we're noticing that the tipping point for videos is sometimes breaking out at day 30, day 45, we've even seen some breaking out at day 125, different things, and so, point being, I'll also just wanna encourage you in the hustle, be consistent with best practices, be consistent, and don't be so judgemental of content in just a one, two, three-day period, just kind of an interesting case study right now. This video has generated $237 from YouTube AdSense when I took this screen shot in mid-March, but here's the cool thing, I connected to affiliate marketing, and I'm reviewing products that are on Amazon of a budget lighting kit, and in one month's time, this video has, it sold 315 units of these Neewer light kit, that's $45,000 in revenue, total, and I get a 4% Amazon affiliate commission. So this video alone, from optimizing it, ranking it, ranks on YouTube, ranks on Google, has generated $1,813, that was in one month's time. Adding it up since it came out in December, I think it's probably generated around $4,000. So that's the power of producing the right videos and the right topics, positioning them the right way, and then connecting them to smart affiliate strategies. This is just kind of an idea of doing this over and over and over again. And I'm not trying to say these results are typical, or that by following this training you're gonna get any results at all, I'm just saying this is just sharing what's worked for us, and kind of how powerful this is when you connect it to a cohesive strategy. So, from January 1 to March 10 of 2020, generated around $46,000 profit from just affiliate marketing on Amazon. Pretty cool right? And so again, if you wanna learn a little bit more about that, we talk about those monetization strategies and rankings on that free Master Class, highly recommend it if you haven't gotten a chance to watch it, and if you have gotten a chance to watch it, shout me out in the comments. It's been recently updated, so if you haven't seen the newest version, check it out, ThinkMasterClass.com. And so, let me know if you got value out of this video, and smash the like button. Those are five tips that you can go apply right now, and double down on your YouTube and your Google strategy. Let me know what niche you're in, if you're just joining, because I'm just curious what kind of content are you building up. Cody, thank you for the Super Chat, Cody says, "I gained four local clients this week "helping Facebook influencers "with Think Media's recent Master Class, "and my storytelling and media advice. "Result, I am busy." Cody, thanks so much for the feedback, I'm so grateful that Master Class helped you. Friends, if you wanna check out anything we talked about in this video, Rev.com, I hope you're captioning your videos, the Master Class, or a few other bonus videos, check those out in the description below, smack like, if you smack, punch, smash, dominate, blow up, okay, lightly touch the like button if you got value. And check it out, there's actually a video I want you to check out next, because we know how important titles are, and so if you haven't gotten a chance to watch this video, click or tap the screen to watch this video on Viral Titles, and I will see you in the next video. Peace. (upbeat music) - Welcome to the Think Marketing show, the number one podcast for growing and scaling your business with online video. I'm Heather Torres. - And I'm Sean Cannell, and we're from Think Media, and if this is your first time listening, welcome. - This show is dedicated to helping you learn how to get your.