As the stats show, over the year, shopping went away almost completely, while more and more images were being shown. But the constant “winner” is video, even though its visibility decreased slightly through the year:
YouTube versus the rest of the world
The study mentions that a whopping 80% of those video integrations are YouTube videos. This leads Marketingland to conclude that you should be using YouTube, driven in part by SearchMetrics’ slightly partisan info-graphic wanting to highlight how Google promotes its own properties in search.
This baffled me, as my experience with my own customers for my Video SEO plugin for WordPress was completely different, actually having a lot of success with other video platforms. I’m not saying Google is a saint, but I am going to show you why this 80% is a logical number.
It’s rather simple: 80% of the videos are from YouTube, because YouTube is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Over 2012, Vimeo, one of YouTube biggest competitors, proudly reported its 50 millionth video being uploaded to the service in that year.
In contrast, YouTube reported 72 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. In years before, the average length of a video was 4 minutes 12 seconds, but let’s assume it’s 5 minutes now, so 12 videos per hour.
This means YouTube users upload 72 * 12 videos per minute, at a minimum. This would mean approximately 450m videos were uploaded to YouTube in 2012 alone.
So that’s 50m videos for Vimeo, versus probably billions of videos on YouTube. YouTube dwarves all the other video hosts and thus it’s absolutely logical for YouTube to take 80% of video rankings. But…
There’s another reason why other video hosts and sites aren’t getting as much love. It’s not because Google favours its own platform that much, it’s simpler than that. Most of the videos outside of YouTube are very poorly optimised.
Video optimisation
While slowly more and more companies are picking up on video, not in the least because it’s proven to be a solid driver for conversions, publishers and ecommerce sites alike are doing a very bad job in optimising their videos for search rankings.
In their 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark, MarketingSherpa found that only 41% had worked on optimising their digital assets. Only a fraction of the companies that have worked on optimising their digital assets will have actually optimised their videos.
So don’t do YouTube?
Now I want to be very clear: you should absolutely be putting your videos on YouTube. Because it’s the second search engine in the world, it’s a great way of driving traffic to your website. But you shouldn’t optimise your videos just there.
You should be optimising your videos on YouTube to be found on YouTube and the videos on your website (self-hosted or hosted on another platform, but embedded on your site) should be optimised to be found in (Universal) search results.
The reason you want to optimise them on your own site is that you want to have complete control over everything around the video. If you want to convert a viewer to sales, or more page views, you’d better already have them on your website.
Getting them to click from YouTube to your site is a hurdle that’ll lead to losing most of the clicks.
Not optimising your videos means that you’re not properly using your assets. And if you don’t have any videos yet, read up on the above linked research about what videos do for conversions and then you’ll know that you should be creating them.
If you do, optimising them is a logical next step and rather simple once you have a process in place. Phil Nottingham’s excellent post on building a video SEO strategy should get you started with that.
Now go, grab that chance!
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