The Secret "Googlejuice" of YouTube

Googlejuice. Googlejuice. Googlejuice.

Ok Google is not Beetlejuice, but the desirability to accomplish what seems impossible runs rampant in the business and online worlds. Businesses are always striving to get higher SEO rankings and to find new ways to get in front of their prospects and customers faster!

So how do we do that?

Depending on which ratings you look at, YouTube is one of the top three search engines. Your prospects are going to YouTube to find out how to do something, to learn something, or to simply be entertained. So you need to upload lots of videos right? Nope. Well not exactly.

Yes you should have targeted, short videos that either show people how to do something related to your brand, learn something about how your product or service can help them, or entertain them in a way that complements your brand.

But it's not just about the number of videos. In all reality, search engines can't "watch" videos and "know" what they are about. They can't "look" at images and "know" the context of the image--though they can do facial recognition. Search engines can only read text and then apply some algorithm that no normal person can understand.

Because of that, captioning your videos is the secret Googlejuice to how your videos raise higher in the search engines. The captions tell the search engine what is contained within the video--helping them "watch" what the viewer will watch.

"But Google does that automatically!" Yes it does, but it usually doesn’t do it correctly. Here are some clean screenshots to show it what it does. I have seen Google interpret conversations horribly wrong where it references political and religious beliefs in videos that contain nothing of the sort.

"Well no one sees those." That is not true! What if someone is deaf? Or what if they are at work and can't listen to the audio? And most importantly, the captions are how the search engines read your video. If you want to be known for YOUR expertise and not some random thing assigned to you by a computer misinterpreting what you said, then take the time or spend the money to have them transcribed. Otherwise, you are wasting valuable Googlejuice that your competition will surely capitalize on.



Update: YouTube has since removed the auto-transcribe feature. While this is good in some areas, it now means that if you want to leverage and build your SEO credibility, you will need to import a transcription. Otherwise, there is no benefit to having videos.