SEO challenges

Meredith 0:24

What's on the docket today?

Meredith's husband 0:26

Today I wanted to talk about some of my own SEO challenges. Oh, okay.

Meredith 0:30

What.

Meredith's husband 0:30

I'm dealing with with my own SEO.

Meredith 0:32

Oh.

Meredith's husband 0:33

For one reason because I think it will help illuminate where at least one portion of SEO is going in the future.

Meredith 0:40

Oh.

Meredith's husband 0:41

Oh, you sound thrilled.

Meredith 0:42

No, I'm just, I'm focused, I'm focused in. I'm going to try and remain on track.

Meredith's husband 0:51

Well, the issue is video and I realize that probably is not an issue for a lot of photographers, although some it might be.

Meredith 0:59

You know, video killed the radio, you know I watched the first 15 minutes of MTV.

Meredith's husband 1:06

Like you can do that on YouTube, you can go watch the first 15 minutes of MTV and that was the video, do you remember?

Meredith 1:11

that I know. Of course it was. I was watching it when it happened.

Meredith's husband 1:14

It's quite the appropriate first song to play.

Meredith 1:17

It's perfect. It's kind of genius.

Meredith's husband 1:20

So video, video, seo. I have a whole lot of videos on my blog and they are tutorials. They are mostly the majority of them are tutorials about how to fix specific SEMrush issues, and they've gotten a lot of traffic.

Meredith 1:33

Because they're good resources. How about that they are?

Meredith's husband 1:36

good resources. The videos themselves are pretty terrible. They're some of the first videos I ever made and they are cringingly awful, but they still got a lot of. They still have useful information in them.

Meredith 1:47

That's what's going to withstand the test of time. Well, not so fast, because guess what happened.

Meredith's husband 1:57

There was a dramatic decline in my traffic.

Meredith 2:01

Recently Dramatic? Yes, from when to when. How recent, so it started.

Meredith's husband 2:04

So I didn't notice it until, I would say, january or February, because I wasn't really paying close attention, because that blog is not really monetized for me, so my livelihood is not based on it, so I'm not watching that traffic like I otherwise might. But I noticed in January, february and I traced it back using Google Search Console to early December. And, sure enough, early December Google changed the way they index or their rules for indexing videos.

Google Search Console

Meredith 2:33

How so.

Meredith's husband 2:34

The actual message inside Google Search Console was video is not the main content of this page.

Meredith 2:41

But it is.

Meredith's husband 2:42

It is yes, and I knew I wasn't. I knew I wasn't doing anything wrong. I knew all the markup, schema and that's the sort of technical stuff behind video. I knew all that was proper. It had passed all the tests, so this was just a change in how Google was doing those, because I then I said, oh okay, if that's not the case, let me try a few different things. I tried to. I had some pages just I put up as a test that had just a video, just a video, that's it. And it still came back and said video is not the main content of the page.

Meredith 3:10

What does that mean? I'm sorry, I don't know what that means though.

Meredith's husband 3:13

So an example that Google provides of when video is not the main content of the page. Let's say you have a recipe and in that recipe you have little videos of the steps involved, so video is not the main content of that page.

Meredith's husband 3:29

Okay, there's a lot of situations where you might have video and it's supplemental to what the page is about. That makes sense, but for my blogs in particular, it was really just the video, and then I would have a transcript or a summary of the video, but the video was right at the top. It was obviously the main content of the page. So I began searching through forums and coming across other people who have experienced the same thing.

Meredith 3:55

Does that have anything to do with why I couldn't add video on my Squarespace? Squarespace Squawk.

Meredith's husband 4:01

No, it does not.

Meredith 4:02

Then I will not even complete my sentence.

Meredith's husband 4:04

But I will say that everybody I encountered in the forums who was experiencing this very upset, Lots of people saying how stupid Google is and how Google is stupid and they're stupid and they're stupid and they do stupid things. I don't believe that's the case. So my initial reaction was, oh great, how do I fix this? Was like everybody else, I need to fix it, I need to get my videos back in search results. But then I was like wait a minute, I know that Google is not stupid.

Meredith 4:35

Right.

Meredith's husband 4:35

Google does things for a reason. So I took a step back into my own SEIQ way of thinking and said well, I need to figure out what Google is doing here way of thinking and said well I need to figure out what Google is doing here.

Meredith's husband 4:46

Why are they doing this? What's happening? Because I can't fight against them. Like everybody, their initial reaction is to try to get their thing back into Google. Figure out what's wrong, do it like it was. If Google has made up their mind to do something, you cannot fight against them. Okay, no?

Meredith 5:01

that's called rage against the machine.

Meredith's husband 5:03

So what I did is I first went to look for examples of people who were still getting their video into search results.

Meredith 5:10

And how do you do that?

Meredith's husband 5:12

When you do a Google search, you can click videos, just like you can do an image search. You can do the same thing for videos. And that's the problem is Google was no longer considering my videos to be videos, no longer considering my videos to be videos. And when you do that, it used to be that whenever you did a search and you look through videos that you would find, let's say, of the first 10 videos, seven or eight of them are going to be on YouTube.

Meredith 5:35

I was just going to, yeah.

Meredith's husband 5:36

But there are always going to be a few that are on somebody's blog and that's how I was getting my traffic. So I did this again in the first 10 are all YouTube. So I did this again in the first 10 are all YouTube. So I load up the next 10, all YouTube. I load up the next 10, all YouTube. I load up. I go through hundreds of results. I do different searches. They are 100% all YouTube results.

Meredith 5:55

Do you have a YouTube channel?

Meredith's husband 5:57

I do not yet.

Meredith 5:59

Hi, see, that would be my. I would think, oh, I should start a YouTube channel.

Meredith's husband 6:03

See, that would be my, I would think, oh, I should start a YouTube channel. Yeah, that is. You just ruined the ending of the podcast. Thank you, You're welcome.

Meredith 6:09

Well, I thought it, I'm sure.

Meredith's husband 6:11

Then I began thinking okay, well, this is obviously a move that Google is making and, yeah, lots of people are upset about it because the videos on their blogs are no longer going to be indexed, and they're saying this is not fair and people are upset and I kind of get that. But also, youtube is supposedly the second biggest search engine in the world. So there's Google.

Meredith 6:33

And Google and YouTube are not run by the same people.

Meredith's husband 6:37

They are Google owns YouTube.

Meredith 6:38

That's what I thought. Yes, just checking, correct.

Meredith's husband 6:42

And so it seems to me like, yeah, it's within their right, if you're searching for videos, that they're going to direct you into the biggest video search engine in the world.

Meredith 6:51

That they just happen to also own. They're going to put their preferences to that. That makes sense.

Meredith's husband 6:57

Yeah, of course I kind of wonder why they weren't doing it this way before. But if you're on the other end of the stick and you're like, well, I was getting a whole bunch of traffic and now I'm not, because of Google, they're stupid. That's the kind of typical reaction.

Meredith 7:09

Yes, they are.

Meredith's husband 7:10

But before I made this decision I was not as quick as you, evidently, to come to this conclusion Story of my life. But I took that information and I thought about, well, what else has been happening. And I thought about well, what else has been happening and I didn't do this on purpose, but I just happened to remember that a week or two ago, probably more than that, a few weeks ago, google announced that Google Podcasts the platform is ending. They're stopping it completely Is it a big.

Meredith 7:35

Thing.

Meredith's husband 7:36

Well, it seems like kind of a big thing until they say we are moving Google Podcasts to YouTube, YouTube.

Meredith 7:41

There you go, all Google Podcasts are going to be on YouTube.

Meredith's husband 7:42

Youtube, there you go All Google podcasts are going to be on YouTube. And then I thought back a little bit further and I go oh, remember, google Music.

Meredith 7:52

Yeah.

Meredith's husband 7:52

Ended about a year ago. Guess where that went. It's now. Youtube Music and then before that. Youtube they announced that you can get regular TV via YouTube. You can get, like, essentially, cable and HBO and all that stuff through YouTube. So I'm like, okay, well, this is obviously the direction that Google is going. Youtube is going to be a major thing. It's already a major thing, but it's going to be more integrated with search results. So what does that mean for me? For us Number one, we got to start a YouTube channel.

Meredith's husband 8:28

Yeah clearly, this podcast is going to be going on YouTube.

Meredith 8:32

Okay, does that mean we're going to have to do live like Handsome? Does they stream it live on YouTube and also On the podcast?

Meredith's husband 8:43

We do not have to go live. You can go live on YouTube. I have no plans to do that, but the podcast, in one form or another, will be on YouTube.

Meredith 8:52

Okay, very soon. I got to shower a little more now.

Meredith's husband 8:55

So that's what it means for me. For us, For more content is going to be on YouTube, and my videos I am going to start posting on YouTube and then embedding in my blog from YouTube. There is no reason to fight that.

Meredith 9:08

No, there's no reason to stay calling people stupid when you actually could do something about it.

Meredith's husband 9:14

And so what does it mean for everybody else?

indexing the transcripts of YouTube videos

Meredith 9:17

They should all get their own YouTube channel and post videos there first.

Meredith's husband 9:20

You don't have to, but keep in mind that that's probably where things are going, especially with the new advances in AI. Google has also started indexing the transcripts of YouTube videos. They did not do that for a long time.

Meredith 9:37

What does that mean? Indexing?

Meredith's husband 9:38

So index to put in the search. Like you can do a search First, google has started creating transcripts automatically. They never used to do that.

Meredith 9:47

I think that's also because, if I may, because often people at work on the train what have you want to watch something, but they can't have the sound on. So they can read it.

Meredith's husband 10:02

I don't know. I don't know, but I don't know if that's the case, because that's kind of always been true and Google had just decided the CC option.

Meredith's husband 10:11

Google just decided yeah, but the CC option is the transcript, right. If there is no transcript, there is no CC option. So that has always been true. People have always maybe preferred to read in the office, but Google has left it to the people uploading the videos to create the transcript. And someone at Google once told me just said there is just way too much. There's just way too much computing power to try to transcribe all that video. It's just too much and, to be honest, a lot of what on YouTube is garbage anyway. They don't really care about transcribing it.

Meredith 10:44

Well, on Instagram they have that capacity now on your videos, you can just add it and they do it. It's hilarious when they mess up.

Meredith's husband 10:52

With AI now and the way people are searching, the way people consume content now is mostly via video. I mean, actually that's probably not true, but there is still a lot of reading being done. But if, given the option between reading and watching a video or listening, I think more and more people are going to do the listening or watching, and so that's where we're going. I think there's going to be an increasing integration. But when you go to Google and you do a search, the results are not only going to be text from websites, it's going to be the dialogue from videos.

Meredith's husband 11:25

And so if you do a search for something very specific and somebody talks about that specific thing within a YouTube video, that can now appear in search results, and that's relatively new.

Meredith 11:36

Do you think they're going to have? If you need a quote from a movie, you just put the quote in and they'll show you, direct you to the exact scene in the film when it happens.

Meredith's husband 11:44

I don't know, because that's copyrighted content.

Meredith 11:49

So movies are not uploaded to YouTube, but maybe a little bit.

Meredith's husband 11:51

Of scenes are Scenes can be Like if there is a YouTube video talking about a scene from a movie and they show a clip, then yes, but the movie itself, I don't know. Probably someday, because then, yeah, youtube will charge you five bucks to watch the movie or something like that, who knows? Anyway, one point if you feel like you need to blog and you can't do it because you don't like writing, you don't really need to.

Meredith 12:14

You can just make a video.

Meredith's husband 12:16

Yeah, Just if you go and make a video and speak into camera and go put that on YouTube. Essentially that's the same as writing a blog.

Meredith 12:22

Is that the same for SEO purposes?

Meredith's husband 12:28

Well, remember that your content is on.

Meredith 12:29

YouTube, it's not on your website. But if you have it on YouTube and then you put it on your website, you could, but then same. What do I no longer have to blog if I can just make a quick video talking?

Meredith's husband 12:39

Well, you can, but in that case, remember that your content lives on YouTube. People are not making it to your website. Then you need to either get people from your YouTube channel to your website, which is possible, or you need to find another way to do it, because it seems like videos are going to be the realm of YouTube and that's pretty much it.

Meredith 12:57

I could make a video, post it on my blog and post the same video on YouTube.

Meredith's husband 13:02

You can yes, you can also do what I'm planning to do and post your video on YouTube and then just embed it into your blog. That's what I'm going to do.

Meredith 13:12

Yeah, I will be interested to see if actual blogging then becomes less important and videoing becomes more.

Meredith's husband 13:19

Again, remember that the video is not going to be your blog, so it's not SEO for you. It's YouTube is more kind of like it's Google's answer to social media. Youtube is Google's social media arm.

Meredith 13:34

Let's say Right Until they come up with their own.

Meredith's husband 13:38

Yeah, that's something they have a really bad track record with. They've tried a lot of different things to compete with Facebook and they've all failed miserably so far.

Meredith 13:46

So far.

Meredith's husband 13:47

So far, except for YouTube.

Meredith 13:48

Yeah, YouTube is a. I'd much rather go to YouTube than Facebook.

Meredith's husband 13:52

Oh yeah, me too.

Meredith 13:53

Okay, that's good.