E390: How I ranked 2 on the videos tab of Google and 2 on YouTube for a lucrative keyword only 8 hours after publishing my video - which took literally 30 minutes to make.
Video is maybe the craziest opportunity that has existed in marketing. Not only is it great for building a brand and top-of-mind awareness… it’s also great for targeting conversion-oriented (bottom of funnel) keywords.
Here’s how I did it (and how you can do it, too).
The YouTube Short I talk about on the podcast: https://youtube.com/shorts/CK4srMu4h14?feature=share
00:00 Prefacing My Keyword 00:19 Daily Video Routine 01:19 The Backlink Reddit Post 02:29 Experimenting with Keywords 04:39 Results of the Keyword Experiment 05:42 How to See Backlinks for Free 08:10 Opportunities with Bottom of Funnel Keywords 11:00 Previous YouTube Experiments 13:50 Short Form Video is the Biggest Opportunity 15:46 Conclusion
#seo #searchengineoptimization #digitalmarketing #contentmarketing
The Edward Show. Your daily digital marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
Yesterday, I made a video about a way to see backlinks to any website for free. If you don't want to pay for an SEO tool, you can still see backlinks to any website for free. And I'll share that after this story. But this story is why I'm making this episode of the podcast. So every day, you don't know, every day I put up a video at least one video a day. It comes out to TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook comes out everywhere. And I didn't optimize the description when the video came out to all those places, except for Instagram and for YouTube shorts. And normally I always use long descriptions for SEO purposes. I always use long descriptions, even if I'm not directly targeting a keyword. I will still use long descriptions. I will just take the transcript from my video and change some words here and there to make it more appropriate for a description, but that will typically be my description. So that is what I did for my description for this video on TikTok, Snapchat, spotlight, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook reels. And yeah, but Instagram reels and YouTube shorts, I said, wait, wait, wait. I'm making this video because yesterday I was looking for content to do my podcast on my daily this daily podcast on it was browsing Reddit saying, what should I make my podcast about today? What should I make it about today? And I found a post on the SEO subreddit. It's a pinned post. I actually think somebody paid one of the mods off to pin this post because it's actually a pretty bad post. It's a very poorly written post, but it was pinned and I read it because it was pinned and I didn't realize that it was probably a sponsored post. But actually there was something in it that was valuable and it was a way to see backlinks for free. And it said, if you want to learn how to do this, this is why I think it was sponsored because it said it didn't actually tell you how to do it. It said, if you want to learn how to do this, Google best free backlink check to any website. That was the keyword that they are targeting and so they want to have a lot of people Google that, click on their results and then they will move up in the search engine results pages for that keyword. So they want people to Google best free backlink checker to any website. And I found the way that they recommended about how to see backlinks to any website for free. I thought it was cool. I made a video about it, but then I said, you know, I'm going to do something dastardly. I wonder if I can take this keyword. And so what I did, wait, wait, wait. I got to correct myself. The keyword that they were targeting was free backlink checker primary position. That's what they want people to search free backlink checker primary position. And when you Google that, they come up number one. But so I wanted to see so funny that I did this. Could I take that keyword? If I just put the keyword in the title for my YouTube short and in the description, because you don't have just you don't have titles on Instagram reels. You only have a description. So in at the beginning of the description for the Instagram reel and the rest of the description stays the same. So the keyword on YouTube shorts goes at the beginning of the title and then at the beginning of the description. That's on YouTube shorts and on Instagram, it just goes at the beginning of the description. So on YouTube shorts, my title was the best free backlink checker for any website is not what you'd expect hashtag SEO. That was the title. And then the first sentence of the description is the same thing. And that's on YouTube shorts before I posted it, I wanted to see like, would this work? And let me actually share this so funny. The original video that came out everywhere except for YouTube shorts was over a minute long. I thought it was pretty good, but it was not a best performing video by far. In fact, it was a pretty low performing video. And I think the edit because I had to edit it down to under a minute. I think the edit was even worse than the original video. Now, I thought the original video was good and useful and interesting, but it just did not perform very well. It got only a few hundred views on TikTok so far. And on Instagram, it has 9,200 views. I put it up last night. So TikTok, it's 640 views Instagram, it's 9,200 views. I don't know what it is on Snapchat. Typically, I get a few thousand views on Snapchat. So overall, I'll probably get 15 to 30,000 views on this video. For me, that's low to average, but it was not my best performing video. So here's what happened. So I put best free backlink checker in the title of the YouTube short and at the beginning of the description. And then I wake up this morning and I said, I wonder if that video ranked, that would be hilarious. Now, it didn't rank on Google. But if you search free backlink checker in the video section of Google, not on the main section, the video section, you see it as number two. You see my videos number two, eight hours ago, it's number two. I literally posted the video eight hours ago, I made the video in 30 minutes. I posted it eight hours ago, took me 30 minutes to make, posted it eight hours ago. And then it's ranking number two for free backlink checker in the video section. And on YouTube, the number one ranking YouTube short for free backlink checker. The way that the search engine results page works on YouTube is first, it shows one to two long form videos. The first one is three minutes, the second one is two minutes, and then it shows a list of shorts. And my short is number one, even though it only has 150 views, 150 views so far. And it's number one. All right. So I want to share, well, first first, I'll say how you can see backlink Sandy website for free really easy. If you know what Google search console is being Microsoft has an equivalent to that. Google search console is Google's proprietary tool for seeing data from their index and submitting your website to their index. So you can see data from the search results on how it applies to your website and submit your website and all of your website's pages to Google's index. So you can tell Google, Hey, like, here's my site, please index it and please index these pages. And also, can you show me how many clicks I got in the last month for this specific word? Can you show me how many clicks this specific page got and which keywords are leading to this page and what I'm ranking, what position I'm in for this keyword and all sorts of data like this. You can see who is linking to you, where your backlinks are coming from, for your own website on Google search console. And Bing has an equivalent. It has their own, it's called Bing Webmaster Tools. But Bing does something unique and Bing lets you see backlinks to any website. If you go to backlinks in the sidebar, you can see the backlinks that go to your website and you can see backlinks that go to any website and it is completely free. All you have to do is sign up with your Gmail or sign up with a Microsoft account. And then you can see backlinks to any website for free. So if you don't want to pay for an SEO tool to see backlinks, you can see it for free. Now, the caveat is it is dramatically underreported compared to a paid tool. It said there were 99 referring domains going to my website. Laws shows like 350 referring domains. So it's dramatically underreported compared to a paid tool. However, if you don't want to literally all SEO tools will charge hundreds of dollars a month for this stuff. So if you just want to see some things for free, you can do that. And I thought there was a pretty cool thing to share. That's what I made the video about. And then, like I said before, I put the video up on YouTube. I changed the title to have free backlink checker at the beginning of it. So free backlink checker is a bottom of funnel keyword. People who are searching for free. The reason that the video doesn't rank on the main page of Google is because someone who is searching free backlink checker, they just want to use something right away and Google is smart enough to know that this is the intent behind the keyword. It is a bottom of funnel keyword. There's lots of tools that target this keyword. And so Google can just share one of these tools and people can use something right away and it's free. But here's where it gets interesting. Again, these are keywords where people have a problem. They're looking for a solution. People are looking for a solution. They're ready to use or purchase something right away. It gets interesting when there are no actual pages targeting these bottom of funnel keywords. And oftentimes these bottom of funnel keywords, they are so high converting. But the search volume is so low that people really realize, even though they're very high converting, because the search volume is so low, people don't realize how lucrative they are. And so a lot of webmasters or SEOs won't target them, even though the conversions happen with these keywords, a conversion rate is crazy. I have several websites that target these keywords. The conversion rate on these pages is ridiculous and they rank so fast and it's easy to rank for. But the thing is it takes several hours to make a bottom of funnel SEO landing page, which is better than a top of funnel SEO landing page where that will make you days or weeks or months, because that has to be several thousand words. A bottom funnel SEO landing page has to be like four hundred and fifteen words, but still that will take time. But a video I made my video in 30 minutes. And there's an opportunity here for targeting these bottom of funnel keywords with a video that shows you how to do something and targeting these bottom funnel keywords where pages are not targeting them. You want to find a bottom of funnel keyword. You want to make a short form vertical video that regardless of SEO will still do well on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, all these places. Then you put your keyword at the beginning of the title, the beginning of the description and then it ranks. And actually this works too with top of funnel keywords if the video gets traction. I've had this happen. I've shared this before. There's pages that target Ryan Reynolds marketing strategy. I had a video about Ryan Reynolds marketing strategy do very well and Ryan Reynolds marketing strategy was at the beginning of the description and then my video the next day after posting it ranked number one for Ryan Reynolds marketing strategy. It doesn't rank like that anymore. I think it's down to like three or five, but it was the next day number one. So I'll share the two opportunities that I see. One is that targeting these bottom funnel keywords with content that you might make anyway and putting the keywords you care about at the beginning of the description at the beginning of the title. And these are keywords that have really high conversions. They're people looking for a solution and they're not highly certain, which means they're not competitive, but people are searching them. And you use long descriptions. You take your transcript, you use a long description and that adds extra meat to it. And this is sometimes enough to get even the features snippet. But a lot of the times it's enough to rank on Google or on YouTube. So that's opportunity number one, opportunity. Number two, it's kind of funny. Ten years ago, me and one of my friends, we made an ASMR YouTube channel where we cut things in half of the spoon. We bought vegetables and fruit and me and we cut them in half with a spoon and we narrated it with an ASMR golf voice and we treated it like a serious sport. And we weaved in all these ridiculous story lines. It's called cut that we were on the front page of the verge because of this, because it was so absurd and ridiculous. And we just thought it was funny because it was so ridiculous. But one of the videos we made was called cutting cocaine with a spoon. YouTube has since removed that because it was too obscene. But what happened and it was so funny, we bought all this sugar and flour and mixed it together. I think that was the the texture. I don't remember what we use if it was sugar, flour, the mix. We put it on a cutting board and then my friend just cut it in half of the spoon. So we put this on YouTube and we titled it cutting cocaine with a spoon and lots of people would search cutting cocaine on YouTube and we would show up number one. And we had, I think, hundreds of thousands of views on this video from just people who are searching cutting cocaine on YouTube and me and my friend in 2017, we had this idea was the end of 2017. We said, let's just target all of these keywords and make hilarious videos targeting it. So there was this big YouTube channel. I don't remember the name, but it would give you funny pronunciations for words. One of the really well performing viral videos was how to pronounce the word penis and it would say beepus or it would say beepus. That's what it would say, how to pronounce penis and it and it would look like it was going to be serious and then it would say beepus and it was a parody channel, but it would rank for all of these keywords, how to pronounce so and so. And so me and my friend, we had this idea. Let's just like find all these top of funnel keywords and just make hilarious videos explaining these keywords. We started actually just doing SEO videos because I wanted to rank for all these SEO keywords that were not being targeted on YouTube and we tried to make the videos fun and funny and just the type of videos that we could shoot really fast at it really fast, put up really fast and the strategy, the idea was that we would rank for all of these keywords and the videos would be funny. We'd be charismatic and cool, we'd build up an audience on YouTube. That was the strategy we put up. I think like 30 of these videos and it was going well. And then another project that I worked on ended up being the first play to earn game in crypto and that I was a founder of that made half a million dollars in the first 48 hours had all these fans starting to recognize and I said, oh, my gosh, this is serious. I got to focus on this. And so we stopped that YouTube channel and doubled down on the video game and the video to earn games, stop that YouTube channel. This was the beginning of 2018. Stop that YouTube channel and shut the YouTube channel down. But I still think there is just YouTube SEO is a known thing, but I still think just seeing what I did, I made this video in 30 minutes and then the next day it ranked on YouTube and on Google on the video section for the keyword eight hours later, it ranked and that's what I wanted to share with you today. I think it's a tremendous opportunity. There's so many ways to leverage this short form. Mobile video is one of the craziest things in marketing that has existed. In fact, I'll share this story. Actually, it's amazing. So one of my SEO heroes, somebody who I learned from a lot is the founder of detailed.com and I share detailed.com all the time on this podcast. Detailed.com makes all these incredibly interesting SEO research reports. I've been reading detailed.com for over half a decade. And I messaged the founder, Glenn Alsop, of detailed.com. Yesterday, for the first time, I sent him a message on X on Twitter. I just had a question for him and I did not expect his response. I'd never talked to him before. I didn't expect him to know who I was. I just had a random question about something that he wrote. And he said his first thing back to me was you are famous. I see you everywhere on Instagram. And this guy, I've been following this guy for over a half a decade. He's been an influencer in SEO for so long. I started making daily videos November 1st, 2022, less than two years ago. So I think there's just the most ridiculous opportunity for short form vertical video in terms of algorithms, pushing out your content, you being able to build a brand and an audience. And like I explained on this episode, using your videos to rank for keywords that are important to you and your brand. It is amazing what's happening out here. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. This is episode 390 of my daily digital marketing podcast. I do this thing every day, seven days a week, the Edward show. If you have a second to support the podcast, give me a like five stars, whatever it is, a comment means a lot. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
