YouTube is the Second Largest Search Engine, Are You Leveraging it?

It is normal to think of YouTube as a video hosting website and may be a social network built around videos. But many of us often forget that YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google.

Yes, a lot of people come to YouTube and search for video content. The traffic and search queries are more than Yahoo and Bing combined together. And when it comes to reviews, many experts unanimously agree that YouTube is the No.1 review search engine.

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Some interesting statistics about YouTube include:

  1. YouTube has more than 1 billion users
  2. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
  3. Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices

I have started publishing YouTube videos for DigitalDeepak.com only recently but for other blogs I leverage YouTube massively. It is easier to rank on YouTube because creating a video is harder than writing articles and not many people would have published quality videos on the same topic.

Another added advantage with YouTube videos is that your videos will also rank on Google search engine apart from YouTube. YouTube is Google’s property and they are more likely to rank a video from YouTube than an article on some other website who’s authority is not yet established.

YouTube can also be used for driving traffic back to your website or blog. YouTube allows you to link to any website on the description area. You can also link to one associated website within the video itself. One channel can have only one associated website.

YouTube Cards

YouTube is constantly releasing new features which supports its creators. Recently they launched a feature called Cards where you can link to your associated website or another video within your channel using a nice notification that pops up on the top right corner of your video.

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And when you click on it there is an overlay which comes up with a thumbnail image and link to your associated website.

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The link can be to any page inside your website. However you can have only one associated website and YouTube’s terms restrict your from redirecting it to other websites. You can see it working on this video I made.

Video: How to Implement YouTube Cards

I will be posting a lot of articles about YouTube and video marketing in the coming weeks. If you have any specific questions about video marketing, leave a comment below!