YouTube Shorts are now Ranking in YouTube Search Results
Youtube Shorts has a leg-up on vertical-video rivals like Instagram/Facebook Reels and TikTok videos. What is it? In a word: SEARCH.
Now, I’m not saying Reels and TikToks shouldn’t remain a focal-point 🎯of your video and content strategy. I’m just saying… YouTube Shorts has something worth looking at more closely.
In its truest sense, YouTube is more of a search engine than a social network. The primary mechanism for consuming content on a social network, for instance, occurs by way of scrolling through feeds.
However, on YouTube, content is mostly discovered through search – which explains why long-form videos have historically performed so well on YouTube. It’s because if a viewer goes searching for a specific video to watch versus it just magically shows up in a feed… then, presumably, there’s a greater willingness to watch that video for longer.
Another perk of search-based video discovery is that your videos can keep on ranking in the search results for a long, long time – versus with social networks, they distribute through the feeds and then after that, they’re no more than an afterthought 💭.
Well guess what… YouTube Shorts—on desktop and mobile—are now ranking in search results pages‼️
In fact, when I look at my own channel’s performance insights, YouTube Shorts have become my most-viewed videos (without diminishing the performance of my long-form videos). What’s more, the bulk of the viewership is discovering my videos via YouTube Search—not from the Shorts feed (as would’ve been expected).
And, here’s the cherry on top 🍒: my top-performing Shorts were posted over a year ago‼️ Search is like a fine wine 🍷 that gets better with age!
So… here’s my advice: start making search-optimized YouTube Shorts and customers are gonna find your business.