SEO
13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos
![13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos 13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1643698394_13-Key-Elements-Of-Successful-YouTube-Videos.png)
YouTube is great for marketing, a fact that is supported by a ton of mind-blowing usage statistics.
These are some that really stand out:
- 500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
- YouTube is the second most popular social networking site, with more than 2 billion monthly users. That’s one-third of the internet!
- Viewers are 4x more likely to use YouTube vs. another platform to discover information about a brand, product, or service – meaning that there is a ready audience for your content.
- Millennials also spend a lot of their time on YouTube. Among millennials, YouTube reaches more of the 18-34 demographic than any TV network.
How can you make the most of the YouTube opportunity?
It starts with a great video. Check out these 13 key components of a successful YouTube video.
1. Branded Intro Footage
The importance of branding in marketing can never be overemphasized. Branding helps build loyalty.
Including branded intro footage helps your loyal viewers to immediately recognize your work so they’ll stick with you and keep watching.
Additionally, such branding is important for ensuring that your viewers remember the video, which is especially handy when they need to refer someone to it.
Even though they might forget the actual content and the name of the video, remembering your branded footage will help direct viewers to your channel.
2. An Attention-Grabbing Intro
Did you know that about 20% of people will leave after the first 10 seconds of your YouTube video?
What’s even worse is that they might give you a thumbs down.
So, what do you do?
It is all about the intro.
After including your branded intro footage, convince the viewer to keep watching. Clearly explain what they are about to see, and how that is of benefit to them.
If you’re showing them how to solve a problem, personalize it so that they feel that you have also been affected. This builds trust, and the feeling that the solution is valuable.
3. Keep Titles And Opening Credits Short
As mentioned above, our attention spans are incredibly short. Nothing is worse than an extensive beginning to a video that drives lost interest.
Even worse, that long opener will discourage binge-watching. Who wants to watch that same long opener over and over again?
Over half of YouTube viewers will watch the entire video when it’s under one minute in length.
Instead, strive for a ~5-second opener that is punchy and straight to the point.
4. Build Trending Topics Into Your Video Content
Using trending topics is a tried and true method for successful link building and can also be applied to your video content.
Think seasonal, newsworthy, local, unique, movies, gaming, music, or even surprising topics, etc. These are all great fodder for trending topics to bake into your videos.
Not sure where to start? Give YouTube Trending (country-specific) or Popular on YouTube (global) a try.
Google Trends and even Twitter Trends are also great resources to discover trending topics to tie into your video content.
5. Background Music
Should you include background music? After all, people are only interested in what you’re saying.
However, thanks to technology, we get bored. Fast.
There’s nothing more boring than a dull YouTube video.
Including background music not only grabs attention instantly but sets the mood for the viewing session, establishing an emotional connection.
In addition, music drives the pace of the video, while a great soundtrack only gives viewers one more reason to share the video.
However, be careful of two things:
- That the music evokes the desired emotions and aura.
- That you are legally allowed to use the music in your video.
6. Being Clearly Audible
Unfortunately, a great intro and nice background music can’t help if you aren’t clearly audible.
Remember, the ultimate goal is for your audience to understand what you are putting across. If your video is just a pictorial illustration, then loud background music suffices.
On the other hand, if your video includes an oral presentation, make sure you can be heard above the background music.
7. Brevity
Well, maybe not that short. Still, that video has more than 11 million views.
With YouTube allowing users to search for videos based on duration, among other filters, we clearly can’t ignore the importance of video length in YouTube.
8. Customized Experiences
Tap into micro-moments. These are the times when people need to know, go, do, or buy something and turn to the closest device to help them achieve it.
Use data to give people what they want, when they want it.
This can take many forms. Consider establishing a connection between events on TV or the excitement around big moments in pop culture, politics, sports, tech, and more.
Another option is to leverage data to deliver personalized video content.
To get started with this process:
- Visit Google Trends to help validate the increasing demand or topic.
- Learn what people are searching for and tailor your videos to fit into existing conversations. A keyword research tool can help you narrow in on the right keyword targets.
- Next, this free Chrome plugin from vidIQ will provide you with valuable competitive data for current ads that are going viral, including tags, social shares, average watch time, velocity, and more.
- Lastly, once the video is created, leverage YouTube Analytics to answer “who is actually watching” and “what they are truly interested in.”
9. A Call To Action
As mentioned earlier, YouTube viewers are short on time. After all, there is too much content to view in one day. They have jobs and lives (presumably).
Consequently, you need to be creative about how you include your call to action because your audience will increasingly disappear over the course of your video.
Engagement significantly drops off between two and three minutes. This means you should not place your CTA at the end, and that is particularly true for longer videos.
Instead, consider clickable annotations in the first few seconds of the video.
Bonus Tip: If you’re looking to grow your YouTube subscriber base, add the following parameter to your url: ?sub_confirmation=1.
Here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/user/jonleeclark?sub_confirmation=1. You’ll get a nice little popup prompting the user to subscribe.
![13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos Here's an example of adding the following parameter to your url.](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1643698393_559_13-Key-Elements-Of-Successful-YouTube-Videos.png)
10: Add End Screens To Promote Your Videos, Channel, Or Website
While end screens can only be added to the last 20 seconds of a video, these useful graphics can be used to link out to everything from a website URL, YouTube channel, video playlist (such as another video in a series), or prompt a watcher to subscribe.
When creating a video, make sure you leave room, as the video ends, to add your end screen.
![13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos Ahrefs Video End Card.](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1643698393_37_13-Key-Elements-Of-Successful-YouTube-Videos.png)
11. Design Video Thumbnails YouTube Users Want To Click
Of all the items in this list, thumbnails have the greatest potential to make or break your YouTube success.
And the reason is simple.
Suggested videos tend to be the leading source of organic traffic on YouTube. In a sense, YouTube acts as an “endorser” of your content by suggesting it as something a watcher might also enjoy.
Thumbnails that drive clicks are more likely to feed the algorithm resulting in more clicks and so on.
Here are three simple best practices to keep in mind:
Don’t trick the user.
Ensure the thumbnail is relevant and delivers on the video’s title. If not, you risk having a lower watch time which will negatively impact the algorithm – the opposite of what we want.
Design thumbnails for smaller screens.
YouTube recommends 1280 x 720; however, most video consumption happens on a smaller screen.
Make sure your image will still stand out by playing with color saturation, cropping to a smaller area, or playing with the edges of the image.
Bonus Tip: Can’t decide on a thumbnail? Consider testing a handful of thumbnail options with a simple Adwords test. A small investment of $10-20/day will provide some insight into which thumbnail is generating the strongest VTR (view-through-rate).
Keep a consistent style, look, and feel.
I realize this is open-ended but some considerations for consistency include logo, common colors, shapes, consistent face, font, etc.
Over time, this consistency will increase video recognition during skimming; and, if they enjoy your content, they’ll be more likely to click. The folks over at Keywordtool.io do this well.
![13 Key Elements Of Successful YouTube Videos Consistent Youtube Brand.](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1643698393_110_13-Key-Elements-Of-Successful-YouTube-Videos.png)
12: Build A “Guest Slot” For Other YouTubers
Perhaps the most common example of a “guest slot” is an interview.
But no matter how your structure it, collaborating with creators who already have an audience is a great way to build your own as it provides exposure to an audience that may otherwise never hear of you.
Look for creators that are already in your niche or who service an audience with similar interests. Social Blade is a tool that can help you find channels serving similar demographics and size of channel.
Be sure to feature your guest in a positive light and prominently so they’ll be more likely to cross-promote the video.
13. Give The Audience A Chance To Participate
It might seem odd if you’re not streaming live, but soliciting your audience to participate has its advantages.
For example, asking your viewers questions directly gives you opportunities to generate and provide responses to comments – further fueling the engagement algorithm.
Viewer feedback can also provide ideas for future content and the opportunities to build content around responses through ‘fan clips’ or idea shoutouts.
The Way Forward
To improve performance on YouTube, driving more traffic to your site and more revenue for your business, apply these best practices in your video creation process.
These tried and tested YouTube video elements are sure to contribute to your own video marketing success!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Alina Rosanova/Shutterstock
All screenshots taken by author, May 2021
SEO
WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation
![WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/WordPress-Insiders-Discuss-WordPress-Stagnation.jpg)
A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.
Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic
The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.
Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.
Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:
“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “
The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”
Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:
“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”
That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.
A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:
“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”
Facing Reality Is Productive
Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:
- Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
- Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay
WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.
Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.
Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.
The live webinar featured:
- Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
- Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
- Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
- Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.
WordPress Market Share Stagnation
The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.
Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.
Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.
Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.
CMS YoY Growth
- Webflow: 25.00%
- Shopify: 15.61%
- Wix: 10.71%
- Squarespace: 9.04%
- Duda: 8.89%
- WordPress: 1.85%
Why Stagnation Is A Problem
An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.
It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:
“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”
Perception Of Innovation
One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.
It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:
“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”
Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.
“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”
Is Improved Marketing A Solution
One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.
Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:
“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”
This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.
They said:
“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”
Future Of WordPress
This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.
The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.
Watch the webinar:
Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com
SEO
Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO
![Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Googles-New-Support-For-AVIF-Images-May-Boost-SEO.jpg)
Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.
How AVIF Can Improve SEO
Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.
Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.
It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:
Improve your site’s crawl efficiency
Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.
What Is AVIF?
AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).
AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.
AVIF Versus WebP
AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.
See also: 12 Important Image SEO Tips You Need To Know
Is AVIF Supported?
AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.
I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.
Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.
Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.
AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google
According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.
“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”
Read Google’s announcement:
Supporting AVIF in Google Search
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
SEO
CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO
![CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/CMOs-Called-Out-For-Reliance-On-AI-Content-For-SEO.jpg)
Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.
This is what Eli had to say:
“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.
This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”
Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.
What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?
Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.
Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.
Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)
“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.
Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”
Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion
Read the discussion on LinkedIn:
Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands
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