YouTube Shorts SEO

YouTube Shorts is one of the biggest opportunities in marketing and most people are sleeping on it. Sleeping!

This is the reality:

Most creators on YouTube don’t know the first thing about SEO so they don’t consider this.
Most creators on YouTube are more focused on long-form videos (YouTube Shorts have to be under 1 minute).
A YouTube Short can take 15-30 minutes to make (or less).
Viewers who are searching actually prefer Shorts to long-form. They’re searching to get an answer or a solution and want to spend minimal time getting that solution/answer.
- Specific example from one of the readers of this newsletter, “I accidentally got a win with YouTube SEO on a YouTube Short. I posted a how-to for one of the most common scooter tricks. It didn’t occur to me at the time but people want to learn things quickly, so my 30-second Short was always picked over a 5-10-minute video on the topic. This led to over 100,000 views and 400+ subscribers from a single Short – with 85% of the views coming from search. This Short is still bringing in views and subscribers to this day.”
  - Thanks again Nick Leinberger for sharing this with me.
YouTube Shorts make it so you don’t need a website to do SEO.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine.
Google uses YouTube videos in its SERPs (search engine results pages).
OpenAI, Google, and others train off YouTube. “OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4.”
- You can talk about your brand using keywords you care about and hedge against traditional SEO being disrupted by AI.
You can easily put out many Shorts in a single day.
When I’m deliberate about targeting a keyword with YouTube Shorts, oftentimes I see that video ranking for my chosen keyword only a couple hours after being published! I published a video a few days ago then went to sleep. When I woke up, I saw it ranking #1 on YouTube for the keyword, and #2 in the videos tab of Google for the keyword (which was competitive).
- This is hyper-rare with traditional SEO and frequent with YouTube Shorts!
Occasionally, Google will pull text from the description or even transcription of a YouTube Short and use that text in its featured snippet.
You can reuse Shorts across every social media platform and simultaneously grow a brand – Instagram Reels, TikTok, Snapchat Spotlight, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Threads, even Pinterest.
- Each one of these is its own search engine as well. Lots of people search TikTok, for example, for quick solutions to their problems.

Did I mention people are sleeping on this?

Because they are.

Be conscious about using keywords.

Put a relevant keyword at the beginning of your YouTube Short title and in the first sentence of its description.

Add more text for the description. When possible, I just take the transcription for my Short and paste that after the first sentence (with my keyword). If the transcription doesn’t flow well with the first sentence, I’ll write the whole description myself (takes me under 5 minutes).

Reuse your Shorts across all social media platforms. You can use this guide to do so. The recommended tool in the guide can also sync YouTube Shorts to everywhere else. This makes it so your Shorts are automatically released to every platform simultaneously.