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TubeBuddy DOES the SEO SCORE really matter?

Stanley | Team TB

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There are only so many things that we can fix/change/adjust in order to increase our visibility on platform... and one of the biggest is Search traffic. The way to do that is through SEO. If you don't want to bother... if your video is not worth the time and effort then no worries. Don't optimize. If you value your work and would like to give it a second chance to be viewed by people looking specifically for what your video is about... if you want to give it a life beyond simply being seen by your notification squad once the opportunity for instant virality has passed... then yes. You should consider focusing on your SEO.

I'm sure Mr. Colbert would not disagree.
 

The Jungle Explorer

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There are only so many things that we can fix/change/adjust in order to increase our visibility on platform... and one of the biggest is Search traffic. The way to do that is through SEO. If you don't want to bother... if your video is not worth the time and effort then no worries. Don't optimize. If you value your work and would like to give it a second chance to be viewed by people looking specifically for what your video is about... if you want to give it a life beyond simply being seen by your notification squad once the opportunity for instant virality has passed... then yes. You should consider focusing on your SEO.

I'm sure Mr. Colbert would not disagree.

You nailed it Stanely.

I had to do a search on Steven Colbert to find out who he is. Yeah, I have not watched network TV in over a decade and have not watched late-night since Leno left, so I really did not know who he was by his name. I know his face and have seen him referred to here and there, and bits and pieces of his late-night show, but everything I have seen of him has been extremely vulgar. The man is a moral cesspool (at least his late-night show is) from what I have seen and I just refuse to watch that kind of garbage.
 
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Miles Ahead Racing

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No. The SEO you do is mostly for humans, not for YT. Would you watch a video that had no title or thumbnail? Not normally (although I have a video like this that does get views because there are certain people that cannot resist a mystery, but normally, you would not). As I said before, SEO is the START, not the end. Everyone is doing great SEO, if you are the only one who is not, you are lagging behind. It is a minimum standard, not a maximum standard. Not sure how much clearer I can make it.
Great explanation! Thank you!
 
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The Jungle Explorer

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If I'm not mistaken, SEO Score is a measure of how well the user and technical aspects of your website contribute to search engine optimization and, ultimately, increased organic traffic.

An SEO score of 100 is a minimum standard. It does not guarantee views, it just qualifies your video to be in the running. It is the starting point, not the ending point.
 
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The Jungle Explorer

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Your SEO score is inextricably tied to your ranking potential, even though it doesn't directly affect it.

Actually, it plays a very small role and only initially. I will quote Derral Eves on this, who said" "You are not going to GAME the YouTube algorithm." What he means by this is that no amount of SEO is going to matter if you do not have what YouTube wants. Derral explains this by saying, "Youtube is not a SEARCH index, it is a HUMAN index."

Here is the grave misunderstanding that most people have about how YouTube works. Video SEO only affects SEARCH indexing; it has no effect on HUMAN indexing, which is the ONLY thing YouTube cares about.

So what is the difference? SEARCH index is like a File Cabinet. The more organized things are, the easier they are to find. A Human Index has zero to do with things being organized in easy-to-find order. A human index is an exercise in controlling chaos. Think about it like this. Let's pretend that a human index is a city with a lot of restaurants. What decides if those restaurants are successful or go out of business?

Is it the location?
Is it the name?
Is it the Logo?
Is it their slogan?
Is it their exterior paint color scheme?
Is it their interior design?
Is it the type of food they serve?
Is it their advertising?

NO! All of these can be compared to SEO and can contribute to the success of a restaurant, but they will not ultimately determine the success of a restaurant. What determines their success is one thing, and this is; How many people eat there. You can have a restaurant with the best of all the above criteria, but if people do not eat there, it will eventually go out of business.

Now that you have this idea of a restaurant in your mind, let me use it to help you understand how the YouTube ranking system works. YouTube is like an investor trying to decide which restaurant to invest in. They absolutely could care less about how good your restaurant looks, where it is at, your name, your logo, the food you serve, or anything else. They care about only a few things.

1. How many people go to your restaurant.
2. How much of the food they eat off their plate.
3. Are they coming back for more.

What these three things represent are.

1. The Click.
2. Watch Time Retention
3. Does the viewer watch another video from your channel after watching the first one.

This is all YouTube cares about. You can have the best SEO on earth, but if you are not ticking those three boxes, you are going nowhere on YouTube. And you have to tick them all, not just one. Yes, you can create a great thumbnail that gets people to click on it, but if they immediately click off, it is bad for your channel and video, even if you get millions of clicks.

YouTube is a HUMAN index, not a search index. While SEO can have some initial value in helping your videos get suggested, if the human effect does not result in people ticking all three of those boxes, your video, and your channel will not be successful. That is the truth of YouTube.
 
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The Jungle Explorer

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In fact, SEO is a very difficult combination and you need to try very hard to get high-quality advertising, and not just dry links.

SEO is now almost completely useless on YT. The new Suggestions algorithm pays zero attention to it since they changed it. It helps with search, a little bit, but has zero effect on suggestions, which is where the overwhelming majority of your traffic will come from. The quality of advertising is not determined by YouTube, it is determined by the Adesnse Ad Mall, and the factors that affect that are content subject and demographics, not SEO.
 

Damon

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SEO is now almost completely useless on YT. The new Suggestions algorithm pays zero attention to it since they changed it.

This is grossly incorrect. Suggestion has nothing to do with SEO and never has. YouTube search is were SEO counts. You're confusing two different metrics as the same. If that's what you've been basing your lack of growth on then you 've been focusing on the wrong thing.

From the lifetime view of my channel, YouTube Search forms 32.7% of my views. Suggested only accounts for 25.8%. Everything I do focuses on SEO, and people are still finding my content. Your assertion that SEO is almost completely useless is completely incorrect.

SEO was never meant to be some trigger to get the algorythm to suggest your videos. That's a total misunderstanding of how SEO works. SEO is a passive approach that over time with hundreds if not thousands of SEO optimized videos people will find your content on a niche topic. SEO is about niche subjects where people will find your content via YouTube Search not suggested. If you've been banking on Suggested, then you've been banking at the wrong credit union, so to speak.
 
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The Jungle Explorer

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This is grossly incorrect. Suggestion has nothing to do with SEO and never has. YouTube search is were SEO counts. You're confusing two different metrics as the same. If that's what you've been basing your lack of growth on then you 've been focusing on the wrong thing.

From the lifetime view of my channel, YouTube Search forms 32.7% of my views. Suggested only accounts for 25.8%. Everything I do focuses on SEO, and people are still finding my content. Your assertion that SEO is almost completely useless is completely incorrect.

SEO was never meant to be some trigger to get the algorythm to suggest your videos. That's a total misunderstanding of how SEO works. SEO is a passive approach that over time with hundreds if not thousands of SEO optimized videos people will find your content on a niche topic. SEO is about niche subjects where people will find your content via YouTube Search not suggested. If you've been banking on Suggested, then you've been banking at the wrong credit union, so to speak.

Nothing you said disagrees with what I said. I stated that SEO helps with Search, a little. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but things have recently changed. The SEO that creators input is becoming more and more irrelevant because YT does not care what viewers say they want to see. They are driving viewers like cattle to the content that YT wants them to see. What YouTube wants is for viewers to binge-watch several videos before leaving. That is YT's sole and primary goal now, not delivering the precise content the viewer is looking for. They have tweaked the whole platform to achieve this goal, both suggestions and search. They stated this in an interview with Video Creator Magazine.

Besides, YT does not need the SEO we input to know what your video is about anymore. They use Google's advanced AI to analyze every pixel of a video to determine what it is about. The Google AI knows everything about your video down to what you say, what you look like, your ethnicity, every object (table, chair, cup, etc), every word on every object, every leaf on a tree or bush and what kind of tree or bush it is, every animal, fish, or bird and what type they are, etc, etc, etc. That is the Real SEO of your video. The real SEO of a video is so much more vast than what the creator inputs about the video, it is mind-boggling.

Google developed this technology Advanced AI through Google Photos. For years they offered unlimited uploads to Google Photos to acquire trillions upon trillions of photos and videos from all over the world. Little did anyone know that Google was using all of these photos and videos to train the Google AI in Object Recognition. You see, for the longest time, Google Search was a TEXT-based search engine. Google's servers had no way of telling what was IN photos and videos, so they did not know what they were about. So you had to input text descriptors about the images and videos so that the search engine could properly list them in the databases. As a webmaster who has designed many websites, I know this, because when you add a photo to a web page, you have to enter the hidden Metadata about the image for the search engine to know what it is. But Google is no longer a Texted based database when it comes to images and videos. Google knows exactly what is in the images and videos without you telling them. They do not need you to tell them one single word about it anymore. The AI scans the image or video and creates a complete profile about it, that is massive and detailed down to the pixel level. This profile is what Google believes about the object and uses to index it, not what you say about it. This is the Real SEO that Google and YT cares about, since YT uses Google's AI to index videos.

This is why there is almost zero room for creator input SEO on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook Reels. They simply don'y need it anymore, and honestly, they don't care what you input. The only thing that matters to them is User Interaction with content. That is the only SEO they care about. Since YouTube is now chasing these platforms, they are following suit and running things the way those other platforms are. Oh, one more thing. If you are using a smartphone to watch videos, even what you click on is not of great importance. These apps are tracking your EYE movements using the forward-facing camera so they can see what ADS catches your attention. Wonder why certain ads you would rather not see keep popping up even though you have told them you don't want to see them? Well, they know you are looking at them. Kind of spooky, but it is 100% true. I have had long conversations with AD engineers about this eye-tracking technology. That forward-facing camera on your phone is a most vital tool for advertisers and content platforms. It is kind of like, "Don't listen to what the viewer say they want, watch what their eyes are doing and use that as a guide to know what they really want to see." The deep psychological profiles that have been built by these systems about us is frightening. They claim to know about you than you know about yourself.

I could go on and on and on about this, but you get the point. Real SEO is a very deep subject and goes way beyond what most people even realize. The best SEO you can do for your videos is a Click-worthy Title and Thumbnail. That is about all that you have control of anymore. And as we have agreed on before, they line between Click-Worthy and Click-Bait, is almost invisible. And as I have said many times before, doing YouTube SEO is a "Minimum Standard". I am not saying NOT to do it. I am saying it is quickly becoming irrelevant on YT.
 
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Damon

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YT does not need the SEO we input to know what your video is about anymore.

Honestly, that is a very good point. They really do know what your video is about even without the SEO "tricks." The one thing we all agree on is that this ain't yesteryear's YouTube. Let each decide on his own whether to continue on YouTube or not.
 
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MediaMan

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YT does not care what viewers say they want to see. They are driving viewers like cattle to the content that YT wants them to see.

Not so fast....at least not for my personal account (6 months old now) on YouTube. I created a new personal account to attempt to avoid exactly what you are talking about, because I was sick of all the misc bs showing up. And sure enough I'd say 90% of the videos that are recommended, show up on my YT home page, etc, are what I would call an acceptable recommendation. Now...my older personal account which is what I now use for generic research...it definitely does show all of that garbage. Perhaps since that channel doesn't really know what I like, it's just showing me the trendy stuff. Celebs, popular influencers, ******* stunts, dancers, funny reactions, etc, etc.

My view on SEO is pretty simple... you could have a title and desc that just says "Here's a bucket of paint" and a thumbnail that just shows...a bucket of paint but in the video is a sexy person doing sexy things, and it will probably go viral. But at the same time a video with a proper title, desc, thumbnail along with matching video content can help get your foot in the door, but once the door is open...it's all about what's in the video.

One aspect of YouTube I don't like is, interaction via comments seem to be weighed extremely heavy. I'm creating content that is meant to be viewed like regular TV shows, not engaged with. Videos with comments (pos or neg) end up doing much better than videos without comments. I'll probably have to resort to saying in the video "please comment as it helps my channel", ugh.. I hate that but I understand why creators resort to saying things like that.

Perhaps the more established your channel is the less important SEO is, but for new channels I think it's vital....to have proper SEO.
 
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plexbee

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I've made changes to a bunch of my videos and gotten the SEO SCORE to 100% but there's no visible difference in performance.

So is it a waste of time getting your videos to 100% SEO SCORE?

Cheers,

Miff
same it doesn't help to rank videos depends on your channel size
 

Damon

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Yeah, there is no way I could run a business today without SEO. I don't care how "smart" the algorithm is. At the very least it helps me find what my audience is searching for. That way I can match my content to what they want.

I don't do simple, single keywords anymore. everything is longtail, and I only focus on 3 to 5 long tail keyword phrases per video. That works best for me.
 

MediaMan

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I've seen videos (new videos in the past few weeks..) with generic thumbs, a few words for the title, 1 line desc, have a zillion views because the content was what users for that video demographic want to see. Content is king.
 
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