YouTube’s content planning guide

Google’s YouTube Content Planning Guide

Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.

Google published a Youtube content strategy guide, which has some great tips for YouTubers and podcasters. And it starts with – finding you “why” – an approach that I LOVE. It aligns well with the Google Human Rater Guidelines question, “what is the purpose of this page?”. And then it breaks down the three types of content you should think about creating for your channel (Hero, Help, and Hub content) and the frequency of each. 

Here’s more from their guide:

Hero content would be: 

• Published infrequently and usually built around a major event, moment, or idea.
• Focus on mass appeal topics that are of interest to the general public at a specific point in time
• The audience would-be viewers who may be unfamiliar with your organization or content.
• The goal for the content would be driving visibility of your content at a specific period in time and converting those viewers into long-term subscribers.

Help content would be:

• Published more often than Hero content but not necessarily on a regular basis.
• It would focus on evergreen topics targeted toward specific questions or areas.
• The audience would be broad and would appear to more casual viewers who do not normally engage with your channel.
• The goal would be to gain viewers and convert subscribers at a steady rate.

Hub content would be:

• More frequent — your channel’s “bread and butter.”
• It would be focused on your existing subscriber base, plus those viewers who’ve been watching but haven’t subscribed.
• The goal would be to keep your audience coming back with steady, consistent content that appeals to their expectations and desires as well as provides a bank of content for new viewers to explore after subscribing.
• The content would be focused on sustainable, targeted content that appeals to your subscribers’ tastes and expectations.  Here Google suggests the following formats; 
  • Weekly Coverage
  • Behind the Scenes
  • Interviews
  • Explainers
  • Q&A
  • Listicles
  • Collaborations
  • Live Streams

I love this breakdown of content as I don’t think brands think through how they should create content with different goals in mind AND targeted at the different entertainment focuses of each audience that might come across your channel. I’ve seen plenty of tips around optimizing your videos to be found via YouTube search, or using YouTube Analytics to figure out what works for your subscribers and creating more of that, but not this focus on making sure that you’re creating content that resonates with brand new people to your channel and to folks that casually check out your channel but haven’t yet subscribed.

So that’s your’ tip for today. If you’re creating video content (or podcast content) think through how you are going to serve these different audiences – the newly landed viewer, the casual viewer, and your subscribers.

Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.

Listen to the previous episode: New Bing ranking tips

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