YouTube is the future of SEO and specifically, parasite SEO. Now we’ve said that for a while, and even Ricky Kesler at Income School, during a conference I attended a couple of years ago, talked about ‘The Future is Video’ because it’s more difficult to fake. Here is an explainer on how to rank Youtube videos successfully with AI.
Parasite SEO and Google’s Crackdown
I’ve been very aware of the fact of monitoring parasite SEO in particular when you’re looking at high-ticket products like supplements, gold IRAs, gambling sites, etc. Traditionally we’ve had a lot of new sites at the top from parasite SEO. Whether that’s Outlook India, Deccan Herald, all of those. But for a long time, we’ve also had YouTube videos ranking.
Forget Backlinks: Why YouTube is the New King of SEO
Now with the latest Google update, we’re rapidly coming up to the 5th of May deadline supposedly where Google has said it is fixing parasite SEO. Sites that are ranking pages from third parties purely through the sheer strength of their domain power to promote affiliate products are going to be penalized.
In my previous video, I explored how most of the major parasites have dropped a lot. Now I don’t think ‘parasite’ is going to end by means. It simply makes sense, Google themselves have said that hosting third-party content on a news site is how media sites make money. Traditional ADV tutorials have been around for ages, so that’s not going to change. But what we have noticed is a distinct loss of power.
As of a few months ago, you could post on LinkedIn, and within hours, it would be in the top three of Google and it didn’t matter what the niche was. That idea of topical relevance, and topical authority seems to have gone out the window, but slowly it seems like Google is slowly filtering out a lot of the parasite stuff.
We’re still seeing a lot of Microsoft CRM portals coming through as the latest trick; but even a year ago, I was seeing YouTube channels ranking really well. I tried to work out how they did it because what they’re doing is not trying to rank organically on YouTube and get that virality aspect. They’re sticking a video really high up on the Google results.
ClickBank Products are Perfect for YouTube Reviews (and Your Wallet)
So let me just explain to you some of my methodology here. I like to look at ClickBank. So, ClickBank is an affiliate marketplace where product owners, normally supplements, can list their products, and any affiliate can sign up and start promoting those products. Some of them pay really well. If you really want to know what’s going on in SEO, then you want to go through some of the brands and work out what their affiliates have been doing.
How Top Affiliates Are Crushing It with YouTube
A perfect example is Java Burn, a supplement for coffee. You get an average of $150 per sale with that and there is a recurring element of $50 per month. So forget about Amazon affiliates or selling lawnmowers for a couple of dollars, if you sell just a few, then you can build up some really healthy income, but of course, it’s really competitive. For the last 6 months or so, we’ve had loads of parasites competing with the products. With a lot of the parasite sites, Google seems to reward the most recent result so you could pay $500 to $1,000 to publish a parasite article and then a week later, it gets knocked off by someone doing the exact same thing.
But if we do the same thing now by taking three items on that ClickBank page; Java Burn, Pure Aviv, and Prodenton, all are top offers on ClickBank. We’re currently looking at the ‘Top Offers’ category and obviously, they are high-paying and the gravity score is a measure of how rapidly it’s selling. So when you go to the ‘Top Offers’ section, what you see is a high-gravity score and really high dollars-per-conversion.
If we look at Puravive, you can see we’ve got YouTube videos at number one and number two and it seems to be just a few channels dominating the niche. I hope I’m not exposing anyone here but I’m just reverse engineering what’s publicly available.
Reverse Engineering YouTube SEO Strategies from Top Performers
Looking at the top two results, Simrix Carson and Flamengo Online, you might be thinking Flamengo Online is only getting zero traffic in Ahrefs but that’s because the video was only published two days ago and I can see right now, having done a manual search, it’s number two on Google.
Rank trackers like Ahrefs take a while to scan keywords and update the rankings whereas if we look at the Simrix Carson post that was published a week ago, we can see that it’s getting 1,000 visitors per month because Ahrefs has performed its scrape and identified that there are 39 keywords that the page ranks for, and those 39 keywords are roughly providing around a 1000 visitors per month.
If we move to another one (Java Burn), we can see that it’s number one with zero traffic but that’s because it was only published 16 hours ago and then when we go down a little more, we’ve got Simrix Carson again, which was only published two days ago. And then we’ve got Jerusalem Post which is more of a traditional parasite SEO site, and it’s being outranked by all YouTube videos.
I saw an interesting infographic on Facebook. Someone said search results now have Reddit and Quora at the top, then big media brands, and then YouTube videos. It depends on the niche. I wouldn’t oversimplify it like that. There are still content sites doing well, there are still e-commerce sites doing really well, and of course, none of it affects local brick-and-mortar businesses but from the affiliate standpoint, we asked how can we get videos to rank like that?
Clickbait Kings and Ninja Engagement: Tactics You NEED to Know
I’ve been working on the subject for a long time without actually doing the full deep dive to test it out and try and do it for myself. But for about a year now, I’ve been trying various things to make it work because what you got to remember is that ranking YouTube videos on Google is different from ranking YouTube videos on YouTube. You might think that number one on YouTube equals number one on Google but it doesn’t usually happen that way. It’s separate ranking algorithms. YouTube is all about engagement and watch time, whereas Google seems much more to do with embeds, engagement, etc.
So there are commonalities but it’s not as simple as let’s have a viral video and then we’ll get on the video pack on Google. One thing we know that works is CTR manipulation. So that helps with engagement and watch time. I did a review of CTR booster, and if we search CTR booster and look what we have here, you’ll find SEO Jesus at number two and that’s ranking for keyword so it’s absolutely working and ranking. What I’m intrigued by is how people are industrializing it, doing it at scale repeatedly.
For Prodentim Reviews, if we go to their channel, we see what they’re doing. So they’ve always hired actors and actresses. You can go through their history and it looks like really good human videos. Those are not just faceless YouTube videos with AI. They’re actually hiring people to speak about the products and look like real YouTube videos.
I’m sure you could do the same thing with a talking Avatar-type thing, but for now, that is what’s working. So I just want to reverse engineer what’s working.
So you’ll notice that the headline is stuffed with keywords. From ‘Prodentim’ to ‘Prodentim Customer Review’ to ‘Prodentim Dental Health’. That’s old-school blackhat keyword stuffing and it’s working. Now the page says 6,300 views and 338 likes. I don’t believe that for one moment. I think that’s been manipulated. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, I’m only saying that’s how you get the video ranking because what we see in all the examples is a rapid turnaround — it was published 16 hours ago and it’s number one on Google.
Headlines That Hook & Scripts That Sell: Unpacking the High-Converting Formula
Let’s have a look at another example: Java Burn review. One thing you notice is that titles are extremely clickbaity. The strategy here is basically: ‘Is the page a scam?’ It makes you click the link because there are fake websites out there and you need to buy from the right one. So does Java burn work? Watch the clip before you buy. The video has 3,400 views in 16 hours, a load of hashtags, then we have the official website which is their affiliate link. Then we got a long-form blog post in the description. so we’re targeting all the longer tail keywords and questions.
YouTube is quite generous with how long your description can be. (We did a quick SEO Surfer audit of a surfer audit of the page and the page and content score is only 52 but don’t forget that’s probably going to do with word count) For one thing,
YouTube is an extremely powerful domain, with a DR of 99 in Ahrefs which is huge. Also, it’s a Google-owned property, so it’s always going to have an unfair advantage there. I think because generally, you watch videos, your dwell time on the page is going to be quite long. So there are plenty of reasons why videos rank well as a page on the Internet and as a page on Google.
Services That Boost Views and Fake the Algorithm
I get the impression that they’ve sculpted the description quite well. Chapters help a lot on that front. Now notice the chapters are all heavily keyword stuffed as well, so constantly repeating Java Burn and then they stuff a load of keywords at the bottom.
There are some reports that YouTube and Google look at the transcript for relevance and ranking, but I don’t think anyone has actually proven that, and then they’re using manipulated comments and using the keyword repeatedly. We’ve got more of the keyword repeated across the page. Also from YouTube’s standpoint, comments are really good engagement signals but rather than just ranking a single video, there seems to be first, a recency bias and kind of its own topical authority because the channel in question is doing extreme volume — 5,300 videos.
Also, their posting rate seems to be pretty high. it looks like whatever keyword they’re targeting, they have to do it pretty much daily and I wouldn’t be surprised if they just hire an actress. The videos are not long, they’re only about three minutes long each, so you just need a couple of actresses to read a script and maybe do five to 10 recordings of a very similarly-worded script but still unique content, and then you can just mix them up.
They’re targeting other languages as well, which is really interesting. I’ve seen people trying to rank similar videos in Spanish, for example. It’s one of the world’s biggest languages with probably a lot less competition, but still very high volume. So you can see that’s is not a small operation. I wouldn’t take the assumption that you could just publish one video, follow all the steps, match them exactly, and manage to snatch that number one position.
Frankly, I think it is much more a case about the operation side, the Standard Operating Procedure: how you hire your actresses, how you script it, how you edit it and have someone on the go all the time, publishing the content around the clock. You also then have to perform all the off-page optimization to get that going.
Building Your YouTube Empire From Script to Screen (and Maybe Google Glory)
Now let’s analyze the script a little further. As I say, it seems that repeating the keyword is good. All the videos are the same length, there’s some sort of process here, so I’m going to use a process similar to how I do my video descriptions. So what we do is paste the transcript into ChatGPT with a prompt similar to the one below:
“I am analyzing a competitor’s videos and I want to know the formula and structure they use for their script that I can repeat. Here is one transcript”
How ChatGPT Crafts Winning YouTube Review Scripts
So go ahead and grab that transcript (to get transcripts on YouTube all you have to do is go down the description and copy) Also if you are wondering how I do my YouTube thumbnails, there is a video on how I do it on my channel but it all comes down to one thing: we take my transcript, put it into a custom GPT I built and that basically gives us thumbnail description. We’re even trying to take that further into producing social media content now, like LinkedIn posts.
After copying two transcripts into ChatGPT to figure out the structure of the video transcript, here is what we found
- Introduction
- Purchase Information
- Explanation
- Closing
- Call to Action
Those are really simple videos to do. The next thing is to just test it out so I’m going to be starting a fresh channel just for supplement reviews and we’ll have a cracker tip.
Fast Track to Ranking: Mimicking the Success Formula & Avoiding Costly Mistakes
Now of course one of the important steps is that watch time and engagement are important for rankings. They say embeds are also really important so if I find an older video that has 4,000 visitors per month, we can see there are a load of referring pages and referring domains here. I suspect those are probably their embeds providing that top ranking.
Those look like backlinks rather than embeds. Yeah, so it’s a 2-year-old article with the anchor text: Puravive. It was published two months ago, so it basically looks like a comment ban or it’s a forum and there’s the link there so it’s not embedded. That is a backlink direct to a YouTube video.
It doesn’t look like off-page is playing a significant role in it. I’ve also been comparing notes with Holly Starks who’s just joined my Mastermind, she’s a very big gun in the industry, especially with tactics like that. She’s known as the Queen of Video, and we agreed it seems to come down to traffic. Yes, the embeds will certainly help, maybe there’s some influence from backlinks, but it doesn’t seem to be that important.
The Verdict: Can You Steal the Top Spot from the Competition?
Whereas, what we’re seeing consistently is a huge volume of traffic which just doesn’t make sense for a niche supplement review keyword. Those are not cat videos, so that kind of traffic is just unrealistic. I think they’re using a service like Vid Optima or one of those, basically using a network of people to drive traffic to their videos and engagement as well. So Vid Optima basically has a network of people around the world whose job it is to watch your video on repeat. Having searched your keyword, it provides that engagement directly in relation to searching for the keyword, and therefore fulfilling search intent and they will do all that embedding and entity stacking.
Plus it looks like the other YouTubers are using some kind of manipulative comments both for engagement and also to stuff the keyword more on the page. Vid Optima has an option for that. I don’t really recommend it because the comments are a bit obvious. I know lots of people used to push back on that in my early videos, so that’s why I stopped doing all that. But while I getting my channel off the ground, and getting that initial organic traction, the tool was really valuable.
Organic Growth vs Paid Tactics: The Truth About Building Sustainable YouTube Success
So I’ve already taken the learnings and taken that script from ChatGPT and produced a very similar 3-minute-long script. In my next video, I’ll take you through step-by-step, how I did that but it’s basically just a green screen over the Java Burn website. It does look a bit weird because I’m using AI. Obviously, it’s not perfect but in that case, I just wanted to do it quickly to test out the ranking strategies. Wanted to know if we could try and knock off one of the videos and try and get my video into that Prime position at the top of Google.
So next I need to create a separate review Channel and then have to verify myself for it to get the link placed in there because it’d be a shame to rank number one and then not be able to do anything with that traffic. Another thing I’m testing out at the moment is paid ads for YouTube. It does seem to do well for traffic but it completely ruins my average view duration.
So the one I tested, I was down to 0.23 minutes whereas if I look at a video I haven’t used paid ads for, my average view duration is much more normal — it’s around 6 minutes. most of my videos get around 5 to 7 minutes of view time and like I say, that’s key for organic reach. That’s why I recommend VidOptima because they focus on getting that watch time up.
That is a much more qualitative metric of views than a purely quantitative sheer volume of views. so I’ll be testing both side by side but that’s the tactic: short 3-5 minute review videos, basically making sure the whole video is about a call to action and then just blasting it with disengagement embeds, everything and all the power that competitors seem to be doing.
