Does Vimeo beat YouTube for SEO?

  Does Vimeo beat YouTube for SEO? Good question!

"Geez. SEO again, Daniel??"   Sorry, but...Yeah.

Listen, part of being a business owner nowadays is knowing how to advertise and drive business your way.

For guys like me in the remodeling and renovations industry, all we used to have to do was drop $5,000-$7,000.00 on a prime spot in our local Yellow Pages and.....boom, that was our advertising budget for the entire year.

Why wouldn't you? It was delivered directly to every home and used by virtually anyone who had a telephone and a need. Even better, they would advertise on television, reminding people to "Let Your Fingers Do The Walking".

It was the proverbial gift that kept on giving!

...well, that is until AT&T sold its majority share of the phone book away back in 2012, admitting it was a "dwindling asset".
Sorry Old Yeller, say hello to the new phone book... it's called the Search Engine.

Jump forward to today and now we're all looking to find ways to get those Search Engines to post results related to our businesses.

One asset that seems to do well is YouTube. I post videos to YouTube all the time (usually embarrassing myself in the process) and they tend to rank well in Google search results, which is great for my business.
I'm fairly certain that Google just can't deny the sheer awesomeness of an up-and-coming film maker like myself, but someone pointed out the fact that Google owns YouTube probably didn't hurt either.

Please.... hater.

On my quest for film-making glory, I kept seeing videos pop up from a different source and decided it was time to take a better look at the another video-hosting website... Vimeo.


The first thing I noticed, with the help of my super secret-squirrel SEO tools, is that this was also a PR9 ranked website, just like YouTube. Can't do much better than that on the Google PageRank scale.

I also noticed it was pretty well laid out and user friendly. Another added benefit I realized, after a few uploads, is that it wasn't nearly as restrictive as YouTube had been to me in the past. Sometimes, I use a Creative Commons License bed of music in my videos and YouTube makes me jump through hoops before I can post the video.
Vimeo was interesting enough that I decided a real head-to-head challenge was in order.
So, without further adieu...

Vimeo vs. YouTube, let the battle begin!

I made a short video about an entryway remodeling project we recently did. I posted that video up to both YouTube and Vimeo to see how they would act in organic searches.

First off, I performed my pre-search ritual. I cleared my browsers History, Cache, Cookies, Site Preferences and set the search region for the United States. That means my search results aren't just competing against a local market, they are competing against the entire country for SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

Results always have thousands of pages but I don't care very much about anything other than the first page. Research has shown many times over that most people don't look much past the very first page of results.

The Golden Globe nominated video I uploaded was titled "Entryway Transformation" (Hey... a boy can dream, can't he?)
That was about 5 days ago, let's try typing those exact words into Google and see what comes up.

VIMEO

Well would you look at that!  

My Vimeo video came up as the #2 result on the very first page and it's only been up for five days! (...and you laughed when I said Golden Globes).

Can't argue with those SEO results.

Hey, I wonder where my YouTube upload of the very same video ranked?

Let's find out...

  GOOGLE

There it is, halfway down the second page. Still, not bad!
But, as we've learned... most people don't make it to the second page when they are searching, especially if the first page gives them what they are looking for.

How that happens is Google's biggest secret and why we are always chasing the elusive formula (algorithm) of exactly how they rank results.

 

 

 

So what conclusions can I draw from this?

• First of all, my biggest conclusion was that I managed to target a few keywords in my video title that were seemingly open to rank well. I'm sure if I had named this video "Remodeling an entryway",  I probably would have had a tougher time ranking well for a more competitive keyword like "remodeling" across the country. Then again, I did show how a local companay beat out HGTV and This Old House for that same word the other day. Maybe that's another experiment.

• The second conclusion that I made was that Vimeo seems to be beating YouTube in Google's search engine results for the identical keywords. Mind you, the YouTube result has a much cooler tiny video preview window that makes the listing really stand out. I guess you have to expect that sort of enhancement when Google owns one of the products and not the other. But, I am surprised that Google didn't seem to favor it's own product in this particular case. 

• My final conclusion was this: I think need to start posting more videos on Vimeo. Not just post relevant videos, but with equally relevant keywords in the titles. The cool thing is that not only can I post information in the video itself, but in the description area as well. (That's the perfect place for linking back to your own website, contact information and other blogs, projects, etc.)

Now all I need to do is figure out who to thank at the Golden Globes Awards ceremony. Shut up, it could happen.

Daniel Batal is the author and owner @ Focalpoint Renovations