It’s video and audio content. So the question I get all the time: Why would I spend $16,302 a month on audio and video content that Google won’t rank? Each episode is about 5 minutes long, which means 180 minutes worth of audio content per month on average. Now as a quick recap, here’s how much time it takes to produce each form of content: Podcasts – 7.75 hours per month Videos – 5 hours per month Blog posts – 8 hours per month And here’s how much traffic each form of content gets from Google: What content does Google prefer? Now if you look at the video traffic I generated from Google, the numbers weren’t as bad as the podcast. I generated 12,261 pageviews from Google to my videos and those users had an average time on page of 2 minutes and 32 seconds. Now that you can see how podcast and videos generate less search traffic, you’re probably wondering why I spend so much time creating those forms of content. Here are my podcast stats from last month. Yes, there are more people who now use the Internet, but that’s not what I am talking about… Sites like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn are competing for your eyeballs, which means marketers benefit. In other words, you’ll have less competition getting listens to your podcast than you would getting views to your website.
When you do a Google search, what do you see?
Lists of websites, maybe an answer to your question, some images, some ads that you usually ignore, and even some products that you can buy.
There are tons of different types of content you see when you do a Google search.
But what’s one form of content that you barely see on Google?
Well, technically two forms of content.
It’s video and audio content.
Whenever you perform a Google search, it’s rare to see videos or audio files that rank high on page 1.
So the question I get all the time: Why would I spend $16,302 a month on audio and video content that Google won’t rank?
But before I answer that, let’s first run through all of the numbers.
You’ll probably think I am crazy at first, but hopefully, it will all make sense in the end. ?
How much do I spend on content?
Let’s do a quick run-down of my content expenses.
I spent $2,144 last month on my podcast, Marketing School (studio time, editing, hosting, and I ran a few podcast advertising experiments).
And I spent $14,158 last month on my video series, Neil Knowledge, to produce educational marketing content for you (studio time, editing, optimization services, and video ad experiments).
As for text-based content, I spent $0 last month. Technically, the content is free because I’m writing it.
Now let’s look at how much content I create each month…
How much content do I create?
My podcast is daily.
Every single day… even on holidays.
That means I am releasing roughly 30 episodes per month. Each episode is about 5 minutes long, which means 180 minutes worth of audio content per month on average.
As for my videos, I try to keep them around 6 minutes long and I release videos every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
I’m producing 12 videos per month, about 72 minutes of video-based content.
And as for blog posts, I write once per week. I try to keep each blog post to around 2,000 words (the average blog post that ranks on page 1 of Google is 1,890 words), and it takes around 4 minutes to read my posts.
This means I produce roughly 16 minutes of text-based content per month.
Now let’s look at how much time I spend to create each type of content.
How much time do I spend on content marketing?
I record my podcast in batches.
Typically, we record 20 episodes at a time.
It takes me about 30 minutes to get to the recording studio and 50 minutes to get back home. I have no idea why, but it always takes longer to get back home…
And even though each episode is 5 minutes long, it takes roughly an hour to come up with a list of 20 topic ideas and 3 hours to record them all (including setup time).
In general, to produce my 30 monthly episodes, it takes roughly 465 minutes or 7.75 hours.
As for videos, it takes 45 minutes to get to the studio and 45 minutes to get back home. I can typically record a whole month’s worth of videos in 1 session (12 videos).
It takes me an hour to come up with video topics and ideas.
And as for studio time, I can finish shooting in 2.5 hours (I don’t script anything, and I typically just do everything in 1 take).
So, to create 12 videos a month it takes me roughly 5 hours.
Last but not least, it takes me no more than 2 hours to write a blog post.
From coming up with the idea to writing it all down to then adding it to WordPress (I blog in Microsoft Word). This means I spend 8 hours a month blogging, considering that I blog once a week.
Now as a quick recap, here’s how much time it takes to produce each form of content:
- Podcasts – 7.75 hours per month
- Videos – 5 hours per month
- Blog posts – 8 hours per month
And here’s how much traffic each form of content gets from Google:
What content does Google prefer?
If you look at the image below, you’ll see that I got 785,991 visitors from organic Google search last month.
Can you guess what portion of that search traffic came from the audio or video content?
A big… fat… ZERO
Well, technically I’ve blocked Google from crawling my audio and video files. But it wasn’t always that way. I used to have a page dedicated to my podcast on NeilPatel.com and it used to generate 32,670 pageviews per month.
But out of those pageviews, only 5,386 came from Google.
I tried everything.
From adding transcription text to each podcast episode to generating social shares to even writing a unique synopsis for each episode. I even built…
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