ReelSEO's Grant Crowell does an in-depth review of YouTube's annotations feature – offering explanations, excitations, limitations, and recommendations for how to use annotations to enhance your video search optimization.
Benefits to including annotations with your video
- It gives background information to what is being watched, either at certain points of the video or throughout the video. Where you position an annotation can also provide a good frame of reference to what you are watching, and about a particular person or object.
- Clickable links to URLs, search results, or channel links to other related videos in the YouTube/Google Video network
· Can have a text reference to an outside URL
Types of YouTube annotations
- Speech Bubble – a cartoon/comic-book style of text to simulate verbal activities by a character in the video.
- Note – equivalent of an all-purpose "post-it" notice
- Spotlight – highlighting a particular area on a video, where text information is displayed on mouseover.
- Pause – complete freezes a video within a selected time frame, and resumes upon ending of the pause time
Test run of YouTube annotations – "Bindergate”
Google or YouTube search for "bindergate" and you'll see a video example I created with multiple types and uses of annotations. (Or just watch the video right at the top of this post.) Annotations can be fun! (Even the people I made fun of in the video told me they enjoyed watching it. ;)
YouTube's annotations limitations
Unfortunately there are still a lot of limitations with YouTube's annotation feature.
- The YouTube logo watermark carries over the bottom right. (So that means don't put your annotation text down in the very bottom right, or it will be blocked out by the YouTube watermark
- You can't copy-paste annotation formats; you have to manually create a new annotation each time. (This can make it difficult to have subsequent annotations appear in the exact same locations each time, such as for run-on text.)
- Can't move the same annotation to different locations. Have to always create a new one and end the old one.
- Can't duplicate annotations from one video to another.
- Annotations are not indexable in any search results – not in Google indexing, not in YouTube, even.
- Can't include a clickable link to outside the Google Video Network (YouTube or Google Video).
- The spotlight annotation feature has no solid background for text, which can make it very difficult to read if it's not behind a solid background in the video.
- Clickable links in videos are not easily indicated. There is just a small square box in the lower right corner of the annotation box
- The Speech Bubble annotation can't include clickable links.
- Only a singular font style. You can't make font larger or bold or italic, or any color other than black or white. Just regular text.
- No "undo" command.
- No alignment choices for text – only left-align
- Can't do a copy-paste between different videos! (Need to bring it over from an outside program like Microsoft Word
- If you're just a regular visitor with no collaborative annotation permissions, you can't copy-paste the text in an annotation (if you don't have access to the collaborative annotations link).
- Because the text is small, it's difficult to tell if an annotation of the same YouTube's mobile platform doesn't feature any annotations in the video.
Tips for doing annotations in your YouTube videos
- Include a "CLICK HERE >" to point to any annotation with a clickable link.
- If you're doing the pause feature, be sure to insert a text annotation run just before the pause feature starts, so people will have an opportunity to understand why there is a pause, and have proper time to read the text annotation.
- If you want to have a text URL featured in an annotation box, try to make it an easily recognizable (simple) URL, since people can't copy-paste that URL from the annotation.
- Switch up the placement and color of annotations during a video playback, to make them more easily recognizable when the content does change.
- Use a a good, solid color contrast in your annotation boxes in front of the area they are featured in the video. (If you are using the spotlight feature, stretch the box to where the text will appear behind a background in the video with strong contrast.) This will make the text stand out sharper.
Our Video SEO recommendation for YouTube's annotations feature
YouTube should treat annotations as indexable metadata, just like it does with the title, description and tags entry fields. After all, annotations are helpful text content that can improve a video's relevancy to the viewer (similar to the description field), which is under the control of the account holder with permission-based controls for collaboration (so spam shouldn't be an issue).
Hey YouTube, you're welcome (again!)