Your Social Videos Are Already Ranking in Google | Soaring Above Search #4

For a few years now we have had a YouTube channel that never quite took off.

We ran a big sprint of videos across 2022 and 2023. They did ok. We climbed to about 2,000 subscribers and then plateaued.

YouTube was never really our game. It has its own meta: titles, hooks, thumbnails, a whole craft that rewards people who live and breathe it. We did not.

So I fell back on the one thing I actually knew. I made videos about things people were already searching for, the same way I would approach a page for SEO.

It kind of worked. To this day one of our best videos is me, on camera, showing how to open an htaccess file. Hardly viral material. But people were searching for it, so it found them.

Then life got in the way. We spent the next few years expanding into the USA, winning awards, and growing the team to more than 100 SEO and AI search specialists around the world. Claude ate most of my attention on top of that.

The channel just sat there. Quietly ranking. I barely thought about it.

Then Google handed social a Search Console

Last week Google dropped an update that pulled me straight back in.

You can now see the impressions and clicks your YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X content earns from Google search, right inside Search Console. They are calling it Platform Properties.

I read the announcement and my brain lit up. I got cooking with Claude Code at 3am, again.

Here is the idea I had been sitting on for years without the data to prove it.

In SEO we build a topical map. We list every subtopic a site needs to own a subject, then we build against it until Google treats us as the authority.

I kept wondering what would happen if you ran that exact playbook on a social account instead of a website.

I never had the numbers to see it. Social platforms do not hand you search data. Until now.

The proof was already in the export

So the first thing I did was pull StudioHawk's export.

Day one showed 18,233 impressions from Google search. Eight days in, the running total passed 152,000. Content we never once optimised for Google, surfacing for roughly 19,000 searches a day.

Clicks across those eight days: 38.

That gap is the whole story. Google already treats the channel as eligible for thousands of searches a day. Nobody ever packaged a video to win the click.

And this covers the whole channel. 80 different videos earned impressions from Google search in the first week.

Then I saw it. 149 different phrasings of "enterprise seo", worth 23,330 impressions as a cluster, and we were appearing for every one of them. We had never planned a single video around any of it.

Look at that. "what is a sitemap" sitting at position 4. "enterprise seo" at position 11, one nudge off page one. "seo specialist" buried at 30 with real demand behind it. Every row is a decision, and the data had been sitting there the whole time.

The Social Topical Map

That is when the framework clicked. I am calling it the Social Topical Map.

1. Connect your platform properties in Search Console.
2. Audit what Google already shows of your content, starting with YouTube.
3. Build the topical map: platform queries, keyword research, and Google Trends.
4. Produce the videos and posts the gaps are asking for.
5. Embed them on the matching pages of your site.

The end goal is one thing. Hold more than one placement on a single search result. A page, a video, a social post, an AI answer, all at once, all yours.

Why this matters now

Google has been pushing multimodal hard for years.

AI Mode reads images and video, and fans out its own queries from them. A brand with only text competes for one slot. A brand mapped across formats holds several. I went deeper on the mechanics in the YouTube Topical Map.

What I am testing this week

So I built a quick and dirty V1 to do the sorting for me.

You drop in your Search Console social exports and it builds the map, then sorts every query into one of three moves.

Then it exports the lot. A spreadsheet with every pillar and plan, plus a prompt set for creating the content. For your top 3 pillars it writes ready-to-paste briefs: a YouTube video, a Reel or TikTok script, and a set of X posts, all built from your own queries.

It is live on Hawk Academy: the Social Topical Map Generator. Drop your exports in and see what your channel is already ranking for.

Funny thing. That htaccess video still ranks. It was the first time I proved to myself that search-first thinking beats chasing the algorithm. Years later, same idea, just pointed at every platform at once.

This week's takeaway

SEO and social have fused. The brands that map their video content the way we map website pages will hold the whole search result. Everyone else fights for one slot.

This is V1 and I am still cooking. Cannot wait to dig into this deeper.