Does YouTube Help with Website Marketing & SEO?
YouTube is well known for being 2nd largest search engine (by queries processed) and the largest video hosting platform.
YouTube optimization has become a key aspect of YouTube marketing. You can find many YouTube videos and podcast episodes about setting up YouTube. How do you optimize YouTube to increase your website’s performance?
When you market on a platform, it is important to avoid “digital sharing”. Your active presence on a platform is more beneficial than your business.
YouTube can be your priority or side project. You could also use YouTube to host videos. These are just a few ways YouTube can help your website’s marketing and SEO efforts.
Profile Links and Branding
It is impossible to be everywhere on the Internet.
Search engines, trademark experts, and customers expect consistency across the Internet.
- This gives you some assurance that you are legal and is well worth the time you spend on a brand
- This provides additional signals and links between your platforms (aka search engine, people can see that YouTube channel and Twitter handle are all related, as well as Facebook Page and website).
- This gives you more visibility in brand searches
It doesn’t mean you have to be a bad person to create a placeholder channel.
Building Personas
YouTube Analytics is a tool that can be used for creating marketing personas.
YouTube Analytics provides detailed demographic and traffic source information. Next, add traffic source data or typical buying cycles.
For example, if you are a beauty retailer, you may notice that most women aged 45 and over visit Google (not YouTube). You can create a persona of your customer by searching for tutorials.
Google Search Visibility
Google Search allows users to search for videos and not HTML pages.
Search queries that do not include a video intention are available in the Video option of Google.
What is it like to be in these results? Video.
Google Search understands video. YouTube is a big presence in Google’s search results for video.
Your YouTube video might rank higher than your webpage. A YouTube video can drive traffic to your website and/or provide more viewer information.
Keyword Data
Google Search doesn’t provide keyword data via the Google Search console. YouTube Search offers keyword data via YouTube Analytics.
Go to your Channel Dashboard, Analytics & Traffic Sources. Click on YouTube Search.
Your “sources”, are keywords viewers used to find your video.
YouTube videos don’t always give enough information. YouTube keyword research can be done using video, images, and text.
YouTube Search Suggestions can be used to complement traditional keyword research on your site.
YouTube Search uses different data sets than Google Search. This allows you to make crucial lateral keyword jumps (for example: changing from “winter gloves” to “mittens”) to find interesting content angles.
KeywordTool.io, Ahrefs, and KeywordTool.io are tools that enable you to quickly extract different combinations of YouTube Search keyword phrases to improve your YouTube Suggest keyword research.
Retargeting Audiences
Did You Know that you can send targeted ads through Google’s Ad network? YouTube videos can be used to complement the same retargeting audiences that you build on a website.
You can link YouTube to your Google Ads account. This will enable you to create audience lists.
- Viewers who have viewed your videos
- People who comment, like, share, and/or dislike your videos
- Viewers of your TrueView video-on-demand ad
- People who regularly visit your YouTube channel are subscribers.
These audiences are just as reachable as website audiences.
Pre-qualify Content
You don’t want to make assumptions when it comes to content investment. Content should be able to drive visitors.
YouTube allows you to test out and evaluate what works before you invest more.
Keyword Research
Refer to the section. This is a great way to pre-qualify content.
Benchmarking
Could it be that this video idea will get viewed hundreds of thousands of times? I did know that the most popular videos about this topic have a View count.
YouTube is unique in that you can see the success and failures of industry publishers as well as competitors. This benchmark provides me with insight into when and how to prioritize video content for a website.
Reverse Engineering Top Content & Publishers
Use tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs to find the most popular content. Search for topics and formats and create your version
Link Building & Prospecting
Pre-qualifying link opportunities, similar to “prequalifying material”, are an important step toward promoting quality content.
Don’t spam website owners with cold emails (aka spam), but it’s a good idea to have a reason. It doesn’t matter if your goal is to help with image licensing or broken links. The more people you know, the more likely they are to work together.
To see the list of websites that have embedded your content, you can click through the YouTube traffic sources report. The Playback Locations reports also include the same data.
You can use the data to create an introduction to yourself on other websites If they embed your video, they might be interested in your website.
It’s possible to stumble upon a “type of website” you don’t know about. If you do, you can prioritize joining or supporting subreddits or community websites.
Referral Traffic to and Calls for Action
YouTube can bring traffic to your website, naturally. If you send too many people to your site via your videos, it could hurt your marketing efforts.
They can be used to complement any links to your site in the description (full optimization guide available here). These overlays can be used in conjunction with any links to your website within the description (full optimization guide ).).
YouTube is not a good medium for “direct responses”. Video cards make it easy to embed calls to action on your website and email list from any device.
YouTube Advertising
If you don’t have time or the desire to develop an inbound/organic strategy for YouTube, you can pay to test.
With your Google Ads account, you can run a YouTube video advertising campaign. This podcast series provides tips and tricks for YouTube Advertising.
Next steps
YouTube can be an excellent platform for marketing, but it can also consume lots of resources and provide little return. Make sure your website and business get the most out of YouTube.
