Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall
Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall
Grow your reach with easy Youtube SEO - Ep 12
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Transcript

Blake Beus 0:02
Okay, we’re recording right recording. So, Greg, before before we hit the record button, we do this too many times we were talking about yes, search engine optimization or SEO, but specifically YouTube, SEO. And we both have a ton of thoughts on this you’ve actually been experimenting with with your own YouTube content on this. So, so tell people what you’ve been kind of experimenting on. And we will hash out some other ideas and plans and some things.

Greg Marshall 0:27
Yeah. So I mean, one of the things is, I’ve been creating video content for a very long time for years now. And but one of the things that I have lacked is an actual SEO strategy, right? So I use my video content in very specific way to attract, you know, my audience and generate business. But one thing that I haven’t paid attention to is the is Search, YouTube search, and how to actually maximize that. And so recently, I’ve been testing and you’ve inspired me to do this, this, so I’m going to give you credit for that. I want to make sure everyone knows that Blake actually inspired me to do this. But recently, I’ve been testing different strategies for YouTube search. And right now I’ve been doing what they call like newsjacking, which is whatever is the trend right now. Right? For example, we just had a big boxing fight on Saturday. And, you know, Tyson fury and Deontay Wilder was was the fight. So I utilized their event, basically, and then created a video that’s related to so that it could pop up in the search. And I’ve done that a couple times. I’ve also done it with my team, the Baltimore Ravens, Lamar Jackson. And I’ve noticed that the search traffic on my channel daily has increased and it’s in it’s starting to increase more and impact other videos. And so that’s just something that I’m seeing that’s working. And I’m, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on like, yeah, search engine strategy, what you should be doing, and just in general, what should people be doing?

Blake Beus 1:57
Yeah, yeah, I love the term newsjacking. It’s one I actually haven’t heard for a long time. A lot of people don’t know, when I first started in the tech world, my very first job was Search Engine Optimization. For an E commerce brand based out of here, Utah, that is no longer around. But it was back in the day when we went to rank well, you had to have like 20 different websites with all the contents. We’re managing content for all these different websites. But I’m glad that’s gone. Quick story right along newsjacking when you guys remember when the Tesla truck was announced, and Elon, yes, did this thing. And he’s like the the windows are bulletproof and has some holidays. And it breaks a window. One One marketer I saw and I was so jealous, I didn’t come up with this idea. But he came out he dropped a video that was essentially titled, The real reason the Tesla truck window broke and talked about how, how, in his opinion, the window broke on purpose, because it generated a ton of news stories. And one thing that Elon Musk is insanely good at is generating buzz. And he knows he knows that a lot of people like to make fun of wealthy billionaires failing on stage. Yep. But he also knows that that will come back to him in money long term in Tesla truck sales, because there’ll be able to say, well, we got it fixed, guys. I don’t know if that’s the exact reason why I broke but I wouldn’t put it past Elon Musk to do something like that, that that’s definitely something that I could see him do. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, um, so yeah, I mean, let’s just talk about SEO and YouTube, SEO. So YouTube, SEO has been gaining popularity for years, you know? And there’s, there’s a few different reasons. First of all, there’s so much content to SEO competition in the Google search engine. But Google, I don’t know exactly when they did this is probably a couple of years ago, started showing relevant videos up above every single other search, search result out there. And so you can kind of shortcut your search engine results if you have good video content. And you’ve nailed your YouTube SEO, because then Google will say, Hey, this is a relevant video for these types of searches. We’re going to bump this up above every other content out there. So if you’re trying to compete against 1000s of different bullet bloggers, not all those people are creating videos because it’s so it’s more work. It’s more intimidating. Like I get that it. But Google tends to reward you for that value content, and you can get get all the way up there. Not only that, YouTube in and of itself. A lot of people think of it as a video platform. Well, honestly, first and foremost is a search engine. Yes. That’s how most people interact with YouTube these days. They don’t go into YouTube and hit their subscription list and just start watching videos in there. They go to YouTube, and they’re searching for answers to a question that they have. And while YouTube is massive, Google search engine is 1000 times larger. Yep. And so it’s easier to rank and get good traffic, high quality traffic by nailing your YouTube SEO.

Greg Marshall 4:55
Yes. And you know what, I have a very specific question because we talked about right for the record button went on. So I wanted to make sure that we touched. So you mentioned that I create, let’s say, I have hundreds of videos on my channel, right? And some of them have done well, and some of them don’t have as many views. My thought is, it’s probably the title and the description, like it’s just not optimized. Is there any value to going back and changing these titles? And are there any like do’s and don’ts?

Blake Beus 5:28
Yeah, absolutely. Go back and change those titles. It’s not gonna hurt anything. If it’s a video, that’s, that’s got good content, but it’s not seeing the views you think you think you should be getting? Go ahead and change those titles? It seems I don’t have any super, you know, concrete evidence of this. But it seems like if you go into your backlog of videos and give it a little bit of a refresher with some new thumbnails, and some new description, text and a new title, that YouTube seems to toss that into, like a more recent algorithm, gossan, whatever, and see if those those edits can generate some, but if they do, you can, you can actually get quite quite a bit more traffic. The the one thing that’s very interesting about YouTube content, I mean, some content is gets stale pretty quick, but a lot of YouTube content, you can have high views on that year after year after year. If it’s if it’s the right kind of content, and so you can take a video that’s two years old, swap out the thumbnail, swap out the title text to give it a better, you know, SEO SEO position, improve the description and see a big bump in that one of the people I’ve seen, and I’m so bad at remembering names, but the guy that runs a website, that’s okay, dork doc. Oh, yeah. No, I

Unknown Speaker 6:45
think it’s Noah. Noah Kagan. Yeah. Yeah, someday, yeah. Yah, yah.

Blake Beus 6:50
He has a bunch of YouTube content out there and everything. And I remember listening to an interview of him a year or so ago. And one of the strategies he was experimenting with was going back and changing the old titles. And every single time he got a big boost, he

Greg Marshall 7:07
got a boost interest is that, and I’ve seen, I’ve watched this cause I think he has great content. And I hope I’m saying his name, right, Noah Kagan or something like that. But he’s, I know, he’s he’s legit. Mark. I know, you started. Facebook. I think it was his first.

Blake Beus 7:22
Yeah, he started Facebook. And then he I think he runs app Sumo. Yes. Right now and has has, you know, bought some WordPress plugins to mean, you know, keep them maintained properly and a few other things. And yeah, he’s got his hands in in quite a few different buckets right

Greg Marshall 7:40
now. Well, he’s definitely a smart marketer. That’s for sure. So alright, so So you’re talking about YouTube search? What about what’s the impact of descriptions? Like? Is there any value into having a short description, long description, does it matter?

Blake Beus 7:58
It definitely matters less than the title, the title and the thumbnail are what make people click. In fact, there’s a lot of YouTubers right now, that will, if their bigger channel, right, they’ll they’ll drop their new video, and then they’ll watch it for the first hour or so. And after 30 minutes, and it gets maybe 10,000 views or whatever, they’ll swap out the title and the thumbnail and see if they get a bump in views. If so, that’s how they split test their title down now. Got it. Descriptions are probably less important. But you definitely need to have some sort of good description, if people are interested in your content, they’re going to be dropping into the descriptions. I don’t know about your browsing behavior. But when I’m on YouTube, I almost always if it’s an interesting video, almost always hop in the description to to check out some additional FEMA saying

Greg Marshall 8:44
I do the same and just to see what it’s about, or if there’s any additional links to you know, go to the website and learn more. So I think so that’s, that’s very interesting. So there’s no I guess, negative really to changing the titles. If it’s not getting the it almost to me, it makes more sense to optimize. Yeah, more than anything, right. Yeah, absolutely.

Blake Beus 9:05
Absolutely. I mean, we talk about algorithms, everybody talks about algorithms all the time, and a lot of people get it wrong, but algorithms do kind of define a big portion of content consumers lives mine as well. I consume a lot of content also. And you have to keep that in mind when you’re changing titles and things to try to give the algorithm the indicators that might might help it determine what types of people that content is valuable for and you got to realize too, you’re dealing with the viewers are not just numbers, they’re actual people. And so this is where I happen to the you know, behavioral economics or psychological sales or whatever. You you’ve got to kind of figure out when someone sees that what makes them click Yes on on the video and you know, I actually dove in deep on this a little bit because YouTube SEO is is super good. but it’s not technically SEO. I mean, I guess it is. But the thumbnail is super, super, super important you want the thumbnail to be to to incentivize people to click data. And so you see a lot of strategies and patterns out there of like the face, you see like the surprise face, you see this surprise face, maybe you’ll see like an arrow pointing to something that you can’t quite see you want to click on it, or something circled that you’re like you can’t see or, or, you know, something along those lines. Obviously, some of them feel a bit more click Beatty than others, but you can do it in a in a good way that promotes value. And everything that will get someone to click in the thumbnail is one of the best ways to do that’s a very visual platform.

Greg Marshall 10:47
Do you know any statistics on what is considered a good click through rate on YouTube? Like a good click through rate on a YouTube thumbnail? That’s something I think I know click through rates on ads and everything else but I don’t actually know the the click the click through rate number that you should be trying striving to achieve on YouTube. Yeah, you

Blake Beus 11:10
know what, that’s gonna be one of those things. I’m gonna have to go look up. I don’t I don’t know if that information is given to you in the YouTube creation platform. I mean, if you pay for YouTube ads, yeah, you get that number. But I don’t know. I don’t know if YouTube in their analytics for just a regular video. Give you the impressions and the click throughs. You can occasionally

Greg Marshall 11:32
you know what? I don’t know. Maybe they’ve had it forever. But I have seen it. Really? Yeah. And I and it does show like impressions the click through rate. But I don’t know what is considered a good click through rate gotcha for YouTube. I just know, like if I base off ads, but ads are different, because you’re essentially forcing it

Blake Beus 11:51
and you’re targeting targeting people. Yeah, you know,

Greg Marshall 11:56
like the most likely you’re gonna like, hit your target. But this is more like a wide net that’s been cast. So yeah, maybe that’s something we look up. And

Blake Beus 12:04
yeah, we gotta we got to look that up and circle back, I will say, more is better.

Greg Marshall 12:08
Yeah, absolutely. The higher the number, the better, right. So

Blake Beus 12:12
even if you don’t know that for your channel, or whatever, just look at kind of what the average is for your channel and start playing around with things and see what you can get, you can get to beat to be better on

Greg Marshall 12:22
that can almost be like a video game. Right? You’re trying to gamify it? Yeah,

Blake Beus 12:26
I mean, it’s, uh, gamifying things is super important to help keep keeping people motivated. So that’s one of those things you could look at and say, Okay, we’re just going to kind of play this game. So you will get that click through rate to be up to. And the reality is, like industry standards and things, it’s going to vary widely. So sometimes you just need to go figure out your own damn data.

Greg Marshall 12:45
Yep. You know, yeah, well, I think the the other thing question I had is, is there anything that negatively impacts you in the algorithm? Like, if it’s to click Beatty? Like, do you ever do you know, people get penalized for that at all? Or? Or does it matter?

Blake Beus 13:00
I can, I can see if that’s not happening. Now. I can see that happening in the future. Okay, but the one thing you got to realize is, YouTube knows a lot about your video. They they it’s not like the video itself is this black hole? Right? Yeah, the algorithm can actually see what the content is on your video and make some intelligent guesses. First, the frequent transcription isn’t for your benefit, Greg, or my benefit is for the algorithms benefit got it right. And so they know what you’re talking about in the video, they know all of the content inside the video from a text perspective that can then be used for searching or whatever got. The second thing is, is they they do have some basic image detection that they can determine inside of a video kind of what the content is got. So if you’re talking about I don’t know how to make potatoes, you know, big potatoes or something, and your video is about bananas. You don’t know it’ll know that, that you have nothing.

Unknown Speaker 13:58
Right? Like

Blake Beus 14:00
and so but if it’s like a talking head style video, that doesn’t matter quite so much because you’re not you’re not showing images of the things right there. The other thing they they know too is they know they use indicators a lot. So are people watching the whole video? Are they watching this part of the video are they click on the video in the first 10 seconds, they’re bouncing? They know that even if all the SEO aspects are good, if the engagement in that area isn’t good, then they’ll demote the video got it so you’ll notice a and this is a standard storytelling pattern but you’ll notice the videos that do really really well I’m talking the videos that consistently have from creators that consistently have you know, millions of views each video you’ll notice that they always start the story in the middle Yeah, right. And and tease the the end results but not tell you the NBL or they always start with some sort of a surprise that’s that happens in the middle of the story. And then they then they go back to the story they tell the whole story and you see literally the exact same content that you saw in the first five seconds, but it happens that maybe minute five or six or something like that. And then they take that through to conclusion. That’s a very standard storytelling pattern. You see this in movies all the time, you see this everywhere. And you can very easily do it on short form videos like YouTube shorts, or tick tock videos, or Instagram reels. And you can do it on a little bit longer form videos, like a longer form, you know, 10 minute YouTube video or something like that. But you know, if you’re talking about your, your ravens, yep, that that one, and you’re talking about how that ties to marketing, you know, you could start in the middle of the story, some something talking about how how this, this unbelievable thing happened right before the end of the fourth quarter that send it into overtime, and you were blown away and couldn’t believe and it made you not be able to sleep at night. And then you go back to the first of the story, you talk about how that story got set up and everything. And then the second half of the story. You talk about after the this incredible thing that happened, you talk about how that ties into marketing. Boom, you’ve got this very addictive. Yeah, storytelling that is, is interesting and valuable, and will get a large watch through right,

Greg Marshall 16:07
you know, you bring up storytelling to you. I think one of the indirect benefits of doing video marketing, especially if you’re trying to improve your results on the search is it’s actually practice for public speaking, for communication for different ways for people to actually share their message, because I’ve noticed the more videos that I’ve done over time, it’s helped me communicate better because it helps you with figuring out what you should be talking about what’s the most important etc, etc. So second indirect benefit to really trying to get higher watching rates.

Blake Beus 16:43
Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s, it’s just about getting confident on camera, getting confident front of people, and you get better at a lot of these things. I I read somewhere that one of the biggest determining factors for high level executives, as to how high they will go in a company once they hit like the upper middle management is how good they are a public speaking or how good they are at present, presenting like a story and storytelling and everything. We’re we’re very enamored as humans by people that can tell a good story that has some sort of principles that we can we can take away. I mean, it’s you see that theme over and over and over throughout the whole history of humanity. Yep. The the people that are good at storytelling are the are the people that we kind of look up to? Yeah. And if you look at anybody, some of the some of the big players out there, you’ve got, you know, Tony Robbins, yeah, the guy tells stories like nobody’s business you got Gary Vee is always telling stories, even if it’s a very short form story. You know, I remember once see, he had this very short video about supporting the original hustle. And yes, it starts by this lemonade stand. And then you know, buys, buys them out talks with them, whether they’re business or whatever. And it’s like the super short story with a bunch of, you know, context surrounding literally everybody’s thought about sorry, yes.

Greg Marshall 18:00
I still think about,

Blake Beus 18:03
sometimes I feel like thrown in my hand. But yeah, storytelling is a super important one. And that’s very vital for, you know, YouTube, SEO

Greg Marshall 18:13
for data. So with YouTube, SEO, pretty much like a good recap is work on your titles. Do you know if a longer shorter title is better or worse,

Blake Beus 18:26
it doesn’t really matter, as long as it’s catchy. But if it’s too long, it’ll get it’ll get cut off, and you won’t be able to see it in certain views. So that’s the only thing I would say, to keep in mind.

Greg Marshall 18:35
Got it. And then description and make sure you have somewhat of a description, to at least tell YouTube what the video is about, even though it can read your video probably more information for the algorithm the better. And what about tags, tags?

Blake Beus 18:51
You know, tags are basically like hashtags in other places. And that’s actually something I haven’t delved into a ton. If I had to guess, I would guess that YouTube cares a whole lot, a whole lot more about your title and your thumbnail. And then the indicators, meaning watch through rate and click through rate. And those things than they do about the tags tags are, are too easy to just like throw in there. And then it’s almost almost every content platform out there. They start with tags, and then they kind of deprioritize how important those are. And you see that right now with Instagram, hashtags. They’re they’re very much D. D. D, prioritizing.

Greg Marshall 19:31
Yes.

Blake Beus 19:32
How much reach you get from your hashtags right

Greg Marshall 19:34
now, back in the day used to be able to get a lot of blogs, and then, you know, over the years, probably because everything always gets abused eventually. Right? Well,

Blake Beus 19:43
and that’s a very easy thing to abuse. You can sit down there and think about all these hashtags, related hashtags and take five minutes and you’ve got all these hashtags, but that was that was easy, right? You want to do the harder thing you want to do the thing that takes a little bit more effort because everybody in their dog can do the easy thing. Yep. The people that are putting Just a tiny bit more effort, we’ll see significant

Greg Marshall 20:02
more data word. Got it? And what about like with? Do you think there’s any influence on what about outside reach? Meaning? Let’s say you have a YouTube video is getting watching pretty well. But it’s getting shared a lot on websites like places outside of YouTube. Do you think that impacts search in any way? Does it give it more value?

Blake Beus 20:26
I would, I would say absolutely. Because that’s another, you know, behavioral indicator. If if people are taking your video and embedding it on their own website, because it’s highly valuable. That took a lot of effort, right? That’s not just smashing the thumbs up. That’s, oh, I want to copy this embed code. I want to go to my website, I’m gonna write a quick blog post about it. I’m going to throw it up there. That’s a lot more effort than hitting than hitting even hitting subscribe or hitting the like button. Got it? So that will definitely have an impact. How much of an impact? I don’t know, I would assume quite a bit. Because even the highly popular videos I can’t imagine they’re getting more than Yeah. You embed Yeah, total. So it’s you’re working with pretty small numbers there. But it can definitely have an impact for sure.

Greg Marshall 21:15
Got it. So I think yeah, I think to recap, that pretty much tells us everything that we probably need to know as far as YouTube search and what to be working on.

Blake Beus 21:25
Yeah, right. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I would just say, I would just say keep at it, I want one of my favorite quotes about creators or whatever it is. To make your to make really good videos, you have to make 100 or 1000 really shitty videos, yes, to get there. And just make sure the next one’s better. And if you’re a person like me, my perfectionism gets in the way of creating content a lot of the time. And because I want each piece to be super great. Yeah. So one of the things I do to kind of shift that is say, Okay, I’m drawing a line in the sand. This is done. Yep. All of the things I wish I did a little bit better on this piece of content. I’m going to carry those over into my next the next one. Yep. Right. But I’m going to draw a line in the sand say this is done. And the same thing happens with, you know, artists, or painters or people like that. Eventually, you have to say this painting is done. Yes. And move on to the next painting and take what you want to learn and move that forward.

Greg Marshall 22:19
Yeah. So yes, I think, Blake, do you have anything else as far as YouTube search and what we should be doing? No, no,

Blake Beus 22:26
I don’t have anything there. But let’s just let’s just wrap this up and talk about, you know, how can people reach out to you Greg,

Greg Marshall 22:33
yeah. So people if you want to reach out I do a free marketing consultation, helping your business, whether that’s ads, even more anything to basically grow your business and the market strategy. You can see me at Greg marshall.co is my website to go and book that call.

Blake Beus 22:49
Awesome. Awesome. And then for me, just blink, be calm. I have a few different offers on there. And you know, you can actually reach out and contact me on there, contact me on social media, whatever. But yeah, that’s it.

Greg Marshall 23:00
All right. Well, I guess until next time, appreciate it, guys.

Blake Beus 23:04
Okay, we’ll talk to you guys later. All right.

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