Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Thank you for joining me today. The sun is coming out, it's beautiful. I'm starting to sweat now because it's so hot, but let's go ahead and start talking SEO.
Today's conversation is going to be about how to use YouTube videos and Vimeo videos alongside your link building. I think that YouTube and video marketing is becoming a more and more important conversation when it comes to marketing, but also we have to understand how it fits together with SEO.
But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. We have a [inaudible 00:00:32] black tea from Tea station, which is an OG boba shop that I used to go to back in the day. I bought this tea, I think, six years ago, so it's been a long time. But let's go ahead and get brewing and get talking about this stuff.
So, the reason why I want to have this conversation is a lot of the clients and team that I work with, they're engaging in video marketing and they're doing a heck of a job doing so, right? So, in the sense that a lot of people are investing in YouTube and these videos are great, because they increase user engagement on your site, they help get exposure and they help people fall in love with your brand. But something that I've noticed is that there is a disconnect when it comes to video marketing and SEO.
One of the main things is that ... okay, I'm going to give you an example. Let's say you have a pizza shop, and in this pizza shop, I have videos about the five best pizzas that I think we make for a summer day, right? I'm not really a pizza cook, but let's just say that there's that article. I create this beautiful video where I show the five pizza, how's they're made, the summer and everything like that. It's great, we have this great video.
I upload it on YouTube like most people would, and then I start going out there trying to link build. I say, "Hey, we have this great piece for people who are looking to do ... what to do this summer. We have five of the best pizzas that they can have this summer in this local area." I'm in Orange County, so let's say the local Orange County area. So, I start putting that out there.
Let's say I start putting that out there and people are linking to it. They're linking to the video, right? They're going to be linking to the video you made, but it's hosted on YouTube. So that means that YouTube is going to get your hyperlink and the link equity from your link building efforts. The problem is social medias, and YouTube is considered a social media, all links coming out of social medias are no followed. Meaning that the links that are coming out of there, they're recognized by Google, but they don't pass any link equity.
What that means then is that if you're sending links to YouTube, one, you're sending link equity to a different website that's not your own, and the second, you can't pass link equity back to your website, because all the things coming out of that site are no followed. What does this all mean? You need to be more strategic with your link building when it comes to videos. I'm not saying don't make videos, but when you make videos and you're trying to go out there and go exposure, it is worth it sometimes to link to your own website.
So what I recommend a lot to my clients, take your YouTube video, put it on your site, embed it in there, make it look pretty, have a title, have the transcripts down there. If you can, try to make it look prettier with images and just make the experience of the page better than the one on YouTube. Therefore, when people are linking to it, they want to link to your page. They will then link to your website and the page, therefore you get actual link equity, rather than passing the link equity to YouTube.
Because though YouTube and video marketing is great, I love YouTube, I spend all my time on there. If we're thinking about SEO and straight link building purposes, we don't want to be sending link equity out, because you're doing all this hard work to get the link. You don't want to send it out of your site to YouTube or Vimeo, you want to try your best to send it to your own site. It's not always going to work. Sometimes people would prefer linking to YouTube, but you want to give yourself a better shot of trying to get those links for your website.
So when you're engaging in your video marketing and your SEO, I'm not saying change your complete strategy, what I would say is there are some things that you need to tie up the loose ends, which is try to get that final step of linking to your website, not the video hosting platform.
But I'm going to go ahead and leave that at that, hopefully that will help you think about and execute your own link building strategy when it comes to videos. I think a lot of people forget this step, they just think, "Hey, it's my YouTube video, I'll get the equity." That's not how it really works. Make sure you understand that, your team understands that.
I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea. If you guys found this video valuable and you liked it, please like and subscribe. I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.