Posted by Lewis Sellers

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

On the 15th of August 2012, our agency’s website (which was in the middle of a complete redesign) was hit with a manual penalty by our friends over at Google. This came completely out of the blue to us, as we’re a fairly small agency that has never taken part in any unorthodox link building techniques. We offer link building services to our clients and pride ourselves on carrying out only high quality and white hat work.

I should point out at this point that our clients have never received any unnatural links warnings. Since we lifted our penalty, we’ve also helped many new clients get manual actions revoked and back into Google.

We straight away knew that we had been hit by Google’s Panda 3.9.1 update (see comments for updated algorithm information)

After looking at a lot of experts discussing this issue on the Internet, I could see a mixed bag of suggestions on what people would recommend we do. I first of all started by sending in a reconsideration request explaining that I believed there was a mistake. As the majority of our work comes from word of mouth, we’ve never taken part in any SEO, but this was something we were planning on starting very shortly.

I later received a reconsideration request response that said the following:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://www.pinpointdesigns.co.uk/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We’ve reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to comply with our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have additional questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team.’

In hindsight, I should have realised that this was never going to work.

I read many articles on the Internet from top SEO experts and looked through the SEOMoz guides on how to clear up link penalties, but the general opinion was that if you had been hit by a manual penalty, that there was a very slim chance of having this reversed.

I then decided to look at our backlinks using OSE (Open Site Explorer). By doing this, we were able to see a list of all of the anchor text variants and types of links coming back to our website. It became clear fairly quickly why we had been hit.

Silly mistakes

When developing websites for clients, we always include links in the bottom right footer of the client’s website. Usually, this is something along the lines of “Web Design Yorkshire | Pinpoint Designs”. These two blocks of text include links to the homepage of our agency’s website. When looking at the webmaster guidelines, it’s pretty obvious that we should never have been doing this, and most likely the cause of our penalty.

At this time, we had around 65 domains pointing at our site, with over 1500 links showing anchor text that was similar to “Web Design Yorkshire”, “Website Design In Yorkshire” and so on.

Luckily, we manage the majority of our clients’ websites, so it has been very easy for us to remove these. We updated the footer of each website to remove the anchor text “Web Design Yorkshire” and saved the changes. We also created a Google Docs file that included the URL of each website along with the changes we had made so that we could include this in our next reconsideration request. 

The second reconsideration request we sent had a lot more time spent on it. Instead of telling Google what they had done wrong, we wrote a long request that had the following structure:

• Who we were and what we do
• Why we believed we had been hit
• What we had done to rectify the issue (a link to the Google Docs file was attached)
• How we knew it wouldn’t happen again
• An apology
• My name / contact details

Note: If you are sending in a request because an SEO company has managed to get you banned, it’s wise to let Google know the company’s name and the work they’ve carried out. Any information you want to provide them should be added in a Google Docs document and a link attached.

At this point, we had just launched our brand new website, so I explained to Google that we had just relaunched and that we were pushing quality content out to all of our users.

The second reconsideration request came back unsuccessful, and my hopes started to fade as to how we were going to get back into the search engines. I then decided that I would contact SEOMoz via a private question to ask for further clarification and any more tips they could provide. I received a response from Carson Ward, an SEO Consultant from Distilled, who helped by providing a little more information.

Carson said that footer links were indeed the problem. There were a ton of links that said “web design yorkshire” and similar, and this triggered the Penguin penalty. He recommended using more branded and varied anchor text, avoiding site-wide links, and, as a last resort, either removing or nofollowing footer links on sites we had designed.

• Use branded anchor text the majority of the time. It looks a lot more natural to link back using your brand name. The safest example would be “Web design by Pinpoint Designs“. The slightly riskier “Web design by Pinpoint Designs” can be a bit more beneficial.
• Mix up the anchor text – use different variations so that no single anchor is overwhelmingly common.
• Avoid site-wide links, especially with exact-match non-branded anchor text.

Now that you’ve already been flagged, you could try doing the above and seeing if that’s good enough for Google. You could also just nofollow or remove the links. These footer links are already devalued, but you’ll lose a little bit of ranking power by nofollowing/removing them.

He also indicated in a second email that Google has sometimes been stubborn on reinclusion requests, and that it might be necessary to jump through some hoops to get back in their good graces.

It became clear that I would have to up my game If I wanted to ease Google’s fears of us spamming them, so I got to work in trying to clear everything up properly. I decided to spend a month getting my head down and working on removing everything. Before setting all the links to no follow, I wanted to give it once more chance.

We wanted to avoid the Disavow tool at all costs, as the links pointing to our website were not bad quality.

What worked

We logged into Google Webmaster Tools and looked at the links pointing to our site, we then went through each of these sites to make sure that any anchor text pointing to us was only brand based keywords. It occurred to me that during this point, the only links we really had were from clients websites, so Google wouldn’t really see us as a website worth promoting.

I then started writing articles for our website’s blog – these revolved around social media, SEO and website launches for our clients. I wanted to build quality content on our website and had a positive attitude of trying to write engaging articles. We decided not to write articles every day, but longer length articles that were posted out once per week or so.

Once this has been sorted, we started pushing our Twitter page. We followed local design agencies and people that we personally found interesting. We always try to engage with people and tweet about articles that we believe are interesting. We even wrote an article on our blog about social engagement and tried to provide useful information to people where possible. It was obvious this was working, as our Twitter account started growing very quickly and we were getting favourites, retweets and replies to our posts!

Finally, we decided that we should start doing some actual SEO work on our website in the same way we do for our clients. We’re a big fan of guest blogging on sites that are related to your industry, so we started out by writing articles about subjects we are interested in. This includes email marketing, social media, SEO, user interface design and so on. We then used some great web tools to find guest post opportunities and got in touch with the blog owners.

An important point here is that we only linked back to our website using variations of our brand name. This was either ‘Pinpoint Designs’, ‘Pin point designs’ or our domain name. We wrote around 15-20 very high quality blog posts and submitted them to different guest blogs varying from PR2 – PR6 domains. We only posted to higher quality blogs, and made sure that they were reputable (as some blog owners only want your articles to boost their ranks for affiliate purposes).

All sites were checked out by domain authority, PageRank and a visual check to make sure they didn’t look ‘spammy’. We also made sure that the niche fitted our website as best as possible.

Useful websites

Citation Labs – Garrett’s tools are fantastic. I really cannot express how easy It is to find quality blogs. We used the Link Prospector tool in order to find high quality blogs that were related to our industry.

Blogger LinkUp – Again, this website is amazing for a site that is free of charge. Enter in your email address and once a day (or once every couple of days) you will receive an email with guest post opportunities. You can then email the authors of the sites to write guest posts for them.

We then went for reconsideration request number three. I put together a fairly short reconsideration request that was based around our previous request. I explained that we had worked on building quality content up across the Internet and that we were interacting with people on social media. I explained that we realised that we’d made silly mistakes and also included a link to our previous work. By this point, a lot of our links had updated in Webmaster Tools and the percentage of non-branded anchor text to branded anchor text had decreased which was positive.

Only three days later, we received the following email:

Summary

Starting out as a fairly small company, our website wasn’t the site we wanted it to be. In 2012, we decided that we would revamp our website and start promoting ourselves across the UK. We’ve been growing quickly year on year, but we very rarely acquire work via our website. Just as this had happened, we received a penalty from Google.

After working with some companies who have received penalties from doing blackhat work, I would recommend the following tactics:

1. Start by building up a list of all the links pointing to your website – This is extremely easy. Login to Open Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools and use other websites such as Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. Pull together a list of URLs and Anchor text pointing to your website and try to make sure that you always have more branded anchor text than non-branded. In the Google Panda updates, it should become apparent fairly quickly why you’ve been struck with a penalty.
    
2. Work to remove those links hard! – Removing links isn’t easy, there are numerous sites out there that will help remove links from you, but it’s a fairly slow process. One of our clients had been using SENuke to build links to forums. We wrote a small script that logged into all of these forums using the username and passwords which luckily they had, and updated the info box to remove the links to their site. Unfortunately, if you don’t have the luxury of having the passwords to hand, you’ll have to contact the owners one by one.
    
3. If you can’t remove links – If you can’t remove links, use the Google Disavow tool. That being said, don’t use it unless absolutely necessary. If you’re having to use the disavow tool on thousands of links, then you’re in trouble!
    
4. Write good quality content – Show Google that you can write good content! Make sure that all the content on your website is unique, up to date and interesting. Spend some time working out anything you are not happy with and show them that you are an authority site that they should promote. Get involved with the community, grow your social media accounts organically and tidy up your image.
    
5. Spend time on your reconsideration request – Google must receive hundreds, if not thousands, of reconsideration requests each and every week. Rather than sending in a paragraph, spend some time telling them what you’ve done wrong and most importantly, be honest. Tell them why you think you’ve been targeted, what you’ve done to rectify it and how it won’t happen again. Apologise for the mistake(s) and hold your hands up if you’re in the wrong. Add in information from Google Docs to show what links you’ve cleared off and let them know why you’re worth it!
    
6. Don’t get involved in the first place! – This is always easy to say in hindsight, but don’t get yourself into the position where you need to clean up your websites rankings in the first place. We were initially targeted because of a bad choice of anchor text. Once we were targeted, we had to make sure we were squeaky clean before having the penalty revoked. Only stick to ethical link building practices and stay on Google’s good side!

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Posted by HappyBrooke

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Author’s note: I’m new to the SEOmoz community and super excited to be contributing – but frankly, I’m a little intimidated by all the expertise on this blog. Gulp. Read and critique with love and understanding for my beginner status, please. Here we go!

For all of you search engine optimization gurus out there, I hope my perspective is a fresh one for you. Sometimes it’s fun to temporarily place yourself back in the mindset of an ignorant beginner. You probably can’t remember the day before you understood SEO backwards and forwards, can you?

Well, I’m still there. (Yes, thank you for the supportive smiles and knowing looks.) I still don’t understand it all – BUT I’m on my way, and I’m making progress.

Stereotypes about SEO

In college, my understanding of “search engine optimization” was that it was for “techie” people, a hybrid hobby of computer science and math. Where I gained this impression, I don’t remember, but I truly thought SEO could only be done by the guys who knew JavaScript and wrote code. That person wasn’t me. As an English creative writing major, I spent my time writing sonnets, short stories, and articles for the school newspaper.

I loved the blogosphere, but beyond blogging and typical Internet usage, I never considered learning more about the inner workings of the web. To me, SEO seemed like a highly complex field easily comprehended only if you’d successfully hacked into something in your lifetime – which, as you can probably guess, I hadn’t. 

When I graduated in 2012, I realized:

1. The journalism market was shutting like a Venus flytrap,
2. I would suffer daily psychotic breakdowns if I had to teach English to adolescents, and
3. I didn’t want to dish out money for grad school.

So I started applying for every kind of job that involved words – techie or otherwise.

I still thought careers in SEO were for people who solve Rubik’s cubes for fun, take computers apart and put them back together, and keep their scientific calculators in their back pockets – people who live in a programmed, digital world of computer gibberish, glowing screens, and Internet forums. 

Then, as luck would have it, I got hired to do SEO.

At first, I was bewildered. Why would anybody want me to do SEO?

However, my boss told me that my present skill set as a writer would actually be a good fit for the role. Besides, he made SEO sound really exciting. As I started to research and gain a more accurate impression of SEO, I was pleasantly surprised to learn I could actually like this. 

Yes, I was unaware of how fascinating the field of SEO is today. This new era of content creation and ethical linking has my head spinning. Now that I’m doing SEO, I’m so excited about all the possibilities SEO has to offer anyone who goes about it!

Conversion from skeptic to supporter

The first thing I did after I interviewed for my online marketing job at Happy Dog Web Productions was to download the SEOMoz Pro’s “Free Beginner’s Guide to SEO” (THANK YOU, GUYS). I took copious notes. I looked things up. I read it slow. Then I went hunting around the Internet for more information about this strange new acronym.

As a frequent “Googler” myself, it was not news to me that people flock to the Internet like children to the candy aisle. The idea that Google is a diamond mine for marketing departments is completely logical. I already understood that traditional advertising and marketing efforts are no longer “how we do things” after reading books like Paul Arden’s It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be, and Seth Godin’s Purple Cow, among others. The way we reach audiences has changed. Everybody is on the Internet, looking for answers, information, reviews, e-commerce, you name it. With the short patience of the average search engine user, companies have to be easy to find and rank for the right search queries – otherwise, well, tough luck!

I began to understand the necessity of SEO in giving companies online credibility. Visibility and respect is a hard thing to achieve when the Internet is overstuffed with information, and even if you have an amazing, relevant website, Google or Bing or Yahoo! may not see it that way, making it impossible for people to find you. But optimizing your online presence for the search engines and the user alike, both off-site and on-site, will eventually, over time, convince the search engines to reward your quality website with a higher ranking.

(Whew! See how much I’ve learned?!)

The part of SEO I’m still coming to terms with is how Google figures out rankings – with its rules and algorithms and valuing certain practices over others. Thankfully, I’m not the only one trying to understand –even the most seasoned professionals are constantly hopping trying to keep up with rapid-fire change in the way search engines compile rankings.

News alert: You, too, can join the fun

Overall, I understand now that good, ethical SEO concepts are not too complicated to grasp – and good, ethical SEO concepts are vital in helping companies get noticed, marketing their brand, and encouraging conversions. If your website content is online but nobody can find it, why even have it?

You don’t have to be a brilliant computer hacker to grasp SEO and how to go about it – one of my most valuable takeaways to date. Yes, you have to be able to follow Google’s algorithmic updates and understand statistics, and having a solid research and analysis process is crucial, but there’s more to SEO than the numbers. 

SEO professionals should be fairly

• Techie,
• Internet savvy, and
• Marketing-minded.

But the surprising job qualifications for the SEO person?

• Have outstanding social skills. All this guest blogging and link earning requires respect, a polite demeanor, and the ability to connect with people.
• Be strategic. Strategy goes a long way with SEO – like setting attainable goals for keyword optimization, creating pages for SEO purposes, and brainstorming what users will want to read and find.
• Think creatively. SEO is about attracting people with great content. I never realized before how user-geared current SEO practices are, which means the SEO expert juggles marketing, public relations, and advertising hats, too!
• Write well. You don’t have to be at a Pulitzer level, but you do have to express ideas logically and write effectively for your intended audience.

When I learned that today’s great SEO has a lot to do with creating awesome content for the user, I immediately realized that this field was a good fit for me because I like words, and I’m a writer. Yay! I know I have a ways to go with the analytics and research, but I really enjoy my current role on the SEO team.

It’ll be a slow trek to reach the level of some of you Mozzers! But I’m excited about SEO and hope you enjoyed hearing from my perspective as a newb.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Nick Sayers

After the demise of Google Reader, we decided to rise to the challenge. Moz Reader is our answer. We can honestly tell you that this is the best thing to happen for Moz Reader, since Moz Reader. Just call us!

Moz never expected to get into the reader business. Ever. That is until one man cornered Rand at the annual “Executives Meet at the Top of a Tower” conference. Behind wafting cigar smoke and the thick stench of brandy, Jon White appeared. Jon (seen in the announcement video) came from British-controlled Colonial Hong Kong with news of an emerging fad: feeds and current events read to customers over the phone. “Bloody genius,” he called it. Rand figured if Hong Kong was doing it, we should, too. The rest is history.

Here we are 25 years later, and finally launching Moz Reader.

On a side note, Jon is only fluent in British and Cantonese, so he hasn’t quite learned how to write American yet. That’s why the Communications Team (Elijah and I) decided to give the “jolly ol’ chap” a hand with the video and announcement.

Without further ado…check out the Moz Reader features!

Moz Readers

Are you ready for a crack team of professional voices to read you content until your heart is content? Meet the Moz Reader team. After you experience our voices, you won’t be able to read a blog post on your own again.

Each and every one of the team may or may not have benefits enjoyed by most first-world companies! As independent contractors, they have the freedom to choose their own benefits and doctors without any “corporate strings attached.” No HR suit is going to tell them how to obtain their own medical coverage!

Real Celebrity Voices

That’s right, folks! We have friends in low…err, high places. Do you want your blog read by Keanu Reeves, Oprah, Ahnuld, Whoopi Goldberg, or Nic Cage? Well, you’re in luck. Just request one of our celebrity contributors, and get your feed read to you with class, grit, or drama.

Content Filtering

Like listening to your favorite blogs with the whole family? Well, with a new uber-complex-algorithmic-math-formula our Big Data team engineered, you can keep your mind at ease. The little ones will never hear any naughty words. Just tell your reader that you don’t want artistically-crafted content and would rather we filter it!

Notifications

No more waiting for your computer to start or opening a battery-draining app on your coveted RAZR! As soon as something pops up in your RSS feeds, we’re going to call you on every number we can dig up to read you what you need to hear. Busy the minute we call? We will call you two minutes later! Persistence is our middle name. That’s right, Moz Persistence Reader.

Easy Sharing

Want to share something we read to you? Give us your closest friends’ phone numbers and we will give ‘em a call! Heck, we will even save their phone numbers in a social database for other companies to access and offer them once-in-a-lifetime deals.

If this doesn’t have you doing back flips out of sheer excitement, then you’re probably in a coma! Well, that’s enough from us. Happy reading!

If you have feedback for Moz Reader, please call your Moz Reader Specialist of Director Relations Customer Liaison and talk over them as they read your feeds! Don’t worry, we will log your feedback and take it into account when we cycle through our current Moz Reader contractors.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by PhilNottingham

One of the earliest questions considered by any business, large or small, investing in video marketing will certainly be, “Should I have a YouTube channel?”

The answer: probably.

…..but it depends on the type of business you are, the kind of content you’re creating and the goals you have for your videos.

In this post, I’m going to expand on that answer and outline the core values most businesses can hope to gain from YouTube as a marketing channel – detailing how those values can best be achieved, and by inference, when YouTube is an appropriate platform to host your videos.

What can YouTube do for me?

YouTube is an interesting beast to varying degrees: a search engine, a hosting service, an advertising platform, a social network, and a community site.

Yet, it’s identity from a user perspective is that it’s much less convoluted. The main reason people go to YouTube: to find and watch videos on the internet.

YouTube is like “Inbound TV.”

No matter how users get to YouTube – through Google universal search, via social media or by navigating directly to youtube.com in their browser – the intent is the same: watch a video.

By and large, people don’t go to YouTube to find products or services to buy; they don’t go there to get news, restaurant recommendations, or travel directions. They go there for one reason – to watch a video, with the goal of finding something informative or entertaining.

In order to get benefit from having a presence YouTube as a marketer, your strategy needs to harness the nature of user intent, rather than work against it. 

This means you either need to serve user intent by creating content that will inform, instruct, or entertain; or support user intent by creating ads which can be served as preroll content to users watching videos relevant to your business.

The primary value your business can gain from investing in such content:

With the right content, those watching informational/entertaining videos can get to know your brand better and in a positive light; while ads, in precisely the TV advertising vein, can improve brand recall, perceived legitimacy, and overall reputation.

There are also some secondary, smaller benefits a presence on YouTube can provide.

Social network integration

Google+, Facebook, and Twitter all integrate YouTube embeds into their platform framework, allowing users to watch videos directly from their feeds without having to leave the social networks themselves.

Video remarketing opportunities

If you’re running a PPC campaign, having a YouTube channel allows you to remarket to individuals who have watched your YouTube videos with ads on YouTube and across the Google Display Network (GDN).

More effective PR campaigns

Video news releases (VNR’s) can be a great way of getting coverage and links from high authority news sites, as the added media element helps to ensure that your press release makes it to the top of a journalist’s pile. YouTube is the ideal platform with which to provide video news releases, since the majority of journalists and editors are familiar with how YouTube works, know how to embed YouTube videos, and are typically happy including YouTube videos on their site.

What kind of content should I be creating for YouTube?

As YouTube is as much a community site as a search engine, successful video content needs to be created for the platform, not just simply uploaded there by default.

If your company are creating videos and the default position is that all your videos (irrespective of content type or target audience) automatically get uploaded to YouTube, then you’re doing it wrong and potentially cannibalizing the benefit you should be getting from your videos. 

As Greg Jarboe aptly indicated in this post about the channel-ization of YouTube, “In order to be successful on YouTube in 2013, you need a coherent channel strategy.”

Really great YouTube campaigns are generally not comprised of one-hit wonders and a lot of supporting content that hasn’t done as well. Great channels (e.g. The Slow Mo Guys and  Old Spice) have successful release after successful release, building upon quality video after quality video. Your channel strategy should essentially mirror a blogging strategy. Successful blogs like SEOmoz are not built off the back of a single quality post and then filled with mediocre content the rest of the way; the readership compounds over time with continued quality over time.

Google is also trending towards ranking more “channel results” in the YouTube and Google universal search (e.g. this SERP for “downhill mountain biking”), as well as ranking individual video pages. This channel-focused ranking means that If you have videos that aren’t performing, then they will be dragging down the perceived algorithmic value of the rest of your channel and preventing it (and the videos held within) from ranking as well as they should. Your YouTube channel should, therefore, be “lean and mean,” containing only content relevant and interesting for users who don’t necessarily have prior knowledge of your brand. If you integrate this principle into a wider video marketing strategy, it should look something like:

• Content that you want your site to rank for (conversion focused) is self hosted/hosted with a paid online video platform.
• Content that you want to share with those who aren’t yet part of the conversion funnel (branding focused) is be placed on YouTube.

Your YouTube channel needs to have series of content that people will actively seek out and want to watch. This could take any of the following forms:

1. Thought leadership

Display your company as thought leaders in a specific industry by offering free information that demonstrates your skills/intelligence and provides genuine value for users. This can be done either by presenting strategic, academic thought leadership content (such as speeches/seminars), or by offering tips about a given field of knowledge, as demonstrated in this example from Sophos offering quick 1 minute IT security tips.

Has someone in your company recently delivered a presentation at a conference? Try running a Google+ hangout on air to run through your presentation again, specifically for wider remote audience. All it takes is a laptop and a webcam.

2. Tutorials and how-to’s

YouTube is a fantastic place to find how-to’s and many people prefer to get instruction from a video, rather than a text-heavy blog post. As with the thought leadership example, if you have specific and uncommon knowledge within your organization that others would likely benefit from learning about, simple tutorials can be a fantastic asset.

This channel from PartSelect is a fantastic low-budget example. PartSelect sell parts for appliances, and they’ve given away tons of in-depth tutorials about how to install said parts for consumer appliances, alongside some wider advice for maintenance. While the content is closely related to what they sell, the videos are relevant for anyone trying fix a consumer appliance, not only their customers. This makes it appropriate and valuable for an audience on YouTube.

3. Ads

Paying for video views through YouTube advertising is a completely legitimate way to generate traction on YouTube. Paid views will increase your overall view count, and while this won’t help your content to rank better, it can help to make your channel appear more authoritative and well-trafficked than it would have been without the ad spend. Bear in mind that, dependent on the type of ad placement, users will be able to skip pre-roll ads at 5, 15, or 30 seconds, so ensure your video captures the imagination and attention of your audience. If you have a video that takes a couple of minutes to get going before the core message is reached, then it’s not going to be suitable for this sort of advertising placement.

4. Creative stories attached to your brand

This definition relates to what is perhaps more commonly referred to as “viral” content within marketing circles, but i dislike this phrase because content that goes viral but provides no positive reinforcement of a message around your brand, and ultimately won’t convert to sales or revenue. 

As a business, you should not be trying to replicate the success of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” or “I want to hug every single cat” since there would be no commercial benefit from you doing so. “Going viral” is only beneficial if you can attach your brand to the messaging, but to actually make the content sharable, there will need to be a story integrated, too. Check out this example from Air New Zealand:

So, how do I know if my business should have a YouTube channel?

If your customers, or the influencers of your customers are watching videos on YouTube related to your industry, then you should have a YouTube channel.

Every company has something to be gained from building their brand, notoriety, and reputation. YouTube can be a fantastic channel to help achieve that goal, but only if you have a great idea for content that a specific brand-agnostic user group will genuinely value.

If you’re doing paid search, YouTube can be valuable addition to an integrated campaign; if you’re doing PR, YouTube can help you get to the top of the pile on a journalist’s desk; and if you’re engaging with users through social media, YouTube can help to boost the engagements with your posts and campaigns.

When is YouTube not the appropriate platform for my videos? 

• When the content is heavily “product focused” and the videos only really make sense in the context of users who are, at least, initially familiar with your business and are therefore part of the way through a conversion funnel, it might not make the best video content.
• When you wish to get video rich snippets for any commercially focused page on your site. YouTube videos will often outrank your site in universal search, which cannibalises your potential traffic and splitting potential link equity between YouTube and your site.
• When your main goal is to build links or social shares directly back to pages on your own site through video embeds. Embedded YouTube videos only link back to YouTube.

In all such instances, you’re better off hosting your videos yourself or with a paid online video platform that will allow you to restrict where your videos can be embedded, and thereby drive all traffic and links back to your own site.

How do I measure the success of my YouTube marketing campaigns?

The single, most important indicator of success for a YouTube campaign is: branded search volume.

This is true whether you are running an ad campaign through YouTube Advertising, whether you’re seeding the content socially to generate traction amongst your community, or whether you’re doing YouTube SEO to try and optimize the rankings of your video in YouTube and Google organic search results. 

If individuals are getting to know your business and are specifically searching for you in Google and Bing more frequently than before, you’ll know your videos have had a positive effect. Unfortunately, (not provided) will skew your ability to accurately measure the amount of traffic your site gets from branded keywords. However, by tracking percentages increases in branded traffic, movements on Google trends, and looking at “search queries” in Google webmaster tools, you should be able to get a flavour for any positive trends. Alternatively, if you’re doing PPC for your brand name (which you probably should be), then ensure you’re buying unlimited exact match impressions for your brand name and look for an increase in impressions over time.

Brand mentions should also be tracked. This can be done elegantly with the new Fresh Web Explorer. Enterprise-level companies can even run brand recognition surveys and aim to see an increase in unprompted recall.

There are some secondary indicators of success, which should predate any notable increase in branded traffic or branded search volume. These include: 

Referring traffic from YouTube

Any referring traffic you do get from YouTube will almost certainly be a very small number compared with the individuals who have watched your videos. Nonetheless, it can be a small indicator of the traction and interest your videos are providing, since users who actively leave YouTube to explore a different site have clearly been intrigued by the offering in your video content.

There’s three ways you can include links back to your site from YouTube videos:

• Include a link in the description, just as a naked URL with no anchor text.
• Set up the content for advertising and get an Ad overlay link.
• Get approved YouTube partner status (by allowing preroll ads form other companies on your videos) and then include links back to your site within your annotation.

Engagement on YouTube

YouTube Analytics has a “Relative audience retention” report, which gives you a snap shot into how good Google thinks your video is, based on how many people have started watching your video and then continued all the way to the end.

This graph is one of the major ranking factors which Google/YouTube use to determine the placement of a video in the search engine results, and you should continually be improving and optimising your content to try and minimise the drops and thereby retain as many viewers as possible to the end of your video. Your goal here is to see the “average view duration” percentage remaining high across all your uploads.

If you have some videos which have dramatically lower average view duration than others, it’s  a pretty clear indicator this content is not up to scratch, and you should, therefore, think about removing that content to boost the overall relative performance of your channel. 

Don’t measure views. No, really, don’t measure views.

YouTube view counters are essentially the equivalent of “hits” on a website and are triggered when someone loads up a video, whether or not they actually watch the content through.

In judging the performance of our own sites, we’ve moved away from measuring website hits to look at more meaningful metrics of success, such as unique non-bouncing visits, time on site, and conversion rate. For some reason, the majority of us seem to subconsciously assume that YouTube videos should be judged based on the number of views in the counter. Raw views have not been a significant ranking factor on YouTube for years and they don’t indicate anything other than a page load. As such, they are a vanity metric that we use to replace “audience numbers” from the traditional TV model.

The YouTube “estimated minutes watched” report  and “average view duration” figures are a a much more useful indicator of overall success that counts for bouncing visits.

FAQ about YouTube and video marketing

“Can’t YouTube also drive a lot of traffic to my site, as well as help to build my brand?”

An anonymous Distilled client, who had set up advertising annotations, put links in the video descriptions and included annotations on the video linking back to their site – all with the goal of driving traffic from YouTube. They recently got  415,000 views across all their videos for the month of December 2012. From these views, they received a grand total of 19 referrals from YouTube.com, which comes in at a click through rate of 0.005%. This is, admittedly, a relatively extreme example, but I am yet to see an example of a channel that gets greater than 1% click through rate.

So, yes, YouTube can drive some traffic, but it’s almost always going to be a secondary value to the branding and reputation built through video views.

Hosting video on YouTube with the specific goal of driving traffic is, therefore, likely a poor strategy and one where where securely hosting your content with a paid provider and submitting a video sitemap to get your videos indexed with rich snippets on your own site is likely a better option. 

“Google owns YouTube. Therefore, is embedding YouTube videos on my site, rather than self-hosting my videos better for SEO? Will having YouTube videos embedded on my site help me to rank better?”

No, I don’t think so, as there is no barrier to entry to embed YouTube videos. If one person can embed a video, then anyone can embed said video – and the methods currently in place to determine “ownership” of YouTube videos with regards to a specific site are fairly rudimentary.

YouTube videos are, by and large, embedded in iframes since this is a lightweight, reliable, and mobile-friendly solution. When reading iframes, Google attribute the content to the original source if this page is indexable (i.e. not blocked via robots.txt).

Therefore, when You embed a YouTube video, you should essentially think of it as like a “vote,” or a link to that video on YouTube.com. There are many reasons why this is a good thing. Since embeds and links are definitely a ranking factor on YouTube, meaning embedding your YouTube videos will help them to rank better in YouTube and in Google universal search….but for the youtube.com URL, and not your own site.

I don’t see this trend changing any time soon. Google want marketers to use YouTube to host all their videos, but so they can drive more traffic to (and thereby serve more ads from) their own properties, rather than your website.

Conversely, when you use a secure third party video hosting provider (e.g. Wistia) or choose to self host your videos, embedding restrictions will allow you to ensure the video is only visible on your site and thereby show off “unique content” to Googlebot, especially when a crawlable encapsulated version of your video file is referenced in the content_loc tag of a video sitemap. Through such a process, you can defacto “canonicalise” your own page with regards to a specific video embed, which you are unable to do using free social video platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. 

That’s not to say that either self hosting or hosting with YouTube is “better for SEO,” but rather that Google has much more to gain from ranking their own platform in the SERPs, rather than ranking a user’s own website. However, that doesn’t mean YouTube is inherently “preferred” in the search results and self-hosted videos can rank just as well as YouTube videos, provident that they’re embedded on a fairly strong page and a video sitemap is submitted. If you want to drive traffic back to your site through rich snippets in the search results, then self hosting or securely hosting is undoubtedly the way to go.

“YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine. If I decide YouTube is not a good platform for me, am I not cutting off a huge potential customer base?”

There is a common misconception rooted in the fact that YouTube has 1 billion unique visitors per month. The myth is that if you don’t have any content on YouTube, you’re missing out on marketing to a demographic three times the size of the population of the entire United States.

The argument above is a complete misnomer. The “YouTube community” is not a discrete bunch of individuals who only spend time on YouTube, but rather a wider spread group of general web users watching videos on the website.

While lacking a YouTube presence may be prevent you from marketing through this specific channel, it does not prevent you from marketing to a specific demographic. Especially since the Google account integration with YouTube last year, the overwhelming majority of YouTube users are also Google users, and visa-versa. In layman’s terms, not being on YouTube doesn’t prevent you from marketing to a certain group of people, but it does prevent you from marketing to them in this specific way. 

I hope you found this post useful. If you have any other questions I haven’t covered about YouTube or the wider field of video SEO and video marketing, please do feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to help you out.

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