YouTube Views Don't Matter: But Here Are 5 Metrics That Do by Dane Golden #340

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 340. Yeah, it's a big number. Pretty exciting. Yeah, and we're celebrating this one. We'll talk about that here in a little bit. It's a milestone podcast. Absolutely. As always, we got a tip from our previous podcast, and that tip is constantly repurpose and redistribute content. Look, after you've spent all that investment in creating good content, repurpose it, redistribute it, rewrite it some, remix it. The purpose is to keep putting it out there so you can keep getting value from it. Boom. As always, please remember, we are filmed here live in Houston, Texas. And Chuck and I, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is... Do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. Hey, we got a really big surprise for you. Huge surprise. Huge surprise. If you're watching this, get ready, because what's behind us is going to change. We're not going to announce it right now. I will say this, though. Yeah. Because the bulk of our fans listen. Right. Not many people watch. Right. And so those listeners will get some value out of today's podcast. But this is the time you may want to start watching. Yeah. That way you can kind of engage with us a little bit more and really get a grasp on what we're about to do different today. And a good place to engage with us actually would be Facebook Live. Facebook Live right now. Because then you can send a comment and let us know about it. Maybe even ask a question on Live. If you... Yeah. Because a question would be relevant with it. Hey, if you've got some sort of electronic device and you have the, I don't know, the know-how, what should they do with that? Yeah. You should tweet us. Use the hashtag SEO Podcast.

This is number 340. Tag us in it. At eWebResults. At BestSEO Podcast. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking. All right, so you notice no tear tattoo. It's gone because we did get a review and we're running a contest. If we get 10 Shikos, which are... There's a series of likes and follows. And we get a review, then we don't tell you how to write us a review. What's happened this time is we got a review, no tear tattoo. But we didn't get the Shikos. There was no Shikos. We got nine, right? So we needed one more. So we're going to tell you how you can leave us a review. And there's three real ways that we want you to focus on leaving us a review. And one of them has three steps. Go on to iTunes, create an account, write a review. Hopefully you'll make that review. Five stars! And then maybe send us an email at podcast at... EWebResults.com And let us know you left us that review. Another thing that you could do is you could actually go on to Facebook. If you go on to our Facebook page, which is Facebook.com slash... EWebResults. Click the stars, leave a review. Hopefully you'll make that review. Five stars! And then... That was really bad. And then... And then... Also go to Stitcher. Oh, like Falling Stars. About to slam into each other's stars. Go to our webpage, EWebResults.com I'm not sure if it's on the homepage. Get into an internal page. You will find a link to our Stitcher. Yeah. The other thing you could do, because you could actually be watching this right now live. At EWebResults.com slash SEO Podcast. And there is a link to our Stitcher. If you go to that Stitcher page, you can... Click the button that says Write a Review. It's at the upper right corner. And leave us a review. And then finally, our Google My Business page. This is really hard to give to you, except we've made

it so very easy. All you have to do is go to EWebResults.com slash... Google Plus. Or slash... Google Plus. Or slash... G Plus. Or slash... G Plus. And all of those will take you to... Literally, if you're on a workstation, not on a mobile device, we should fix that. But it will take you to a pop-up. That pop-up will be a place where you... Let's just leave a review. Leave a review. And go ahead and make that review. Fastos. All right. So that is how you can leave us a review. Thank you. We appreciate it. We would like to engage with you. And there's a number of ways that you can engage with us. Facebook.com slash... EWebResults. Twitter.com slash... EWebResults. YouTube.com slash... EWebResults. Instagram.com slash... EWebResults. LinkedIn.com slash... Company. Company. EWebResults. All of those will take you to our profile. Go ahead and... Psycho us. There. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, we're probably looking for you. We probably need your help. Hit us up. Give us a call. Give us an audio resume by calling 713-510-7846. If you would like a free... What kind of analysis? Comprehensive. Website analysis. You can get one. Just go to EWebResults.com and click the green button that says free website analysis and you will get that. It's time for the favorite segment of the program, the algorithm cataclysm. Yeah, that was good. That was big cataclysm. Because it's nine what? This is like nine point... Probably seven. I said 9.5 earlier. Right. Maybe a skidget higher than that. Wow. Because it's two of them. By the way, on the seismic scale, just a skidget higher means a whole lot higher. Yeah, skidget higher. Anything over nine is higher. Off the charts. So dig this though. We'll start with the AMPs first. AMPs are accelerated mobile pages. Right. And at first Google was like... Oh, this is neat. This is neat. You should try this. Well, now, accelerated mobile pages are now indexed officially inside all organic results. Wow. So it's no longer just for mobile

searches and things like that. They're being displayed, period. What does that mean? That means if you have a desktop site and the majority of your traffic comes from a desktop device, well, those accelerated mobile pages can still have some benefit. Make sure you're using AMPs when necessary. Awesome. More algo cat. And this one is kind of... Should we do it like another seismic event? No. Okay. No, because we knew this was coming. Okay. Penguin, we're talking about the algorithm. The Penguin Smackdown. Yeah, is now a real-time component in Google's core algorithm. Remember, first they did Panda. Oh, yeah. They would just re-index and reprocess. Well, and the problem with the way they were doing it at first was, let's say, they wrote out a Penguin update and then your site was penalized due to bad linking or whatever the reason it had to be link-related if you were affected by Penguin. But even if you went and fixed the problems, you didn't come back. You had to wait until the next Penguin refresh. Refresh, yeah. Well, now with it being part of the core algorithm, those real-time stats happen, real-time updates happen. More importantly, it's more granular. So, no longer is your entire domain name penalized because of a bad linking scheme or some link profiles or some spamming links. Now, it's the actual web page that's on your site that may be affected. And so, that's good news. Yeah. Maybe you did some, I don't know, paid Fiverr to build some links to a page. And maybe you forgot about it. Yeah. Exactly. Well, now they only penalized that page instead of penalizing your whole site. And that was the benefit of adding Penguin to the core algorithm. An algorithm un-cataclysm like it. It smooths things out. Well, it's important to just check your link structure and make sure that you're good. Absolutely. That was AlgoKit. Man, that's some good stuff. All right. I got a little bit of news. I just found two things. It's Allo, the chat app from Google, right? Well,

first off, Snowden says don't use it because they're storing everything. Every app asks for everything. What was interesting, I saw a little video about it, which I thought was cool. Say we're trying to figure out some place to eat and we're like, hey, how about this? We could actually share a video in that chat kind of real time. I thought that was kind of cool. Anyway, go check it out. I don't know if we're going to even mess with it. Next was the DOT refreshes their rulebook and includes some self-driving cars information. I'm just impressed that they got them into the rulebook so quickly. Yeah, I'm like, you know, usually anything government-related takes 10 years. Maybe we should add whatever, ROVs or drones to our list. Anyway, at some point in the future. And then Twitter is in talks for getting bought out. I don't know if you knew that. A couple companies, Google's one of them. Apparently growth has stalled. Revenue has fallen. So they're talking. So that's... I got Twitter news also. Okay. But you understand, Twitter, I think they're just testing the market. I think they've made some changes. Like, for example, the Thursday nights are doing well with the NFL agreement they have. They're broadcasting games through Periscope. So that's been pretty cool. But I got news from Twitter also. They rolled out pretty big changes to the 140-character limit. Right. So, you know, a lot of people who do marketing were struggling with the fact that I'm limited to 140 characters. What made it worse was that if I wanted to tag you and maybe include a link to our podcast, then those characters ate at my 140. So, well, that's the change Twitter made. No longer are links, attachments, or people you at all... So they excluded all of them. Excluded all of that from the 140-character limit. It's funny, like, evolution. Thank you, Twitter. Yeah. Man. Could you say that more emphatically, please? Thank you, Twitter. Like, come on, man. Trying to re... Oh, retweets and the little

quotes and all of that has been removed from your character count. That's what's up. Took y'all long enough. It's funny how things evolved, right? Because it was born out of a text message. Yeah. Right? That's the character length of a text message. So there you have Twitter, and now I'm like, okay, that's not enough. It's not enough. Exactly. So, that's what's up. It's not enough. Cool. Any other news? That's all my news. All right, so I've got one review, as I mentioned. This one is from Catherine J. Dunkley Donnell. Hold on. Say their name again? Catherine J. Dunkley Donnell. Dunkley. That's what you said. Yeah, Dunkley Donnell. Okay. It says, I gave you a five-star review already, but after hearing the three-star one on number 335... I love it when they reference... Reference, oh, five podcasts ago. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. We should get caught up. Yeah, so she heard that tonight when she left this, and so it was apparently at 11 p.m. She said, while walking the track, so she was listening to our podcast while walking the track, I had to give you another. Don't listen to that guy. Don't change a thing. I love both the potatoes and the meat. You give the latest news and the hottest tips from experts in the industry, and in such a fun way, an easy-to-take-in way, I think the people giving you less than five stars have not listened to other SEO podcasts. Some others are so dry, my mind wanders. And here we go. I really love this. Listening to you, I'm walking more than 10,000 steps. More than the 10,000 steps I'm supposed to walk. We're that good. You forget your exercise. Yeah. Am I improving my SEO? You are so interesting and entertaining, I'm getting skinny. Punch in the face. Well, she punched us in the face. We are the diet plan of internet marketing, though. Let's go. Red Bull, the diet plan. That's awesome. Catherine, punch in the face. Yeah, punch in the face to you. Dunk Lee Donald, appreciate

you. I hit her back because we had a short conversation, and maybe I'm supposed to call her back. That's awesome. So we would get that started here shortly. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. We did it. We didn't skip our teaser. We kind of teased in a way that wasn't about what we're going to talk about. So the potatoes is over. This is interesting. We're covering an article. And the article is YouTube views that don't matter. What? Here are five metrics that do. Now, first off, who says YouTube views don't matter, right? I mean, we all watch YouTube videos. We all love videos. I personally have, you know, millions of YouTube videos. And I love my views. And I was so excited about the fact that they was going. I was refreshing every 10 days looking at how many views I had. And so this guy, Dane, Dane Golden, posted an article on act.com, said YouTube views don't matter. And so rather than go through the article and kind of see what's going on, I figured, man, let's get Dane here in the podcast. And we can figure out why YouTube views don't matter. So he's here. We're going to interview him right now. Let's bring him up on the screen behind us. Dane. Dane, appreciate you tuning in, man. Thank you for joining us. Punching the face to you. Punching the face to you. He's over there, so we can punch him in the face. He's hitting us back. You can see from behind us. So I've got to tell you, Dane, you kind of depressed Charles because you let him know that his million views don't matter. Yeah. I mean, I got like, you know, eight videos or several videos on YouTube. He got in line for the tear tattoo. That's how painful it was. So we're excited to actually have you join us. So first, let's talk a little bit about Dane, right? So Dane is with Hay. That's H-E-Y dot com, right? Like literally, hey. And I'm

like, hey. That's where he's from. No, not Fat Albury. Like, hey, hey, hey, hey. No, it's just hey. Hey. Yeah. And then, and he calls himself the chief YouTube officer, which is why he's writing an article about YouTube views don't matter. Let's get started. Charles, I think you got the first question. Yeah, so Dane, I like to, you know, we talk about SEO a lot here, right? And a lot of our clients talk about SEO in reference to YouTube videos. You specifically don't like the term video SEO. Why is that? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's sort of a misnomer. It's really better for, better to call it discoverability because it's not just through search that you come to YouTube videos. There's lots of different ways. Okay, so really not using the term YouTube video SEO is because SEO kind of insinuates search, and this is more than search for these videos being found. That's right. All right, Charles didn't want to ask it. What do you mean when you say YouTube views don't matter? Right, I got to have Charles' back here because he was almost in line to get a tear tattoo. Well, do, let me put, let me ask you a question. Do web page views matter if you don't make a sale? Great question. True, true. Results? Yeah, I mean, from a results standpoint, no, not really. Because at the end of the day, I tell people all the time, I'd rather get, you know, 100 visits and 35 of them taking action than get 1,000 visits and only nine taking action. Yeah. Even though 1,000 visits is 1,000 page views. Right. So, in that vein, no, not really. So, I'll run through my five reasons why they don't matter. Excellent, yeah. Oh, okay. So, we got, just to clear, we got five reasons that YouTube views don't matter. Yeah, five metrics. Right. That do matter. Five reasons they don't matter and then five metrics that do matter. That do matter. Excellent. Okay. So, you guys have to shout out the numbers,

though, if I read them out, okay? That's my job. Don't try and give that to Charles. That's... All right. Number one. Number one. One. You don't know if the views are paid or organic. So, you don't know if they're part of a paid campaign or that just someone is coming to them normally. That's not broken out in the YouTube metric, right? Mm-hmm. So, that's one. Well, before you go past that one, before you go past that one, I got a question about that. Because I was looking at the article, and in that same area, you mentioned views from paid campaigns count toward the video's official view count. It does. That was new to me. I hadn't realized that videos or YouTube ad roll commercials actually count toward your video view. You care to explain that some for those who may be doing ads? And is there a time frame associated with it? Well, it's generally more than... So, when you do a pre-roll video, you don't... The advertiser doesn't... Let's say it's longer than 30 seconds. The advertiser doesn't pay until you've gone past that 30-second time period, and it doesn't count as a view. But if it is viewed more than that, then it counts as a view, and it's paid, and... And then you can't track it if it's paid or organic. Interesting. I just was not aware that YouTube pre-roll ads would count toward your views. Yep. That's right. Interesting. So, any video can be made into a pre-roll app. Got it. Excellent. All right. Number two. Two. You don't know how much of the video is being watched. So, when we look at a video and we say it's got a million views, mentally, we say... Be careful here. ...someone has watched it. It's got a million views. Don't suggest they didn't watch the whole video. Well, that's right. Very true. We don't know how much of it they've watched from the metric. So, most likely, they didn't watch the whole thing. And that's neither good or bad. If they clicked

on the call to action in between, you don't care because the video worked, right? Exactly. But we don't know. Okay. Number three. Three. More views don't help you sell more stuff. It only helps if they clicked on your call to action and they actually bought the stuff. So, now, let me... Can I play devil's advocate for a second? And I say this because I write music, right? Right. And so, a lot of times, I will reference a YouTube video for the sake of finding the right, let's say, instrumental for a song. And that's probably the one time where views matter to me because I'm trying to identify which one of these is the most accurate one. And usually, the one with the most views is the one that tends to be the most accurate. And so, therefore, I'll proceed and I'll download. And watch out, yeah. Yeah. And so, I've taken that action all based off of the amount of views. But it's a free action. Yeah. And so, you know, this probably can be taken with, you know, some grain of salt. But that's one case where I know specifically views have definitely controlled my decision making. But they're not necessarily organic because... You're absolutely right about that. So, and I'll sort of answer that with number four. Number four! Which is most views don't help you, more views don't help you get ranked higher in YouTube search. It used to be early on that number of views was how they rank search. Or these other discoverability factors. But today, you can look on a search result. I bet you do it, Charles, all the time. You look at, for some type of musical search you're doing. And you see the top one has 4,000 views. And the next one has 40,000. And you don't know why. The way they rank it is actually, today, they rank it generally by how long someone watches it on them. So, the one with 4,000 views may have a longer watch time than the one with 40,000

views. That's right. Seems like a smart metric. So, I got a question for you. You're talking about, you know, how views don't help you get ranked. What about other metrics, like comments or subscriptions? Do those affect the YouTube ranking? Yes. And actually, we're going to get to that next. Okay. Okay, cool. We're going to get to some metrics that matter. So, number five. Five! A million views is cheap, relatively. For instance, if you've spent $200,000 on an expensive ad that you're posting on YouTube to promote it and get just a vanity metric of views. So, your boss at an agency will say, good, you got a million views. It's not really that expensive. But it doesn't. And views are not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying they're bad. I'm just saying they're not helpful for the most part. It's only, if you didn't care, if you wanted people in, only wanted people in Malaysia to watch and you went to some Fiverr farm and just told them to keep watching, you could get this quite cheaply. And if you paid through YouTube's system, you could get it at a minimum of $10,000, which is relatively cheaply, like I said. So, for about $10,000, you can get a million views. Yeah. Yes. You saved $10,000. They might not be in a country where your service is even sold, right? Yeah, that's true, too. So, some better metrics. All right. I don't know if this is six or one. Now I'm confused. We've never had this before. Number one. This is number one of the five metrics that do matter for YouTube videos. Yeah. So, organic audience retention. And this is what we were talking about earlier is how long are people watching on average. And if you go to the blog post on acton.com, you'll see that it's organic and paid TrueView in-stream may have a totally different watch retention. So, this is on a per video basis. So, what happens a lot of times in videos that you see a lot of views on

is that they may be watched until like five seconds and then you can click off and then people are clicking off. So, the question is at what, you know, how many people are watching after a few seconds I think is a very important question. And this is a heat map that's on YouTube. It's for every video. It's called audience retention. So, that's a very, very important question. Okay. Yeah. I was looking at that. I looked at that heat map before and kind of understood, you know, what times people are looking at it and how many at one deal. I just, I didn't realize that that was actually contributing to how YouTube ranked the video. Pretty interesting. Yeah, so, YouTube ranks videos by what they call watch time, which is, which is, which they don't tell you what it is other than basically they say get people to stay on YouTube as long as possible, whether it's your video or other videos. And so, if they're clicking off your individual video, then that reflects badly on that video and on your channel. Hmm. So, so, so it affects the video ranking and the overall visibility of the channel in whole. Yeah. Because your one video doing poorly in any way can, can reflect poorly on your whole channel. That's similar to actually how Facebook, if you, if you post, this is interesting, learned this pretty recently. If you post, yeah, we've got some people on Facebook Live are having a hard time hearing you. If they want to go over to ewebresults.com slash seopodcast, they'll get the full feed. Yeah. That's right. Because live is plugged in. It's the speaker that's, that's driving his, his voice on YouTube Live. And actually, we could drive that out, I think. So, the, if you post, so say you're super popular, everything you put out there gets lots of attention and likes and everything. And then I'm not so much, which is probably pretty close to realistic. And if Charles, even on our business Facebook page, posts something, it

will naturally get shown to more people than if I post something. If through eWeb or? Even though it's through eWeb and I've already seen that. And it's based off of the person who actually did the posting. Yep. Because you, you post more engaging stuff. Facebook wants people who are engaged. Whether you posted it in this business, that business, or on your site. The fact that my profile gets more engagement says Google wants to show your posts more. And so, you're just talking about the same thing with YouTube. Well, Facebook, that kind of sucks. If that's true. Yeah, because you've got to be mindful. For example, we've got a particular client who, it's a mother-daughter pair, and the mother does not do Facebook. And when they posted from her account, got no views. And when they posted from the daughter's account, who is active on Facebook, got lots of views. So, same kind of thing. The bad view on one video of your profile can break your profile. Very cool. Number two. Okay, number two. Organic subscriber velocity. Now, that sounds like a mouthful. But, basically, it's how fast are your subscribers watching your video? Oh, so, if you post a new video, you've got, whatever, 100,000 subscribers, and they all watch it within five minutes. That would be a really high version of the metric. Subscriber velocity. Interesting. And so, a low velocity, I'm assuming, would have a negative effect, right? Same example. You've got 1,000 subscribers, and they all take 20 days to finally watch your video. Then YouTube probably doesn't favor that video that much. That's right. Yeah. So, how fast? There's some people, friends of mine, who have reverse engineered a bit of the YouTube algorithm. And they said that if you can get your subscribers watching within 24 to 48 hours, as many as possible, then you're going to have a, that's a better metric. It's a little bit difficult to figure out. You have to dive deep. But in the blog post, I've pointed where you can go to do

that. Pointed at the data, yeah. But, but... Yeah, for those who are watching right now, if you've got videos on YouTube and you're interested in knowing what your organic subscriber velocity is, just go to your analytics. And then there's a watch time and a lift navigation, and it'll get you there. You can figure out what that velocity is. So, number three. Three! Subscribers gained. So, subscribers on YouTube, you know, the funny thing is that if you post something to Facebook or Twitter and you only have 10 followers, people are not surprised if the post doesn't get shared or viewed that much. But if you post the same thing to YouTube and you only have 10 subscribers and you only get 10 views or one view, people are so surprised. Because it's YouTube, it must, everything must get a million views. Everything goes viral, doesn't it? So, you're saying not everything goes viral? Intuitively, it makes sense if you think about it. So, your subscriber base is the natural group that is going to be coming and watching more frequently. So, the more subscribers you get per an individual video because of that video. They have said, you know, I want to subscribe to this channel. Now, you have to do call-outs, you have to ask people to subscribe both in the video and in the text below. But you have to ask yourself, if people aren't subscribing to this video, why are you doing this video? Or why are they not subscribing? So, that's a good metric. Yep. Subscribers gained. Number four. Suggested videos. So, as opposed, and we were talking about the difference between SEO and discoverability. Most views on YouTube come not from search, but from that right-hand column suggested videos. So, it's actually not even their first video because if you think about it, to get there, they've already watched one video. They've already watched the video, exactly. So, the types of things we focus on, having good thumbnails is extremely important. Having good titles. Remember, those thumbnails, by the way, have

to look really good, very small. They have to really pop. And they have to be identified with your brand as a whole so people know, just by looking in a split second, that that's one of your thumbnails. So, whatever is getting people to, whatever is getting the algorithm to be more in the right-hand column, there's up to 20 different thumbnails that can be in the first part of that. And ideally, you should try to get more than 10 of them. More than 10 of the thumbnails of the suggested videos? Yes. They're both. It's the same thing. The thumbnails in the suggested videos. So, 10 of those 20, ideally, is really good. But you have to do that by having the great thumbnails, doing the tags, doing the description right, doing the titles right, and having videos that people want to click on. That makes sense. Content. Do you mind how? I'm going to make the content. You stole it. You stole it from me. I was like, so what you're saying is make good videos. Yeah, exactly. And also tag them. Yeah, optimize them. But you have to start with the content, apparently. All right, so you have to do all the metadata, just like you guys are doing with web pages, right? So, I got a question for you, kind of along the lines of suggested videos. What advantages would you say playlist offer, right? Because we tend to embed videos a lot of times. And so, with an embedded video, we kind of lose that opportunity for those people to get to YouTube and actually see the suggested videos, right? And so, I try to complement that by just screwing this video on a playlist. So, even if you're watching the embed, at the very least, the next suggested video will begin to show. So, with that being said, how can we maybe gain more subscribers from a playlist sort of environment? Or is that even a possibility? Well, I didn't mention playlists, but they're extremely important. Okay. Them and thumbnails are the

two most important things. Sorry, my light went out in the conference room here. But the playlists are extremely important because they tell YouTube what else is related. So, that's why they show up in the suggested videos. But you can also, you have to title them correctly so that they are the types of things that people are searching on. So, the playlist comes up in search. You can also put playlist links in the description and that further increases the relative connection of the videos. But as far as embedding, what you can do is instead of embedding just a video, you can actually embed a playlist. Yep. Gotcha. So, what I heard is important factors, playlists, very important, and thumbnail. You mentioned it was like kind of one, two. Yeah. So, embed the playlist. I get it. So, we have clients, like I have a, for example, we have a client who is, they have a music school in Austin. Right? And we went down the path of creating YouTube videos for all of the music instructors. Right? And each one of these instructors has their own page on the website with that video embedded. And so, it sounds like we should go back and create an instructor playlist. Playlist that starts with that instructor. Yeah. And then put all of the instructor videos on that playlist so you can watch them all. Thank you for that one, Dane. Yeah. Number five. Number five. Stealing my thing. Conversion thing. And some of the most advanced companies in the world at doing marketing automation and tracking links, they have tracked every link that ever exists about them on the web. But somehow, they refuse to put a link from the description of the video to their website, much less a unique link. So, they're not tracking conversions in any way or even seeing conversions. So, conversions is essentially a sale. You know, it's en route to a lead or a sale or some sort of contact. And if you're not doing that, why are you doing video to

begin with? Yeah. We were, I've actually experimented with that a couple years ago when YouTube rolled out the annotations. And I was able to associate my site and then we used, like, the UTM tracking link inside a video annotation so we could track and see how many people were watching. What was cool was, now that I think about that exercise, you're right. The view count was really, really low in regards to people watching the video. But the engagement was high because a lot of people were clicking the link. Right. And they got to the end of the video. And so, what it kind of told me was that, hey, Chuck, they really like your music video. Well, the people who watched it really liked it. Right. It's just a lot of people didn't watch it. Right. And so, yeah, links and conversions definitely do matter. So, I got a bonus question for you. Yeah. Bonus question for you. So, and we were talking about YouTube and gaining subscribers and things like that. Right. And so, this question is more about YouTube and Facebook comparison. In your expertise, would you prefer to have a new YouTube subscriber subscribing to your videos or would you prefer to have someone on Facebook requesting to be notified when you produce a video? Well, any Facebook notification is really valuable. If you can get somebody getting specific notifications about anything, I would say that's very valuable. So, I would go with that. Okay. And you had one question that we kind of skipped over, which was the difference between YouTube video and native video on a social network like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Well, yeah. I mean, if you think about it, there's the feed type of social media. YouTube is a social media, but it's also sort of like a video blog. Yeah, exactly. It has two different factors. It has SEO type factor, but it also has a shareability. Mm-hmm. And the thing about YouTube, well, let's start with Facebook. The thing about Facebook and other feed-based video

distribution is that 90% of your views for a given week is going to be that very last video you posted, right? Mm-hmm. Right. Because there's no way to find the other videos unless they're being used for paid media. With YouTube, it's just the opposite. 90% of your views are going to be your greatest hits. Much like a blog, you might have a blog post that finds its way into SEO, and it keeps getting those reviews, rather those views, two years later. Mm-hmm. And the same thing with YouTube video. That's why you have to optimize the videos, even the old videos. Go back and re-optimize them if they weren't done properly. So it's like, you know, to use a music analogy, it's like if you have all these, you own all these great old artists, you own the rights to great old artists, and you're just properly selling those again and again and again. Oh, yeah. Shout out to Sony and everything they do with Michael Jackson Records and everything from the Beatles. I get it. Okay. Awesome. That's pretty good. And we had one question that we had sent to you, hoping that you could share with us, and you gave us some notes on it. But we're going to kind of check with you. We've got a web page, ewebresults.com slash, I think it's web design something, if you go to our site and go to services and click web design. We added a video recently, and we kind of asked you to kind of share with us and our audience, how do we get that video to place better, one, in Google, and then to get more views on YouTube? And I know you've already covered some of these, but if you could kind of briefly go through your list. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there's a few different things we could do, but basically the video, just to describe it, was you two talking to the camera and describing what you did essentially and why you were good, which is a great promotional video.

It's very honest. It's very authentic. They definitely know you guys by watching that and by watching this live stream, et cetera. So they know your personality, and they know you're talented. So it's a good, well-done, authentic video. It's not expensive, and it doesn't have to be. It's just very straight ahead. My first comment is that you embedded it on a web page where I think that you did autoplay on mute. Is that correct? That is correct. I think so. I would do neither. I would just embed it straight ahead and not be on mute. With a play button in the middle to make it clear that it's a video that you could play. Yeah, I don't think that autoplay really gets you anywhere. Interesting. It's sort of how its video is done on Facebook, the autoplay on mute, but you're sort of, you're in a different environment there. You're in that mode, potentially. Yeah, and you sort of know what to expect. Do you have it, because it sounds like, and this is fine, it sounds like it's kind of a preference or a guess, as opposed to, do you have any stats to kind of support either way? I think just people, you know, if they want to watch it, they'll watch it. I don't have, no, I don't have a ton of stats. I don't think a lot of people have done that, so I don't have anything to back up. What we've noticed is that time on site, right? We were talking about time and minutes watching, things like that. And in regards to web page engagement, the pages where we've embedded a video and that video autoplayed, we saw an increased amount of time spent on that site. Now, whether that correlated to a conversion or not, you know, remains, you know, we have to dig deep in and figure out. But I do have the data that support more time on site with embedded autoplays. And you did this compared to not autoplays? Yeah, because same site, like A-B test,

this page with no video and then the same page with video that autoplays. And so... I may be wrong. I may be wrong. Yeah, and, you know, this is what we do. We make ideas and we're, like, we're removing sliders from websites right now, right? Like, we're just going back and removing sliders because we're like, yeah, you've got to use sliders. Sliders are great. You've got these three strong messages. Oh, wait, nobody looks at them, so let's remove them. Exactly. Right? Data is the only thing that matters. Have you tried a mute versus not mute autoplay? So, we have not, but we just kind of internally feel like videos that autoplay with sound, for some reason, are a distraction, right? And so, because most of us tend to be listening to music or listening to something while we're surfing. And so, we decided to do the autoplay on mute. But, you know, we may test that. Well, you know, what we probably should do is come back because, you know, now there's all these Facebook videos that, while they're playing on mute, they're showing you, you know, that messaging, right? And I think there may be value in doing that because then they can still visit our website. They don't have to have the audio on. They never turn it on. And we're still saying, we're great at SEO. You should hire us. We're great at SEO. You know, whatever it is. You're saying having text on screen as mute. Yeah, exactly. Having text on the screen. So, even while it's playing. They understand, yeah. Yeah, they understand that you can still get the message. And we might be able to just do that with annotations. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and not even have to get into that. But then you've got the debate of personality as part of what we're trying to impart on that particular page. And you got anything else for us in our audience? I got a lot. Well, those are the two high points of the video, but I can go on.

Yeah. Okay. So, I would put a link to that video in the footer of your email. Because when you do that on, and you put a link anywhere to a YouTube video in Gmail, when somebody reads it on Gmail, it pops up as a big icon on the bottom. And then everyone you're corresponding with will have an opportunity to read it. Or watch it, rather. Wow. So, you suggest referencing that specific video and not necessarily our channel. Okay. Well, that video, I think, of the videos you have, is the one that sells you the best in a short period of time. Hmm. Very cool. All right. If you were to reshoot that video, I would start talking and start looking at the camera in the very first one second of the video. Right now, it takes three or four seconds because you have a title card. Mm-hmm. I would start right from the one second, looking and talking at the camera in close-up. Because if you look at the audience retention we were talking about, I bet there's a little drop-off. Right there at the beginning. Let's see. Yeah. You got better keywords in the video metadata. That's on the YouTube side. Yeah. And then, on the YouTube side, you have your call to action. It's down deep in the description. I would put it in the first three lines because that's before the see more button. That's a lot of sense. Pro two. Yeah. Pro two. No, I believe that might also be called a duh. Yeah. Pro two. Yeah, CTA link within the first three lines because they show it before the see more. Above the virtual YouTube fold. Yeah. Yeah. And there's other things you could do. You could put it at the front of a playlist if you want people to watch other videos. But I think I like, as I said via email, I really like your guy's whole style and the way you do things. And you're just your authentic approach to both showing who you are and showing

that you're super smart. And that's what that video shows. Awesome. We just got called super smart. Super smart. I'm taking it. Thank you. All right. So we've got, tell us a little bit about Hey, or is it Hey.com? Hey. Hey. Oh, I like it. Yeah. Well, I'll just back here and say, Hey. Hey there.com. Yeah. Just real simple. We just work with B2B tech companies, including SAS platforms. We help them optimize their YouTube videos. They already have these are, you know, think about it. These are assets that are already approved that you've already paid for. You just want to get more money out of them. Mm-hmm. And then. That was our tip. Yeah. Repurpose. Repurpose. That was a tip from previous podcasts. Yeah. I heard it. I heard it. And, and then going forward, we create strategies for doing it right. Because you can't really change what's in an old YouTube video, but you can, you can craft videos in a, in a format and a topic and in a release strategy that really helps more for a content marketing approach. So from a content marketing, simply, I mean, show people and help them learn how to do things in their job better. Just like content marketing blogs, they don't have to be about you. Maybe they're a little bit about you, but really it's about helping them. That's what we do. Absolutely. So, yeah, we want to talk, tell people how you can be found online. They can go to hey.com or just Google the word hey. I come up on the first page. Okay. And what about any social connects, any social contacts? At Dane Golden Everywhere. You can listen to the Tube Talk podcast. And please, friend me on LinkedIn. I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. Awesome. That is, that is awesome. Thank you. I'm, I'm so glad, you know, we've had initiative to get interviews started. I'm so glad you could be part of that first one. Yeah. This inaugural, this is history making right here, groundbreaking. And I appreciate

you, you know, putting some time aside to work with us through our setup and even be a part of this. This is big for us and I hope you enjoyed as much as we did. All right. So we're going to keep you on the screen. We're going to get you to, to say your name as we're coming off. We'll have a pattern for you by the time we get to you. We want to thank the audience for tuning in. Hey, give us feedback. We've just had Dane Golden on and it's our first interview. Give us feedback. Any, any feedback would be appreciated. Maybe we can make it better. We can, I don't know. We, we, Dane's head isn't big enough in the background. You know, something like that. Let us know. You guys. Let's draw a wooden news for a second. Oh, we got some wooden news. One piece of wooden news, yeah. And it's really more of a moment of silence. I want to give a moment of silence to, to rest in peace to Terrence Crutcher. He was, and, and Keith Lamont. Two black men killed by police this week. Just a moment of silence for those families. We're going to keep working towards, towards, towards a better America. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We are the number one SEO podcast because of all you all out there. Watching right now, right now. We really appreciate all of you all. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for making us the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. Thank you to Dane for joining us. Until the next podcast, although this doesn't apply to Dane, but we'll, we'll swing it anyway. My name is Chris Burris. I am Charles Lewis. And I'm Dane Golden. Bye-bye for now. Balance check, balance check. One, two. Well, I thought you was daping me up. Yes, I dap. SEO podcast, 340. We going live, man. And if it's sunny or a stormy, it's Chris and Chuck. And you know what we finna do. Shout out to Dane Golden. Got

an interview. Oh. There we go, hard, man. SEO podcast, 340. Let's go. Boom.