October 15th, 2012
by Emily Burgett
Having a well-optimized YouTube channel can be a great asset for your brand. It’s an easy way to interact with your audience visually while entertaining. But can too much of a good thing actually hurt your search engine optimization efforts?
This week’s Ask An SEO Expert feature focuses on multiple YouTube channels and what effect that can have in terms of SEO. Steven Shattuck, Community Manager at Slingshot SEO, explains when that can be a good or bad thing and offers simple tips for optimizing your brand’s YouTube channel:
Do you have an SEO question that you would like to have answered? Simply submit your question on our website or via Twitter by using the hashtag #AskAnSEOExpert.
Transcript:
Today’s question comes from Katie, and she wants to know if having more than one YouTube channel can affect your SEO. The answer to that question is, maybe.
So, if you’re a big enterprise brand, you might want to create multiple YouTube channels for each of your smaller sub-brands. As an example, GM might want to create several different YouTube channels for each of their different car brands. They may have a Chevy YouTube channel, they may have a Cadillac channel, and they may also have a Buick channel, as an example. Then for each channel, they’ll only have videos about Chevy on one, videos about Cadillac on one, and videos about Buick on another.
It’s a bad idea to have, for example, three Chevy channels or three Cadillac channels, and having the same kinds of videos across three YouTube channels. It’s definitely a bad idea to put the same video across more than one channel. YouTube may see that as duplicate content, and plus you’re kind of cannibalizing your videos by doing that. You’re splitting up all of your analytics. It’s just a bad idea in general.
What’s a good idea for maybe a small or a mid-market sized company is to definitely just have your one core channel, and split your videos up into playlists. Users really like that. So, if you have maybe customer testimonial videos, you could have those in one playlist. If you have product demos, put those in one playlist.
Just sort them that way, and then users can easily find your content and you’re not splitting it up across channels or even duplicating your content. Definitely fill out your titles, your video descriptions, and fill out all those keywords. One of the best things you can do for video SEO is to transcribe your videos. That’s a big thing to do for sure. So, I hope that answers your question, Katie. Good luck with YouTube.