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Local businesses can use purpose-built AI tools to optimise their Google Business listing, encourage timely customer reviews and appear inside answers from LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini, so they are found by local customers beyond traditional search engines.

This is a genuine customer review of The Protein Works, recommending the shakes as meal replacements and pointing out that the brand's social media is aimed at a much younger audience than the people who may actually be buying.

Maximising YouTube views comes down to knowing a narrow audience rather than trying to please everybody, then backing that content with paid promotion, proper video SEO and genuine engagement, because retention and clicks are the signals YouTube rewards with organic reach.

YouTube SEO matters because Google wants video badly enough to rank it within a day or two and then judge it on engagement, which means video is the bridge to voice search and, in my view, the thing that will wipe out traditional SEO.

Growing and monetising a YouTube channel comes down to ranking videos in the top five search results, earning genuine engagement and watch time, and treating YouTube ads as a low-cost way to reach precisely the right audience rather than a quick fix.

Backlinks still work for website SEO as long as they are good quality links from authority sites, but on YouTube you need none at all, because a video can rank on its title and description alone.

You rank a video on YouTube by researching the phrases people actually search, studying the videos already ranking for them and finding the commonality, then building better content around that topic rather than copying it.

Ranking a video near the top of YouTube search comes down to targeting a longer, less competitive keyword, placing it correctly in the title, description and tags, making a genuinely good video, and finishing with a thumbnail that stands out.

Video is hands down the single best SEO tactic you can use this year, and on YouTube the work comes down to the title, your tags, subtitles, audience engagement, and links placed in video descriptions and community posts.

YouTube is worth advertising on because it functions as the second largest search engine in the world, right behind Google, which owns it, and it lets brands make affordable ads that reach a lot of people for very little cost.

Google preferences YouTube videos over any other type of video, including Facebook or Twitter video, and even over text, because it is trying to keep up with consumer behaviour that increasingly wants to watch rather than read.

The best SEO strategy right now is video, answering the exact questions your potential clients are already searching for on Google, then paying to get views on those videos, because engaged traffic and rising conversions are what push both the video and your website up the rankings.

Google favours video in search results largely because it owns YouTube and wants to diversify page one with its own video content, on top of the fact that consumers genuinely prefer watching video.

Links still carry serious ranking weight in 2019 — the modern way to earn them is PR and genuinely linkable how-to content, with keyword-relevant anchor text rather than "click here".

Simon's 2019 position in a live industry argument: social absolutely belongs in SEO — he'd ranked sites number one through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn alone, because social can deliver keyword-tagged traffic at a scale organic positions can't.

Reward loops for shares and likes can explode traffic, but the real SEO win is engagement: relevant visits, actions and conversions that send Google the social signals it rewards.

What an honest SEO conversation sounded like in 2019: realistic targets against the competition, ROI worked backwards from sales — and the £15,000-a-month retainer Simon turned down on principle.

Web designers aren't SEOs, and schema — Google's actual language — was already the give-away test in 2019: if your site has none and you're paying for SEO, ask your agency why.

Broken social links, scattergun linking and missing subtitles were the 2019 basics everyone fumbled — while playlists-as-categories, a keyword bible, and subtitled video quietly did the ranking work.

The opening lesson of the 2019 Basics of SEO course: titles, H1s, keyword density, URL structure, alt tags, clean code and speed — on-page ranking as it actually worked before answer engines.

Part two of the 2019 course: keyword sprinkling instead of exact-match anchors, SSL and mobile as non-negotiables, bounce rate as a quality signal, and the rule of 50 — sites with 50+ pages consistently outperform.

The 2019 course close: most SEO plans fail because there is no plan — so here's the honest one, from keyword bible to site health to a time budget that quietly adds up to a full-time job.

Reviews looked like a weird SEO lever in 2019 — but stars on the results page win clicks, and Google Local rankings built on reviews took one estate agent from invisible to a 1,200% increase in calls.

Cold pitching fails because it starts with a pitch instead of a question, and the work that actually generates conversations is pinning down the ICP with AI research tools, enriching the data, and then reaching out across email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

YouTube ads are the cheapest way to get in front of a precisely chosen audience at the top of your funnel, and the way to make them work is to start narrow with specific placements and keywords, test three pieces of creative, and only scale the budget once you know which one is winning.

A fake marketing guru is someone selling a course full of sales pitch and upsells but little real teaching on scaling, emotion or data, often because they've never actually run ad accounts for other people's businesses.

The 2021 numbers behind video-first: nearly 90% of video marketers reported positive ROI, viewers retain 95% of what they watch, the first six seconds decide everything — and Facebook claimed six times more engagement on live video than uploads.

Eight channel-growth levers from the s.media team: community engagement, headlines that earn the click, layered CTAs, cross-linking everywhere, audience research, search optimisation, playlists, and thumbnails that stop the scroll.

The 2021 playbook in six minutes: post between once a month and twice a week, watch three metrics, run the awareness-trust-relevance funnel, convert the middle with testimonial sequences, and let the numbers tell you which part of the campaign is broken.

The s.media team's 2021 case for going live: four in five people prefer video to blogs, lockdown accelerated live's growth, and announcements, Q&As, behind-the-scenes and even customer support all work — as long as you don't over-plan it.

The 2021 answer to a false rivalry: Facebook rewards digestible, snappy, message-led clips where the video is the star; YouTube rewards episodic, long-form, character-led content people lean into — build for both instead of picking sides.

The s.media team's 2021 strategy primer: two billion monthly viewers, an ideal customer profile that campaigns often prove wrong, YouTube guiding inbound buyers at every step, A/B-tested formats, and the three Ps — production, promotion, placement.

The s.media team's 2021 read on influencer marketing: values alignment beats pre-vetting scores, rev-share deals bind brand and influencer honestly, micro-influencers (1k-40k followers) carry more trust per pound — and a saturated market punishes the lazy pick.

YouTube matters to your brand because you only pay when somebody actually watches, the attention is genuine rather than background noise, and the same video that runs as your ad can also rank at the top of YouTube and Google search.

A solid video marketing strategy starts with a YouTube-first approach that builds brand awareness and cold clicks at the top of the funnel, then remarkets warmer viewers with an offer on a different platform, such as Facebook or Instagram, to close the sale.

The best way to use YouTube for marketing is to combine organic ranking of well targeted videos with paid ads placed against a carefully chosen demographic, keyword and placement overlap, rather than a broad spray and pray campaign.

The fastest routes to 1,000 real YouTube subscribers are a piece of content people want to share, ranking your videos to the top of search, or running ads, and fake subscribers from bought bot services should be avoided because they can penalise your channel.

The s.media team unpack the 2020 brand emotional-intelligence study: why tech brands topped the list, where Mercedes' empathy gap hurt, Coke vs Pepsi and Nike vs adidas — and Simon's takeaway that empathy scored as badly as self-regulation.

A YouTube first strategy means building your marketing around video rather than one-dimensional tactics like PPC or Facebook ads that only drive traffic in one direction, because YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world, the fourth most watched channel in the UK, and video content that ranks well there also helps your SEO elsewhere.

Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing where a brand chooses someone with social influence in a relevant field to endorse or feature its product, directing that influencer's audience to the brand's website.

You find the right brand ambassador or influencer by checking that they are aligned to your brand values, your brand guidelines and your tone of voice, and above all aligned to what your customers need.

Becoming the expert voice in your industry on YouTube means putting your most engaging people on camera, building a strategy around answering your target market's real questions and pain points, and staying consistent rather than posting for a week and disappearing for years.

You put your brand in front of the right customer on YouTube by placing targeted video ads against your competitors' videos, influencers' videos and the videos your customers already watch, and you pay nothing unless somebody watches past 29 seconds.

YouTube gives businesses a much cheaper way to run long, engaging, TV-style ads in front of precisely the right people than any traditional advertising channel has offered before.

Unlike magazines, newspapers, television, radio and poster sites, YouTube's advertising space can never be filled, because so much video content is uploaded every second that Google simply cannot serve ads against all of it, which keeps the cost down to one or two pence per TrueView.

Conversion speed and cost on YouTube ads depend on the whole funnel, not just the ad, and combining a video campaign with remarketing can make conversions many times cheaper than the video campaign on its own.

Google's real advantage is letting you overlay audiences, keywords and websites on top of each other to build something far more specific than an off-the-shelf audience, and the ongoing testing and refinement of that overlay is what makes the difference to a campaign long term.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and because Google owns it, it will always favour serving YouTube's own videos, giving well-optimised, engaging content an enormous, and currently underused, route to rank.

A YouTube first strategy puts YouTube at the top of the funnel for cold audiences, because you are charged per view rather than per impression, and then uses Facebook, Instagram and the other platforms further down the funnel to remarket to the warm audiences YouTube has created.

If your customers are spending hours a day watching video on their devices, your brand has to be there too, because sticking to traditional media means your message is being placed where your customers no longer are.

Before you advertise for a client on YouTube, run a discovery session that captures their current digital performance, their objectives, their mission and values, their customers, a SWOT on them and at least three competitors, a STEEPLE, and everything else they have planned.

Building the right audience is the single most important part of a YouTube campaign, because Google decides where to place your ad from keywords, audiences, placements and topics, and a keyword list that looks obviously right can quietly hand you the wrong people entirely.

Benchmark your competitors twice over, once analytically through their channels and numbers and once as a consumer making a split second judgement, because that second impression is exactly what your customers form in the first few seconds.

The content that works on YouTube falls into three types, educational, entertainment and news, and each one can be led by an influencer, a brand, a product or a service, which is the same content you can then use in your YouTube ads.

The two biggest misconceptions about YouTube ads are that placements alone will let you scale, and that you can turn an ad on and get results from day one, when in reality you need to overlay audiences and give Google two to six weeks to learn.

Once you understand your client and their competitors, three tools finish the picture: Google news alerts for the industry, the Facebook ads library for what competitors are actually running, and Vidnetics for what video is already live on YouTube.

Before you run a single YouTube ad there are ten pieces of groundwork to put in place, from your budget and discovery session through to your channel, landing page, Google Tag Manager conversion events and remarketing pixel.

Audience lists are built in the audience manager inside Google Ads, and they only work if you have connected Google Analytics, YouTube and Google Tag Manager first, then keep every list specific, on topic and named with enough detail to recognise later.

Building a real customer profile, covering who they are, how they live and what genuinely drives them, gives you the empathy and understanding needed to target audiences properly on YouTube.

Placements let you choose the exact YouTube channels and videos your ads appear in, which is the best route if your budget is small, but the hard part is getting enough scale because you are competing with other advertisers and not every video in a channel is monetised.

Display remarketing follows the people who have already watched your videos or visited your pages around the web, and because you can buy it on a cost per click basis it converts far more cheaply than cold top of funnel traffic.

Building the perfect audience is not a guess or a personal preference, it is a test, learn and implement process that starts with Google's off-the-shelf audiences like affinity and in-market, then moves through custom audiences, remarketing and customer match, and only reaches similar audiences once you have proven success to scale from.

Rather than serving video ads into apps, where conversions are challenging and Google's categorisation is unclear, exclude the app categories you do not want and instead build custom audiences of people who use specific apps.

If you let Google choose your placements, you have to go back in regularly and exclude the channels and videos that are spending your money without converting, because that negative list is what stops you paying for audiences you never wanted.

Use the Google Ads keyword planner to discover new keywords, judge each one by the 51/49 rule so that anything sitting at 50/50 is dropped, then refine the list in a Google Sheet until you have around 50 to 100 keywords you are genuinely sure about.

Before doing anything else in Google Ads, always check the date range in the top corner, because everything shown on screen is filtered by whatever period is set there.

The settings that matter most on a YouTube campaign are cost per view, budget, networks, language, location, bidding, exclusions and conversion events, and conversions are the one you cannot afford to be lazy about.

The strongest audience construction strategy is to find which keywords already convert well in your Google Ads search campaigns and build a custom audience out of people who have searched those exact terms, rather than relying on a long keyword list on its own.

Track every touch point in your funnel as a conversion event through Google Tag Manager, because the more data you feed back into Google Ads the better your campaigns perform.

Copy your templated ad group using edit, copy and edit, paste inside the same campaign, then immediately rename the copy and put the launch date in the name, because campaign performance follows a time-based pattern you will need to spot.

Keep your Google Ads optimisation score as high as you reasonably can, but feel free to dismiss suggestions that don't actually suit your account, since most of them are really just designed to get you spending more.

Always add both a bank account and a credit card as payment methods on your Google Ads account, because a backup card stops your ads pausing when a direct debit takes a few days to clear.

Running a placements-only YouTube campaign, built from a curated list of channels found with a tool like Vidnetics, can work well, but it should always run as its own small campaign, kept separate from your keyword, topic and audience targeting, because there is a hard ceiling on how far it will scale.

Remarketing is the loop you build for the roughly 97 per cent of paid traffic that lands on your page and does nothing, and it is almost always far cheaper and far more productive than buying more cold traffic at the top of the funnel.

Remarketing on YouTube is one of the most valuable things you can do because it lets you keep showing new content to people who already know your website, almost for free, until they're ready to buy.

Set up a Google Ads account by clicking through Google's guided smart campaign process without worrying about what you put in it, then pause the campaign it creates, drop the budget right down, and switch to expert mode.

Set up a YouTube campaign as a custom video campaign bidding on cost per view, get every setting right once, and save it as a template you can copy for every future campaign.

To set up your first YouTube video advert, create the campaign in Google Ads without any guidance, choose a custom video campaign, and build it as a template you will duplicate rather than as a live ad.

YouTube gives you a wide range of targeting options, from basic demographics through to in-market, custom intent and remarketing audiences, and the real skill is testing combinations of them rather than layering on too much detail at once.

Topics in Google Ads are too broad to use on their own, so overlay them with keywords, audiences and placements, and limit yourself to two or three topics per ad group so one broad topic does not swallow your budget.

A YouTube ads strategy only scales if you do the work in order, research and planning first, then KPIs, then budget, then conversion tracking, notes and remarketing, because every step you skip drops you back to the start.

Use the same video in your ad, on your landing page and across your social profiles, because seeing it again after the click is often what pushes somebody the last bit of the way to converting.

A YouTube channel stands apart by refusing to copy its competitors, leading with a clear unique selling proposition, becoming the expert who answers the questions the audience is actually asking, and staying consistent both visually and in how often it posts.

You amplify a YouTube channel off site through four areas, PR, email marketing, social media and everything else you own, from packaging and billboards to the message people hear while they wait on your phone system.

Your own website should be working to build your YouTube channel, through prominent social icons, embedded videos on landing pages and blogs, links back to the channel, and clear calls to action telling people to watch more on YouTube.

Repurposing content means taking one piece of video, adjusting it to fit each platform's format and length, and posting it in as many suitable places as possible, video, blog, podcast or infographic, rather than using it once and leaving it.

Before launching a YouTube campaign you should set deliberately pessimistic KPIs for basket value, conversion rate and click-through rate, then track results week by week on a single sheet so you can see exactly which changes moved the numbers.

Before you run a YouTube advertising campaign, decide whether your objective is brand awareness, lead generation, conversions or increasing the bottom line, and write it as a SMART objective for an initial three month test.

Before you film anything for YouTube, write down your video goals, your target audience, the story with a start, a middle and an end, the timeline of each part, and a realistic budget, because a lot of prior planning prevents a poor outcome.

A hook is a relevant creative idea that grabs someone's attention in the first few seconds of a YouTube ad and keeps them watching because it genuinely connects to what you're selling, not just because it's eye-catching.

Engagement is the lever that decides what your YouTube ads cost, because Google actively measures how people respond to your content, and getting the engagement piece right should save you at least five to ten per cent of your ad spend.

The two key timings in a YouTube in-stream ad are the hook and the first call to action, and both have to land inside the first 29 seconds, because that is the point at which you start paying.

The long term job on YouTube ads is to keep driving your cost of acquisition down and scale slowly, adding 10 to 15 per cent to a budget every three to five days rather than doubling it when Google asks you to.

You can repurpose one piece of YouTube video content in three places, on your own website, in your email marketing and across social media, so that a single video becomes multiple pieces of content across channels.

YouTube is top of the funnel, so the worst mistake you can make is running your ad campaign on YouTube only, instead of joining it up with landing pages, social media, email marketing, offline touch points, remarketing and a properly mapped out funnel.

Building a paused campaign template with all your basics in place lets you spin up new placement, keyword or topic campaigns quickly just by copying, pasting and renaming, saving huge amounts of time as your account grows.

If you are starting YouTube ads on a small budget, begin with placement campaigns, then move through multiple small-budget audience tests, exact match keyword campaigns and custom audiences, and only move to Google smart bidding and a target cost of acquisition once your account actually has conversions in it.

Do not put all your eggs in one basket with a YouTube ads budget: get your tracking and landing pages ready first, then split whatever you have across three or four campaigns so you can test different audiences instead of letting Google spend everything on one.

There is not much to do day to day on YouTube ads beyond watching for a handful of red flags: several days with no conversions, clicks arriving with nothing tracked behind them, ads that are approved but not serving, and a cost per conversion that suddenly shoots up.

Forecast by working backwards from the profit you need on a sale, through your sales call conversion rate and your opt-in rate, until you arrive at the most you can afford to pay for a lead in the worst case scenario.

CPA is cost per acquisition, the cost of a sale rather than of a lead or a view, and you work it out simply by dividing total spend by total customers.

Stop reporting return on ad spend and start working out genuine profit, because until you have included your product cost, your media cost, your agency fee and your time, you do not know whether the campaign made money at all.

You are in profit on an advertising campaign when your cost per customer, which is total spend divided by the number of sales, is lower than what it costs you to fulfil the product.

Testing and learning on YouTube never really stops, but the way to avoid getting lost in it is to test only one or two things at a time, starting with ad creative and hooks, then targeting, then bidding and campaign objectives, and only later demographics and devices.

Too much data can be as dangerous as too little: wait until you have enough volume on a placement or audience before drawing conclusions, test assumptions with small budgets, and look at the whole funnel rather than just the easy, early metrics.

Turnover is vanity and profit is sanity because Google will take whatever percentage of your figures you feed it, so a media buyer's job is to teach Google your real profit, not your turnover, and to scale only within that discipline.

Knowing when to scale or spin up a new YouTube ads campaign comes down to reading the patterns in your account's graphs over time and always writing down what changes you made and when.

Link a YouTube channel to a Google Ads account through settings and billing, account, linked accounts, YouTube, add channel, then either confirm you own the channel or send an authorisation request to the email address of the person who does.

People struggle to get support from Google, but if you work through the help section to contact us and pick the phone option whenever it appears, Google will call you back within a couple of minutes and your issue tends to get escalated faster than by email or chat.

To track that someone has spent at least 30 seconds on your site, create a page view conversion action in Google Ads, then fire it from a Google Tag Manager timer trigger set to 30,000 milliseconds on the pages you care about.

Google Tag Manager lets you manage the marketing tags on your website, which are snippets of code, so you can accurately track conversion events from Google Ads and user behaviour on site.

Ticking "audience expansion" on a YouTube ad group appears to override your placement exclusion list, including any app store exclusion, so your ads can end up back in the app store even when you have specifically excluded it.

Linking your YouTube channel to your Google Ads account, through tools and settings then linked accounts, lets you retarget everyone who has watched your videos organically.

Set your budgets at campaign level, understand that Google saves up unspent daily budget and can release it at any point, and write down your expectations and targets before you start rather than reacting day to day.

Because YouTube makes it so easy to A/B test creative, businesses have a real opportunity to stop copying the same tired formula everyone else in their niche uses and instead let their own personality come through.

Once you spend consistently you will get a booked call from a Google rep, and while the call can be useful, you should go in with your own agenda and be mindful that their main objective is to get you to spend more money.

If you do not know where to start scripting a video, take the bullet points you already wrote on your earlier worksheets about why people would buy, why they would not buy and what their pain points are, drop them into the script template and move them around until a structure appears.

Before building a YouTube ad script you should capture, and rate on a scale of one to ten, exactly why your specific type of customer wants to buy your specific product, because different customer profiles buying the same broad product category will value completely different things.

A good call to action is short, tells the viewer exactly what to do, appears both spoken and on screen, and flows naturally out of whatever the script has just been saying.

To A/B test a YouTube ad properly, keep one script and change only the opening six second hook, so you produce a version A and a version B that differ at the front end and let you see which creative actually works.

Your ad creative has to show real empathy for what your customer is going through, because getting the tone wrong, as a funeral director advertising with a jokey cartoon does, tells people you have completely missed what they are feeling.

Film your YouTube ad in landscape on a propped up or tripod mounted camera, look straight down the lens, get the lighting right, kill the background noise, and then slow your speaking down and use pauses.

A full ad script is built by turning the earlier bullet points on why people would and wouldn't buy into authentic, question-and-answer style prose, with timing, voiceover and visuals marked up alongside the words.

Understanding the reasons someone wouldn't buy your product, price, confusion between options, an unknown brand, competitors with more benefits, or a past bad experience, gives you a different, useful kind of insight into your real pain points and barriers to purchase than only knowing why people would buy.

Before you film a YouTube ad yourself, work out your limits on budget, time, location, people, equipment and props, because those six things decide what kind of video you can realistically make.

The biggest mistake in filming a YouTube ad is turning up on the day without an actual plan, so a smooth shoot depends on documenting and briefing everything in advance, location, crew, scripts, props, equipment and wardrobe, and then sticking to timescales on the day itself.

Take your list of reasons why people would not buy, turn each one into the pain point behind it, and write the answer to that pain point, because those answers become the basic structure of your video communications.

People are not one-dimensional, so if you want your YouTube video ads to stand out and truly engage your customers, you have to stop judging your audience in seconds and actually think and act like them.

You almost certainly already have usable footage sitting on your other social channels, such as Facebook testimonials or product demonstrations, and repurposing it into a YouTube ad script, rather than insisting on a fresh, high production shoot, is a perfectly good place to start.

Before you plan a video ad, work out your target market, your message, your budget, your timescale and your available equipment, because trying to do something ambitious on a budget or timeline that cannot support it is the most common way people waste their money.

A storyboard is an optional but useful frame by frame visual plan of your video, and whether you need one depends on your budget, your timescales and how complex the thing you are filming is.

YouTube beats TV on cost, targeting, speed to market, production cost and trackability, and this comparison is what got me excited about setting up s.media in the first place.

Understanding everything about your customer, from their income and family to their fears, frustrations and least favourite things, improves both your targeting and your creative, which is why you should build several customer profiles rather than one.

A blended cost per conversion figure can be misleading when it mixes cheap micro-conversions like page views with the real goal, so building a custom column for the specific action you care about, such as cost per phone call, shows you the true picture.

To manage placements, download the where ads showed report from your video campaign into a Google Sheet, sort it by impressions, pick the channels that are burning impressions without converting, and paste that list back into Google Ads as excluded placements.

A display campaign is set up in Google Ads by creating it with no guidance, switching off Google's automatic bidding suggestions in favour of manual CPC, targeting people who are physically present in your chosen locations, and then building an ad with images, logos, headlines and descriptions that fit Google's tight character limits.

Vidnetics helps YouTube advertisers build large, relevant placement lists, model likely return on ad spend before committing budget, and see what ads competitors are already running and spending on.

Discovery ads sit inside YouTube's search results and suggestions rather than interrupting a video, so they tend to feel less like an ad and can build longer, trust-building engagement over time.

Google is pushing video to the top of search because it is worried about answer engines like Alexa and Siri, and it uses engagement on YouTube as a testing ground to decide which videos deserve that promotion.

Google is pushing video to the top of search because it's defending its position against answer engines like Alexa and Siri, which is exactly why YouTube advertising is only going to become more important over the next few years.

YouTube ads are the cheapest way to put a business in front of a highly targeted, top of funnel audience, but only if you follow a tested strategy rather than the broad, rushed approach that most beginners and most paid courses teach.

The course introduction: accountant turned early-web builder, agency founder, and the pivot to a YouTube-first strategy — the background behind the free YouTube Ads course and why the numbers matter more than what Google tells you.