Social Signals and SEO, Part 2: What Actually Counted in 2019 (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Which social basics do people still get wrong?

Another thing we see not happening — and this is a really basic mistake on people's websites — is social buttons plus links. One of the most basic errors we see: websites with no social media attached to them, or the link is broken, or it just links to LinkedIn generally and doesn't actually go to the company page.

You want to set up all of your social profiles so that, yes, you can get to them from the website — but there's also a link from that social profile straight back to your website. Within those social media platforms, you then want to start linking to the particular sections of the site you're trying to promote.

Why should you stack content into categories?

One of the biggest mistakes we see is people just generally linking all over the place, rather than stacking content on top of each other with links to a particular category. If you've got things going on a theme, it will work.

YouTube gives you a really good example — and YouTube's owned by Google, so there's a bit of a clue that it might work. On YouTube you can have a playlist, so treat your playlist as a category. Within the category, you build loads of videos all about the one subject, so somebody could actually play the whole playlist all the way through. You set the header video as the key piece of information, with links to the pages on that topic on your website, and below that main video you have lots of supporting videos, again linking to the particular product or service you want to talk about.

What is a keyword bible?

When we're talking about links from YouTube videos, think about the way that link is structured and have the keywords in it. Don't just go willy-nilly, and don't try to have a strategy that involves hundreds and hundreds of keywords. Ideally, speak to someone like me and get some research done on the keywords you should be using — that depends on volume, intent, value of order, all those sorts of things.

Once you've decided, have what we call a keyword bible. For each of your products, categories or pages you're trying to rank, you'll have one master keyword — the golden one, with the big volume and the intent, the one we want to beat our competitors up over. Below that, you'll have lots of phrases and topics that relate to that main keyword — building blocks. We talk about lots of different things on a subject, but we know the golden term is what we're aiming for.

So: top video, lots of videos underneath, keywords within them. Put a proper description in the description tag on YouTube and get links in there. Even if people don't click through, it's good housekeeping — because when Google finds that video, it will follow through itself and see you've categorised it properly: it lands on content that's relevant, the keywords match, job's a good'un.

Why do subtitles matter so much?

The other thing — and this is something people are just too lazy to do — is subtitles. If you're going to post a video, why wouldn't you put the subtitles in? There are lots of tools to do it, and obviously you can transcribe it. The reason most people don't is one, it takes a bit of time, and two, they don't see the benefit.

My advice: stick the subtitles in. If you don't believe me, talk to your kids. You'll see kids of six to ten years old searching for content on YouTube, and a great deal of what they watch has subtitles and a voiceover — and the reason it's coming up in search is that people have added the subtitles. Make sure they match the words being spoken. And when you're preparing a script for a video, make sure it's got the keywords in it that you're trying to rank for. I wouldn't have created this video and just rambled on without talking about SEO — but because I'm talking about SEO within the video, hopefully that will enable it to rank, and then we'll take people from watching it back to the website, and then to make an enquiry.