Aleyda Solis with Jason Barnard at SMX West

Aleyda Solis talks to Jason Barnard about optimising video for YouTube. There are three pillars: Relevance, Engagement and Retention. All based on understanding your audience, and creating videos that bring them value and that they want to consume. Sounds so simple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSZxcIxmSC0

Aleyda learned loads from producing her practical / how-to series : Crawling Mondays. The series has been very successful with her very niche audience (international SEO), which very much proves her point.

Success on Youtube is all about playing the YouTube algorithm as a social algorithm. All about relevance, engagement and retention. The entire system works on the algo recommending according to direct user behaviour (shares, likes, watches, comments and channel retention…).

Building communities around your brand on all sorts of channels then push the video out to them to get that user engagement right at the start… that boosts it up and gets it more recommendations to relevant people by the algorithm, and that creates a virtuous circle.

Lastly, you should publish the video on your site. You lose nothing and gain visibility for your site outside the YouTube. Use Wistia to do that because it includes structured data that will give your thumbnails in Google SERPs… and Google can show both the YouTube and Wistia versions in their carousels.

Along the way, Aleyda mentions boatloads of SEO tools and their functionalities.