So What? Understanding YouTube’s Algorithm and Video SEO

Happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights uh live show from Trust Insights. I'm joined by Chris. Uh last week you had just John and Chris, and this week you have just myself and Chris. Um, and sometimes it's just me and John.

So, you know, we're just kind of mixing it up a little bit. Um this week we are talking about YouTube and video algorithms and video SEO. And so um one of the things that we get asked a lot is around YouTube and what are some of the best practices. And what always kind of comes as a surprise to people is that YouTube should be treated like um a search engine because that's what it is. It's just videos instead of text and articles.

Um, and it is part of the Google marketing um platform. And so it uses a lot of the same technology. But Chris, we're gonna dive into all of that. So, you know, where do we start with understanding YouTube's video algorithm? What do we need to know about it?

Well, that depends on how much you like reading academic papers. Uh the core of what makes you look so thrilled. Uh the the core of of all of what makes YouTube special really 2016 paper that Google published on the topic that is called uh we'll add this to the stream here, Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations. Now, this paper goes on uh at length for the technology that underpins YouTube and how it makes recommendations, how it identifies videos that should be suggested to users in a way that uh makes the user happy, it fulfills uh user intent and guesses reasonably well what the next things that uh user would like to see. And we don't need to, and we won't dig into the neural network behind all this.

We're just gonna talk about a few of the cogent features that the algorithm takes the model takes into uh account, and then we reverse engineer that to understand what our YouTube strategy could be. So a few things here. First, uh you have some of these different uh vectors, these vectors are nothing more than variables, data points of things like what the user has watched, right? So your watch history takes it is part of what you get recommended, um, which means that, and we'll talk about this in strategy. If you want somebody to see your videos, it's kind of a catch 22.

They have to have seen your videos, right? Uh thing, but it basically means that YouTube is going to prefer things that you've already seen because it assumes that if you like that channel, you you know, you're watching Lindsay Sterling or you're watching first to 11 or whoever on YouTube, you're probably gonna want to see stuff like that. And it's gonna take into account other similar things. So if you like first to 11, you probably like Halo Scene. If you like Halo scene, you probably like Cole Rollins and so on and so forth.

That's one part of this vector. The second part of the vector is called embedded search tokens. And this is words. This is where the title, the description, what you searched for as a user, YouTube uses its machine learning to try and find videos that have semantic matches to those terms. So if I type in data analytics, it's going to find me videos that are about that, but not just the title, the description.

It's going to be your past search history to try and find related terms. It's going to use its own natural language library, and it's going to use its closed captions. One thing you may have noticed on YouTube is if you don't upload closed captions, a good chunk of the time, as long as assuming you're not posting the music video, it'll provide them for you. And they can be not so accurate, but it does attempt to do that. So that's part two.

And then the part three and four here are other things, like where are you in the world? Because obviously there's some content on YouTube that you can't watch if you're not in a that region that's encoded for, and then other user variables. So a lot of those things that the algorithm is looking for are things that we can reverse engineer to say, okay, how does this inform our YouTube strategy? Hey, John. Hello.

I see I came in on the easy stuff. I just had my second shot with Dr. Fauci over at uh the clinic. So I yeah, was like doing a Ferris Bueller, like running through backyards to get here and dive into my chair at the last minute. Excellent.

We can see here that in terms of categorical features, there's other things taken into account too. The user language, the video language are obviously important, right? You're probably not going to enjoy as much videos that you can't understand, uh, unless you're weird like me, you like watching the voice, you know, shows of the voice from like other countries. Um how long you've watched similar types of videos, uh, types of you know, previous impressions of videos, which is how fast you've scrolled past things in YouTube. So again, that's one of those things where that thumbnail in that video, it's gotta be a thumbstopper, right?

It's gotta keep you from scrolling on. So there's a lot of things in this paper that are worth deconstructing. So now here's the fun part, which is how do we so what, right? We've got this great paper, but what do we do with it? The first thing we need to do is figure out what are we already doing?

What have we already got? So I'm gonna go ahead and pop on over to the Trust Insights YouTube Studio page. Anyone who's in YouTube should be intimately familiar with either the desktop version of this or the mobile version. They're both very good. And the first place we want to go, unsurprisingly, is on the left-hand side, analytics.

Inside here, we're gonna go into reach. And inside reach, we're gonna scroll down. And this is where you start to get the interesting stuff. Like here's your traffic source types. Unknown, external from YouTube, YouTube search from suggested videos, from channel pages, and others.

And then it tells you when your source is external, where external did it come from. So in this case, Google search, right? So the 28 uh 24% of my 28% is from Google, from us, yay, go us, um, other parts of YouTube, Twitter, and the Chrome app. And then on YouTube itself, YouTube, 19% of our videos get their views from YouTube search itself. Google Analytics, our number one term, advertising, Google Ads, Google Data Studio, and so on and so forth.

And it's some recommended, you know, other suggested videos. So the first thing you want to do is baseline. Look at this and go, how are we doing? Right? If 0% of your video views come from YouTube search, it probably means things aren't great, right?

If 100% comes from it, that means you're not doing enough marketing of your videos elsewhere besides you. It's interesting because you're walking through it as if it's supposed to be another part of your content strategy because it has a lot of the same elements that a blog post has or other content on your website. And I think that rather than having a separate YouTube strategy, YouTube should be a part of your overall content strategy. You know, could because you're mentioning things like titles and keywords and you know the closed captioning and the transcription, and that's all just you know the narrative content that goes along with it, and then where are people coming from to get to your YouTube site and what keywords and you know, and so I think that that is a missed opportunity for some businesses who aren't utilizing YouTube at all, or if they're just once in a while posting a video to their channel and hoping for the best. Exactly right, it is part of a nutritious content strategy.

I was actually reading the other day on the origin of part of a nutritious breakfast and some terrifying stuff. We'll talk about that in another show. Um we won't. So again, one of the things that we always talk about with attribution analysis is to make sure you're not over indexed on one particular thing, right? A lot of these channel names are are very so should look very similar, right?

Um, where Google has no idea where this came from, so it's going to sign it to direct external uh traffic from websites and apps that embed your videos, right? So if I put a YouTube video on trustinsights.ai and you watch it there instead of on YouTube, it shows up in external YouTube search, suggested videos, channel pages, and so forth. Um you do want to have that nice mix, you don't want to be over reliant on any one thing. Um, so make sure you go through, baseline this, get a sense of this, and maybe even um if you're if you're been doing this a little while, expand that time frame, maybe go out like 90 days or 365 days to see what's been happening, um, see if you can notice any changes. So that's step one.

Know where you are. Before you move on from that, Chris, I have a question. So um, I know we do this in our newsletter email, and I know that our friend Jenny Dietrich does this every Friday with her Ask Me Anything YouTube videos. And so you embed the video in the email newsletter for people to watch there, but then they can also go to your YouTube channel from that by clicking on the video. How does that show up uh in your data here?

What would that look like? That would all um that would come in traffic sources from external. You can't actually put a video in an email. There is e email does not support video players itself. You can put a thumbnail image, but that typically it depends on where you link it to.

So if you link it to your website, they'll show up as external. If you link it directly to YouTube, it's gonna come in as direct or unknown because it doesn't know. Interesting. Um yes. It's funny, you used to be able to tie your YouTube channel into your Google Analytics account to get some more data that way, but Google turned that off last year.

So is that available on 360? Is there any way still to do that? Or are you just pretty much what YouTube gives you your just not doing it anymore? Exactly. Google said, nope, not doing that anymore.

So we've got our baseline. We have a general idea of what we're doing okay for, right? You know, here's you know some of the search terms. You can go in and see the search terms. Um so far, so good.

But this is not super high volume, right? We're not gonna win any awards by getting two views on on the term Google Analytics. So we need to go out and figure out what else should we be trying to found before. Wow, that was mango trying to be found for. Let's put in what are some of our other terms?

Google Ads. And instead of everything, I'm gonna put in just YouTube search, right? So there's all these different options. And this gives me a sense of okay, you know, what are the more popular terms? Uh, Google Ads and Google Analytics are definitely in there.

Nothing really like blowing things up. Um, you can see some of the regional stuff, and then if I switch this to um top queries, you can get a sense of what are some of the related terms here. This is good, but it's a lot of manual work and a lot of guesswork. Better is to use in any one of the major SEO tools. They all have the ability to look at uh YouTube.

So I'm gonna go here to uh hrefs, uh, but again, this works in SEMrush, this works in Moz, you name it. You'll notice YouTube is one of the selectors here. I can choose YouTube. So I'm gonna go ahead and put in Google Analytics, analytics, data, data science, ads, Google ads, and so on and so forth. And we're gonna switch over here to having the same terms, so we can get a sense of you know some of the bigger volume phrases.

Hey, look, Facebook ads, right? Is the largest volume search on YouTube uh globally? Then data science, big data, and we don't really care about you know free with ads, movies and stuff like that. Uh data structures and algorithms, data is beautiful, which is a fantastic channel. Um YouTube ads.

So we've got some got some starting points here for additional topics, right? We should probably do a show on Facebook ads, right? It's it does very well. It's a lot of volume here, and it gets a lot of clicks. If you look at the volume versus the clicks, you know, that's a that's more than half.

And the the uh return rate, uh, which is this column here, is very high. A return rate um basically means how often does that person come back to that search term? So above one is good. So uh what strikes me is that a couple of weeks ago we did record a podcast talking about you know the changes with iOS 14 and Facebook Business Manager and advertising. So, would it make sense for us to go back?

Because we record our podcast using video, post it to YouTube in addition to our um just our audio uh streaming services. Should we go back and see how we can add Facebook ads to that? Would that make sense? Like, can you can you reoptimize video content the same way you can like blog content or web page content? Not really.

You can op you can add in stuff into the title, the description, and the tags of the video, but the actual video content itself would be uh a little more tricky uh for that. So it may be a little bit tougher. Um, what I would suggest we do, uh, and I and is, and this is a more advanced uh technique. There really is no way. Like you can see here, there's no search rankings, you know, showing up here, right?

It's not like regular where you can see the top ranking pages. So you have to go into YouTube uh for a given term and essentially say, okay, I want to know, let's look at data analytics here. And so what are the top videos that rank for that? You know, here are a bunch of these videos. What I like to do, because I'm weird, is take these videos, download the audio from them, and then feed that to a transcription service and then run that through some machine learning software to say, okay, tell me what the words are in the that are in common in these top five videos, because that again can help me expand my knowledge of what else what should we be talking about?

So when we see Facebook ads, I should take a look. Let's, in fact, let's go to that Facebook ads, skip past the actual advertising, and then we would pull these top five ads and top five videos and look at the language that they're using. So I did this for both um Google Analytics and management consulting a little bit earlier. And you know, Google Analytics, logically, number one term, bounce rate, data analytics, predictive analytics, management consulting. So as if we were gonna start doing shows around you know, trying to aim for like Google Analytics, we'd want to talk about the bounce rate of pages and stuff.

We'd want to talk about predictive analytics. Uh, if we're talking about management consulting, you know, what is management consulting? Um, things like that. Uh, what is it, you know, how's consulting firm work? Um, how do you integrate with private equity?

Um, cocktail hours figures. So, Chris, I have a question though. Going back to where we started with that academic paper. If I put in the term Facebook ads, would I get the exact same search results as you? Because one of the things that you were talking about was in order for people to see your video, they need to have seen one of your other videos.

So, how does that how does that work in terms of what YouTube is searching is serving up as search results? Would we get the same set of results? If we were logged in, we would not. If we were logged out, we should get similar-ish results. So I forgot to say log yourself out of Google first.

Or can would it work in incognito mode? Or is it just truly the login? Let's find out. Because I think that that's one of the things that that's interesting too, is no two sets of search results are probably going to be identical based on what we're learning about how the algorithm is recommending videos. Let's go Facebook ads.

So even though I'm not signed in, Google will uh still knows my location because it knows the IP address for getting from. But yeah, you can see there are somewhat different videos. Is uh this this strange looking person um is in fewer of the top five results uh for that term. So um, you're right. We actually make sure make sure that you are logged out so that you gang it, but you raise a good point.

This is a point about SEO in general. The idea of a top ranking term is harder to come by these days because so many people are getting such personalized results that, yeah, if two people are logged in, they're gonna see very different search results based on their past history because that's part of um part of the way the these deep learning algorithms work. Um uh Brian had a question here. Um for shoot tools that show what terms your videos are ranking for. I don't know.

I don't know of any. Uh I know there's a bunch of companies out there like TubeBuddy and uh a few others. I don't know if they can actually do that or not. That would be a I guess go check with the vendor. Okay.

So you've gone through, you've gotten an idea of what your keywords and key phrases are. Now you got to go and make the content for YouTube, right? Which is hopefully, you know, we're not going to cover making YouTube videos today, but it's it is pretty straightforward. Um, some important things to keep in mind. One, um, you should have a content calendar, right?

So if you have the ability to do so, uh generate a content calendar, right? A predictive one ideally, so you can see when terms are gonna rise and fall uh by audience interest and try to time um not only the videos creation, but then the publication of those videos towards those things. One of the things you can do on YouTube, uh let's go and go back there. I think I'm logged out now. Is as you publish a video upload video.

Let's see. I need a scrap video to toss in here just to uh let's use my end card video. Well, that's not working. I was gonna say that's the something has gone horribly wrong, Face. Um well, so I'll do a little plug.

So, Chris, while you're doing that, you had mentioned that it would be helpful if someone has a content calendar, uh, more specifically a predictive content calendar. Um, that is something that we at Trust Insights can certainly do. We can certainly help you with. Um, hit up our boy John Wall if you want to learn more about it. I'm pointing down because he's two blocks down from me, like the Brady Bunch.

Um, but a content calendar doesn't need to be elaborate, but it should definitely include some keyword research and some forward thinking in terms of planning of making sure you are getting a good um balance of terms that you're not just always going after the same term week after week after week. Exactly. So one of the things you would do, um, no, it's not made for kids. I never make anything for kids. Um, is you can set a video as a premiere.

Um, you can schedule it, and you can premiere uh set a premiere date. Well, guess what? When should the premiere be? When that term peaks in your content calendar, you predict the content calendar, right? So it makes logical sense to use the YouTube features that are there to make sure that you're being seen.

So that's one of the big things that again, a lot of folks don't do that they really should do. Second thing, subtitles. So we've been talking obviously for a while now about the importance of text. Google will attempt to do transcription on its own. Google will not do such a hot job.

In fact, there are entire videos on YouTube of popular musicians who make song covers of bad YouTube transcriptions of their songs, right? So the lyrics, you know, mangled, uh, and it it is quite funny. There's that, and there's someone else. Oh, Melinda does um uh Google Translate songs, like watching a song through Google Translate twice to try and get the lyrics out. It's it's hilarious comedy.

You want to make sure that the transcripts, the the subtitles you provide to YouTube are as good as can be. So use whatever service you want. We use Otter, um, but there's Rev, there's all these different services out there. There's you can just hire somebody to do the transcripts manually, but you want that text loaded in here and you want it with your keywords. So part of the making content part is have that keyword list handy and know what you're gonna talk about in that show so that you can say, Yep, we're doing YouTube SEO, or where you're doing video SEO or doing video optimization or uh video search.

I have to go through my list to make sure I say that all uh and that's what goes in the transcript. Um you all you load that into the subtitles. So it's a really important part of making these videos is knowing what you're gonna say and then making sure it's in the subtitles because Google processes those. The third thing is having an end screen of some kind. This is more of a content engagement thing rather than acquisition.

For SEO, we've done a lot of the acquisition part of you know, making sure we try to attract searches and stuff. Um for engagement, we want to make sure that we're using all the features on YouTube, like end cards, for example. I'm gonna show you uh an example of what an end card video would be like. Oh hey, you're still here. How about some more videos to watch?

And uh, if you like what we have here, uh please uh like and subscribe. You know, hit the little subscribe button and the bell. Thanks. More videos. So, Chris, how is that different?

So a lot of people would include that in their actual video. And so therefore there wouldn't be an end card. An end card would be a duplication. So are you suggesting that people don't include something like that in their video in order to have something to put in the end card? No, so that that's something that you would typically like depending on the type of video editing you're doing, um that's just a snip a templated piece that goes at the end of every video.

So you wouldn't have to do it you don't have to remember to do it. But that's what I'm saying is that people a lot of times they don't include it as a separate video. It's included in the video like if you like what you heard today, like and subscribe the little button down below. And so if if what you're suggesting is people stop doing that in their videos and they can just record it once and start including that as an end screen as the end card instead. That's right.

You you would um in your editor you would do that. You would have a templated in because you want it to be you know 11 to 16 11 to 20 seconds long and stuff. So you know sometimes for example when we're recording the in your insights podcast I forget to mention things and stuff like that. It's easy it's better to have something canned that is reliable and it has the motion so that when you do it in YouTube's editor you have the you can put the the pieces where they're supposed to be on screen pretty easily so those recommended videos though that's just always dynamic. There's no control over the other ones that are going to show in there or can you set it up so that it's going to your you know stays in your catalog?

Oh it stays in your catalog you can even specify which playlist or if you just want to be a single video. So you have a you have options as to what you want to show at the end of your video. So keep people watching because of course YouTube makes its money on getting people to keep watching. So if you put in a video on your channel that is likely to keep your users engaged, YouTube's gonna be like, cool, we're gonna make sure that the user uh continues to see these because we want you to keep watching the next time you know, then as the next video queues up, here comes yet another ad. Right, and it rolls because I've seen some of the screens, you know, it just comes up with a full checkerboard of 60 videos that are all over the place.

But yeah, if it's your own stuff, that's much better. Exactly. Yeah, and so you want to have that in there. So that's one of the retention pieces. The other thing to do is to invest some time in the actual channel customization.

So let's go ahead and bring back the trust insights channel. Here, let's go back to YouTube. You get a lot of options for customization, and it's worth using as many of them as makes sense because again, these are these are engagement and retention tactics. Um, some of the basic things that you should do for your channel um that we need to do, we need to do the intro trailer, which is you know a 30-second spot. Explain to people why they should subscribe.

Um there's a a featured video for returning subscribers. So when somebody comes back to your channel, um, you could show them a different video. This is a great place to put a call to action to a different property. For example, you know, we roll a video there saying, Hey, if you like what you see here, make sure you sign up for the Trust Insights newsletter. Go to TrustInsights.ai/slash newsletter and enjoy even more from us.

Um take the time to add in different sections based on the the content you want to see have featured most on your page. Again, spend some time and effort to do some branding. Um, you may need to hire some folks to to make it look good if you're incompetent uh at graphic design. You know, if MS Paint is as as good as it gets, please hire somebody. Um take some time to work a little bit on the channel name and description.

Again, this is all text. We saw in the paper that any text that's available uh is going to make it in here. So we actually probably want to spend some time tuning this up a little bit. Uh make sure that you add some links, relevant links to stuff. So we've got four here for you know our homepage, the contact, our podcast, or Slack community.

Probably should add one for the newsletter too. But all these things are just basic configurations that again, a lot of folks don't spend enough time going in. And from a process perspective, probably wouldn't hurt to check in once a quarter and say this is still up to date. Because even I'm looking at the description, I'm like, well, that's out of date. So add that to the list of things to do.

Exactly. Um, and then the other thing to do is to make sure that you are doing as much promotion outside of YouTube of your YouTube channel as possible if you want it to be a strategic priority. Um, this is something that again, I don't see a ton of people doing. And it really matters because when you get somebody to watch a video, as we were talking about earlier, it enters their watch history. And the more you can be in somebody's watch history, the more likely it is they're gonna get recommended your stuff again and again and again.

Um without that, it it's it's tough because you're not essentially feeding uh YouTube what it wants to see. So this is an example. In this week's Trust Insights newsletter, we had a big old promotion of a video, right? So understand UTM tracking. It's a free 16-minute tutorial, no form to fill, just watch the thing on YouTube.

And it sends somebody to the YouTube, this specific YouTube video, but it also includes uh a fun little trick. So there's this URL parameter at the end called subconfirmation equals one. If somebody's not subscribed to your channel, anytime you send them to your YouTube channel with that little thing, and you'll you'll see it, for example, down here. Are you subscribed to our YouTube channel? Click that link and it'll pop up a little subscription box the moment you hit YouTube.

And it will say, like, are you you know, do you want to subscribe to this channel? I'm not sure this will work because I am up there. It is. Are you sure you want to subscribe to Trust Insights? Right.

So if you've got a call to action in your email, you can get some some subscribership this way. Um so make sure that you're using outside channels like your newsletter, like your email, even just putting stuff in your email signature is a great way to help to build uh that viewership and and and attract people because again, you're trying to feed that search algorithm. That makes sense. Um, Chris, can you uh go to the YouTube channel itself? So if you go to this, yes, this page.

Um, so if you scroll down a little bit, do you have control? So you were talking about customization. Do you have control over what people see on this home page? Uh can you put them in, can you organize them? Can you put the videos in any kind of an order, or is it just sort of like randomly, you know, if you recorded five videos and uploaded them, then people can like I don't know, just get a random assortment of videos.

Like, what is that process? You can you can actually put in just like uploads and people can see like what you've uploaded recently, right? That's an option. Um, you can put things in by individual playlist. Um, you can put in you know your most popular videos to try and and you know show people the things that have people have engaged with in the past, multiple playlists, uh, other channels.

If you want to highlight and feature other channels, so like on my personal YouTube channel, I have the Trust Insights channel, and vice versa, trying to cross-market as much as we can. You have a whole bunch of different options here. So it really is just a question of what you want here, and then drag and drop to to reorder things in sort of the sequence that you want them to. Um, you also have the option to change the section contents themselves uh or to modify the playlists. So there's a whole bunch of different things you can do on that page.

So I think that that goes back to your process piece for like maybe once a quarter you're auditing your channel because you may have evolved in the types of videos that you're creating, but it's not completely obvious to you until you go back and look at the videos that you have uh on your website. Yep, exactly right. So um, so from a video SEO perspective, it really is about getting that attention and then retention, right? We want people to be paying attention to us, we want that that history, we want to be part of their history, you want to be as much part of their history as possible. Uh, and we want to be part of their history about their searches and things, so encouraging people to search.

Um, this is where having a brand name also really helps. So, you know, branded versus unbranded search. It's good to be found for data analytics and stuff, but also make sure that your channel name is easy enough that somebody can go and find it, right? So if we start up a new incognito thing here. If somebody doesn't know who we are, at least we show up for our own name, right?

It would be really bad if I type this in and there was like, you know, US News and World Reports Consumer Trust Insights report. And that would that would be a bad thing to have happen. So if your company, if you experience confusion in regular search for your company name, you may want to name your YouTube channel something else. You may want to name, you know, data party brought to you by whatever, something that that it will show up distinctively in YouTube search. So Chris, one of the um learnings in this episode that we said, um, and if we covered it, I want to go back to it, is we said that the we would be helping people understand the one thing 90% of videos fail to do that impacts your video reach.

So what is that one thing? Not using closed captions. If you take nothing else away from this live stream, that is your pro tip is to turn on those closed caption option uh for your videos, even if it is a little bit mangled. I know that um a lot of the um transcription services really sort of jumble up my last name. Um, you know, Chris becomes a whole different person altogether.

So those are things that you can fix over time, but definitely at least turn on the feature to start it um generating on your videos. Yep. So that concludes that part. We do have another interesting question from Kyle in here, which can cover briefly, um, which is can we talk about how 5G will affect omni-channel marketing, which is an interesting question. Uh Eli, you want to take a shot at it first?

You know, everything that I've heard about 5G stuff is all more IoT stuff, you know, and so there is some stuff about, you know, the fact that there's going to be better tracking of personal location, which just seems like a really bad idea for marketing people to be throwing out to the world right now. But that's one front. Um, yeah, I really, you know, don't see much else besides, you know, again, if you want to know where all the cameras are, are you walking around inside a store and want to know which aisle to go to, you know, all that location stuff is going to be tighter through the mesh. But that's everything that you know, the only stuff that I've heard. I don't know, is there anything else out there?

I mean, so here's the thing. 5G is faster, right? It's lower latency, so it's more like Wi-Fi. Um, so the idea being that you can have uh lower power usage, more reach, uh stuff like that. All that means is that these lovely devices that we're walking around with all the time and use for everything, we'll just use more, right?

And because you'll have fewer restrictions. Um, the cost per gigabyte of data use will go down. That said, and this is not a commercial plug, even though I wish it was because I would like him to pay us a lot of money. Um 5G, I don't think will be nearly as impactful as as Elon Musk's Starlink. Um, Starlink, for those who are unaware, is a low Earth orbit satellite constellation.

It's uh going to eventually be like think of a thousand satellites orbiting the Earth that will deliver good high-speed internet access to pretty much anywhere on the surface of the planet. So you can be uh, for example, in the middle of Montana and get the same bandwidth and latency uh as somebody you know is sitting in them in the heart of New York City. That I think will change omnichannel marketing much more in the long term than 5G. 5G is great, but you need things like towers to be able to get you know data to those phones. And those towers have a limited range.

Starlink, you needed a big antenna, it's like a three foot wide parabolic dish that mounts on top of a building or something. But again, if you've got electricity, um, you could set one of these up, say in a in a remote village in Zimbabwe and be able to, you know, watch YouTube videos that search for YouTube stuff on YouTube, but it will enable commerce and connection for a huge swath of the planet where there simply isn't right now. Um, so that means a lot of the more remote and rural areas all around the world, uh it will allow nations to be able to, you know, entire groups of people who are simply not online or they are through older edge networks on on you know last year's mobile devices. It's entirely conceivable that a village, say in the middle of uh Malaysia, in the in the outer reaches of Malaysia, buys an antenna for the village. It's only the whole village is online, and you know, they're all watching YouTube too and and you know, checking out cat videos.

So I think in Go ahead, Katie. I was gonna say, I think, you know, what some of what you're saying, and this is sort of the you know, the other sort of reminder for marketers, because there are still companies out there who aren't doing this, is make sure your assets are mobile friendly because Chris, if what you're saying is people are gonna spend even more time on their phones, I mean, there's nothing more frustrating than navigating to a website that isn't optimized for mobile. And so you're like, well, forget this. I'm gonna go find a different website that has the same information that is optimized for mobile. And so I think that, you know, to Kyle's question, how it affects marketing in general is you got to make sure your stuff works on a phone.

Period. You have to make sure that your images work for desktop and mobile. You need to make sure that your content is easily readable on mobile. You need to make sure that your websites are mobile optimized. If you have a mobile app, you need to make sure that the experience is really, really easy because consumers they get frustrated within 0.2 seconds and will just move on.

They won't bother to try to work it out with you or try to figure out, like, well, if I do this, can I do this? They will leave you a really crappy review that will follow you everywhere, and they will go find your competitor who did think about mobile first. I would strongly encourage people to go into your Google Analytics. This should be part of your process anyway, right? Go into Google Analytics and look at the places that are sending you traffic, right?

So let's take a look real quickly at the Trust Insights one here, right? Here's here's our year to date. India is the third largest nation sending us traffic, right? The UK, Finland, Australia. And these are, you know, it's not zero people.

There's a couple hundred people from each of these locations, China, Brazil. Part of Omnichannel marketing to think about is there a market in these places, right? Um, I this is currently set to e-commerce. If I switch this to all goals, not only are we getting traffic, we're getting some conversions. Now, a lot of these are like, you know, subscribe to the newsletter, which is totally fine.

Um, but it's not zero, right? Getting conversions from Brazil, getting conversions from the Netherlands. So a big part of 5G and Starlink and Omnichannel and all this stuff is actually saying, do we have a market outside of the place that we live right now? Is it a viable market? And should we be considering any marketing efforts there, right?

If Australia is sending us 369 users this year so far, should we be marketing to Australia? Should we have some localized content? Is it worth thinking about? That opens up a whole other discussion about multinational marketing, but at the very least, be looking at your data to say, if you do serve outside of your service area and you know these technologies are coming. Do you have a long-term strategy in place to just start addressing those things?

I think that that makes a lot of sense because you really do. I mean, it goes back to what are your business goals? And so, and what is your business plan in general? You know, are you set up to serve globally, or are you only set up to serve, you know, whatever country you're based in? And so it really forces you to revisit those questions.

Um, we've been fortunate enough to be getting inbounds from Australia and New Zealand in the recent months, but we very quickly realized that it created some challenges with trying to actually get on the phone because of the time difference. And so thinking about having your structure, like what happens if I have a client who is 12 hours ahead, how do I handle that? Do I hire a specific team to be always on 24-7? You know, so those I think that you know, back to the question about 5G and opening it up more globally, it will force you to start to think about things in terms of your business structure and your team structure that you may not have to uh consider at the moment. Exactly.

And going back to YouTube to sort of close the loop there, one of the things you can do with YouTube is you can provide closed captions in multiple languages. So if you see a country that's sending you a lot of traffic and it's you know not in a native language, um, you can hire somebody to help you transcribe it or translate it and then load captions from more than one language in YouTube. And you could see can we attract some interest in India or Bahrain or uh Argentina? Wherever you're getting your traffic from, who knows? Put up some videos with with alternate translations available and see if that gives you any additional traction, maybe opens up a market on YouTube that you didn't realize you had.

Uh so Chris, this is might be a little bit off topic, but related to YouTube. So you had mentioned that Google Analytics removed the ability to integrate YouTube directly in uh to your data. This might be a different episode or future topic that we cover, but would it make sense to then create a YouTube channel grouping or include YouTube in your social channels? It depends. I would say it depends on your strategy, right?

If YouTube is incidental, um, it probably doesn't make sense to I just lump it in with social media, right? Um referral traffic. Depends on on how you want to define social. If you're investing substantial amounts of time and effort in YouTube, it might not hurt to make it its own thing. Um because you want to see is it is it having a return.

And that said, the source mediums are always going to be pretty clear. One thing that's very nice is because it's owned by Google, it shows up in Google Analytics quite nicely. Um, so that you don't have to worry about a whole lot about tagging there. You do want to make sure that you're using UTM tags like in the YouTube channel descriptions and stuff if you've got calls to action so that you are guaranteeing that those clicks come through uh to your website, uh, Google Analytics uh as as clear as possible. Uh, but you don't have to worry about YouTube itself.

So I think that sort of wraps up the show for today. So to go back to the original point, so what understanding YouTube's algorithms and video SEO, it is not good enough to just create a video and upload it to YouTube and hope for the best. You need to be treating YouTube as a full content strategy, rolling it into your larger content strategy, um, advertising your uh YouTube videos on other digital channels like social, in your email, on your website, um, and getting other people to also reshare your videos, making sure that the videos are accessible, making sure that you turn on closed captions, making sure that you have those uh transcripts of the videos themselves. There's a lot that goes into a really good, well-rounded YouTube strategy. So if you're just uploading videos to YouTube and hoping for the best, we're gonna go ahead and say you're doing it wrong.

Exactly. Um yeah, we'll cover Brian had one more question. We'll cover that maybe in an upcoming issue of the newsletter. But thanks for tuning in, folks, and we'll talk to you next week. Thanks for watching today.

Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trustinsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at trustinsights.ai/slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.