329: Sam Oh On How To Do YouTube SEO And Rank In Search

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You’re listening to the My Wife, Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Now today I have Sam Oh from Ahrefs on the show and you probably recognize the name because Sam is the face of the Ahrefs YouTube channel and the man in charge of SEO education for the best SEO and keyword research tool on the market. Now in this episode, we’ll discuss both e-commerce and YouTube SEO. But before we begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

00:28
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02:19
Welcome to the My Wife, Quota, Job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Sam Oh on the show. Now Sam is a director of product education over at Ahrefs and he’s one of the public faces of the company. And if you’ve ever checked out Ahrefs, the YouTube channel, you’ll find Sam dropping knowledge bombs on SEO in an easy digestible manner. And I love his style and he’s turned the Ahrefs YouTube channel into a powerhouse with over 150,000 subscribers in a relatively short period of time.

02:46
Now I’ve never met Sam in person, but I kind of feel like I know the guy from all the YouTube videos I’ve watched and it’s nice to see another fellow Asian on video. Anyway, today Sam and I are gonna discuss how to rank a YouTube channel, do keyword research for YouTube, as well as we’ll touch on e-commerce stores and ranking e-commerce stores in search as well. And with that, welcome. So Sam, how are you doing today? I’m good, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Hey Sam, so I’m not sure if a bunch of my listeners have actually seen your YouTube channel.

03:15
And for those people who don’t know you already, if you wouldn’t mind giving a very brief intro, but how you got started online and kind of like the history behind your SEO journey. Yep. So I started in 2009 with an e-commerce store, basically fresh out of college, didn’t have any experience. I studied health science, but I basically saw an opportunity and I figured if I was going to screw up, then I’ll screw up while I’m young. It turns out that actually worked out pretty well. So I started

03:42
Learning marketing, basically I got, it’s a typical story where you hire an agency with all the money that you have in the bank and it doesn’t work out. And for me, that kind of just fueled me to do it myself. So that site got acquired in 2012. I worked on other projects. So I continued with e-commerce with third party marketplaces, eBay, Amazon, and did decently in those. And eventually I started in agency life because kind of started to figure out this thing with SEO and.

04:10
and just digital marketing in general. And from there I had two kids, felt like agency life wasn’t working out for me just in terms of the amount of time I had to invest in it. And so, yeah, I decided to join Ahrefs and yeah, that’s where I am today. I’m just kind of curious, you sold your e-commerce business and then you went to an agency. I was just kind of curious why you shifted away from e-comm.

04:36
I actually got really bored, which is the reason why I sold the site. So it’s not a typical e-commerce site where I would sell physical products. I was actually selling cell phone unlock codes at that time. And this is before like unlocking was like a popular thing where stores would, you know, sell you unlocked phones. was mostly like you’d have to go through your carrier or whatever and be locked to that device or to that network. And so, yeah, I just.

05:02
wanted to try something new. And so I tried things like AdSense. I stayed in the third party marketplace side, just because that’s when people were hyping up eBay and Amazon. And I was like, all right, well, let’s see if there’s anything in this. And so I started doing that and just kind of wanted to know what it was all about. And then when I got to the agency side, it was my own agency with my partner and it basically happened by accident. Like we were just taking, we were both taking on side projects.

05:28
He had an expertise more in local SEO and I was more on the content link building side and in the actual strategy. So we started consulting together and yeah, that’s basically what it was and we did quite well. He’s still actually running it. So yeah, that’s basically that was basically agency life. then actually, Ahrefs started off as an experiment. I was trying to convert them into a lead, then converted me into a into an employee. So

05:58
Nice. Yeah, that’s a story for another day, I guess. Yeah, it’s funny how things happen by accident. we started, I started both of my things kind of by accident. I mean, I never had the intention. I was an electrical engineer for many years and it was a very nice job. Actually. I never thought I’d be doing, you know, blogging or podcasting or YouTube channel or anything like that. So just happens. Yeah, definitely. So I’m just kind of curious before we start with kind of the guts of the interview.

06:23
I know Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools out there, but I’m curious, how does Ahrefs rank its own blog in the search engines? I notice it ranks for a lot of really difficult terms. Does the company actually do active link building and what is kind of like the content strategy for the company? Yeah, so I joined Ahrefs in, I think it was 2018. And at that time they were still doing link building. They were doing guest posting and outreach and whatever.

06:53
But yeah, in 2018 is when both Josh and I joined. And by this time, like they had already done a lot of that initial run to work. And then from there, it’s just been, we’ve focused a lot of energy on content. even our editorial process is quite strict. And so we stopped accepting guest posts even, but yeah, we basically run a tight ship in-house and we focus on actually creating content that is better than anything else that’s out there. And naturally that attracts more links, but we also have

07:22
quite a large audience. so the thing is that the majority of our audience are SEOs. And so they have blogs and when they see content from us, they will often link to our content. So it’s just about getting exposure. And so we don’t do so much link building now, but we do still make tweaks with the technical side, the on-page side. And I guess we update our posts quite frequently, which helps rank certain pages. But yeah, we’re not doing like so much link building now.

07:50
Is most of the user acquisition through some of the free articles through SEO? Yeah, definitely. Our content contributes quite a bit to customer acquisition and I would assume customer retention. yeah, we’re basically teaching like in our content, we basically take a general topic like keyword research, for example, and we use, we always integrate our products as much as we can. So basically like there are different ways to do it, but this is the way that we do it and

08:21
most of us, if not all of us, are practitioners. So we actually use the tools in our everyday SEO things. And so it’s really easy to just organically share how we would do it in Keywords Explorer, for example. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. Can we kind of talk a little bit about what’s working and not working in terms of search engine optimization? Like in June, I know John Mueller said that guest posting for links results in unnatural links and Google devalues them. Have you seen a decline in just like guest posting effectiveness? I wouldn’t say so. OK.

08:50
Like I don’t think I would really. It’s a tactic, right? I think he’s trying to get more at like, uh, like excessive guest posting where it’s literally just spammy content with links back to your site. Okay. Yeah. It’s like a lot of people do those like quote unquote guest posting at scale, but they try and publish bad content on other websites. I don’t think like beyond SEO, I just don’t think that’s a good way to do things. Like if you’re going to guess post for someone, then you should probably do a good job.

09:20
build a relationship through that and actually pitch sites that you want to build relationships with or to actually reach their audience as opposed to just like pumping numbers on links. I just don’t think that’s effective. Yeah, I was just I always have to second guess what I hear because I feel like they talk about what they want to happen. And I’ve been doing a lot of guest posting on pretty strong sites. And I always put out really comprehensive content. And then I saw that video a couple months ago. I was like, you know, I wonder if

09:48
they’re just gonna devalue all those links. Cause I do spend a lot of time on those posts. So. Yeah, like in the SEO community, people generally, well, people don’t really think it’s valid what he’s saying at the same time. Like I haven’t done guest posting in a little while in about a year and a half maybe. So it’s tough for me to give you a definitive answer on that. But from what I’ve seen and from what I’ve heard, I don’t think much has changed. Okay. Okay.

10:14
So let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about YouTube, because I know you pump out lots of YouTube videos, and I kind of want to know your process for getting those videos to actually rank in search, in Google search and YouTube search, I guess. Do you start by using Ahrefs, the keyword tool for that? Yeah, like we’re kind of in a different stage now because we have an audience, so we don’t necessarily need to go for search terms. So in the beginning,

10:44
When I started, think the site or the, channel had around 12,000 subscribers. And at that time we could only reach our existing audience. So we would cap out at like between the thousand to 3000 views per video. But so we decided to take a little bit of a different approach and that’s when we started targeting search. So usually I start off with keywords, explore, and I’ll start off with a seed keyword. So for example, SEO link building keyword research, basically broad keywords that are related to, to our product.

11:13
And then I’ll look through different things like volume, and then I’ll take it over to YouTube and I’ll search for those and I’ll look at how many views those the top videos are getting. I’ll look at some other analytics like social blade, where you can kind of get an idea of whether this is because of audience, like they have a huge audience. So therefore they have a lot of views or is it actually coming from search? And then based on the keywords that we’re actually ranking for, which I would get from YouTube analytics.

11:43
You can throw that into trends because now you have a benchmark estimate of how many views you get ranking in position one for X keyword and then put that other keyword against it. If that makes sense, then you kind of have an idea as to the relative percentage of how much traffic you get by ranking for that keyword. So let’s back up a little bit. Just even to just the keyword research part. I’ve noticed that when I type in certain terms, it’s a lot different than the Ahrefs Google keyword explorer.

12:12
A lot of things I type in have to be like extremely broad just to even get any numbers period. Is that what you find too or? Yeah, for the most part, like I’m guessing you’re doing things with e-commerce. We’re doing things with SEO and these topics like while they might be huge in Google and I guess just industry money, it’s it’s not necessarily big on YouTube because that’s not what people are searching for. It’s just.

12:37
The search volumes will vary between Google and YouTube just because of platform intent. Like if you think about why you go to YouTube, either I’m guessing and correct me if I’m wrong is you have a very specific need that you want. So you either want to be entertained in which case you may just click on the things from the homepage, your subscription feed, or even just search for a brand name of someone that you follow in YouTube. If you want to learn something, then you’ll search for something like how to tie a tie.

13:07
And it’s just easier to digest because you get the visuals through video that you can’t really get through blogs. And so, you know, people coming to YouTube to search for like how to do SEO. Sure, there’s going to be a decent number of people, but it’s not going to compare to something like, I don’t know, like Minecraft hacks or something like that. I don’t know about hacks, but it’s just in terms of the reason why people are coming on, they’re not necessarily going to YouTube to

13:36
learn about e-commerce, but they may be looking for other things related to e-commerce. And that’s why you see a lot of these channels that are selling things like how to make $1,000 with an online store do well because people are clicking through to that. And YouTube is very much a momentum channel as opposed to a search channel. Search is involved, but yeah, it’s more of a momentum channel than anything else. So if you can think back to back when the channel only had 12,000 views, like what type of search volumes were you going for? Well,

14:03
We created a video called SEO for beginners and that started ranking for SEO. And that was slightly by accident that we ended up ranking for that. And I think there was something, something to that, that kind of shifted our strategy from just creating videos about like random topics to learning how to rank our videos on YouTube, learning how to rank our videos in Google. And from there it’s like SEO traffic is passive, right? It’s passive and consistent. And so that

14:33
started to build up our subscriber base quite well. So because we’re getting consistent views to the channel, it just continually grows. So if you look at our YouTube search traffic in analytics, it’s literally just like a steady graph, kind of like a mountain. just kind of keeps climbing. Whereas something like browse features, which is mostly like homepage clicks or whatever, it’s like spiky here and there and that’s based on the momentum and same was suggested. Right. Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve had a couple of YouTube

15:02
people on that have gigantic channels and they told me like, they don’t even think about SEO at all. They just put out videos with attractive click baity kind of title, not click baity, but you know, attractive titles and thumbnails and it just kind of grows on its own. would say that’s true. And it’s not it really depends on what you’re like, I’m guessing they’re in like if you’re in a B2C market, like for ecommerce, for example, like if you’re in weddings, then

15:30
you know, a lot of people are searching for things related to that, like how to plan a wedding or whatever it might be. know, you can create, like, let’s just call them clickbait. They’re not even clickbait, but like, you can do a lot of creative things with weddings. And people will click it and view it and subscribe and blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, it’s a little bit different, like depending on the niche that you’re in.

15:55
I guess like if you sell cardboard boxes and you’re just making videos on cardboard boxes, it’s going to be tough to actually get people to click it because people, I would guess, maybe I’m wrong, but I would guess that most people don’t really care about that. But if you turn that cardboard box, I guess business into a DIY with cardboard boxes, then you might be able to get traction because people are into DIY. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And then back to that first question on just when you’re doing the keyword research,

16:24
How do know what volumes to go for and how can you judge the competition? Yeah. So there’s, there’s something called channel authority. I don’t know if it’s an official thing or not, but basically. Like when you’re starting a channel, it’s best to start off very niche. So you start to build, like, for example, for us, because we’re in SEO keyword research link building, like we have so many videos on that. As soon as I hit publish for any video that has that as the main topic and the keyword and the title and the description.

16:53
then literally we rank in the top like three, four, five, like within seconds. And then eventually it’s kind of like the Google dance, but it’s the YouTube dance. And we kind of just move up and down, move up and down. And based on how well you can actually engage the audience. So if you’re doing clickbait and no one’s actually watching your videos, it won’t settle in a top position. But you know, if for us, like we try not to click baits or our titles are actually kind of boring, but they’re very straight to the point. I wouldn’t say they’re boring. mean, they’re clickable.

17:22
You know, okay. Yeah. Well, that’s good to hear. Yeah, I feel like they’re boring, but at the same time, like we don’t want to mislead people who watch our videos or read our content anyway. But as we, as we kind of settle, like we, get decent engagement times and percentages. And so yeah, we ended up settling at a decent point. But when you don’t have that authority, and I guess maybe back when you only had 12,000 subscribers, you didn’t have that authority.

17:50
I’m trying, what I’m trying to get at is when you’re first starting out, you probably have to go for keywords that are easier to rank for, but it’s, but how do you even determine what that is? Yeah. So usually with the top ranking pages, like you’ll need to look at the channels. So if you’re competing against, like if you try to rank for YouTube SEO right now, you’re going to be competing with like, with us, with Brian Dean, with channels called Think Media. think it is basically a lot of YouTube channels that have

18:17
lots of subscribers where those subscribers are actually engaged. Like you can kind of test that by going to the channel and actually looking at their growth. So on social blade, you can see whether their subscriber rates are growing, whether their view counts are growing or declining. And sometimes they’ll see like huge channels with millions of subscribers, but when they publish new videos, they get like 300 views. In those cases, they’ve usually spread themselves too thin. And I don’t think that they’re much of a threat. If you see small channels,

18:47
that are similar to, I guess, your size, then it’s more likely that you can rank for that. And then also just looking at the types of videos that those channels publish. Like, Think Media basically publishes everything related to cameras and video marketing and everything. so trying to outrank them for a lot of things would be challenging if you’re a new channel. I don’t know if it’s impossible or not, but yeah, it would be extremely challenging unless you had…

19:15
like an incredible video. You mentioned the words spreading yourself too thin. Does that mean that anything that you make a video on should be within the same topic? Relatively, like if you kind of think of it as like a mind map of some sort, like SEO, like we can still write about digital marketing and still rank. I think we rank number one for digital marketing, online marketing and internet marketing with that same video. But if we started creating something on, let’s say, let’s say e-commerce, I mean, that would

19:45
still fall in the same bucket? It would. And I think like we rank number one for e-commerce SEO as well, but that’s related to SEO. Uh, as we create more e-commerce content, I’m sure we will like how to start a Shopify store. We might actually end up ranking for that over time. But at the end of the day, it comes down to engagement. Like a good example of this is with blogging. We create a lot of videos. We don’t create a lot of videos on specifically just blogging, like how to start a blog.

20:15
best web hosting companies. Like we don’t do stuff like that, but we can still rank for like how to write a blog post. Cause we talk a lot about content marketing. So it’s like, there is still like channel relevance to the things that we’re talking about. But if we created a video on like how to create or how to make the best cup of coffee, I don’t think we’d ever rank because our channel has nothing to do with coffee.

20:39
And that would probably just be reflected in the engagement numbers, right? That’s the main reason why it would fail. But if you, if all your followers or subscribers watch that video and gave it a thumbs up, maybe it would do well or no. think so. It’s tough to say because we haven’t actually tried anything. So like random like that, but I think that’s, I think what you’re saying is, is right. Because naturally, like if you build an audience around SEO, it doesn’t mean that they’re going to be interested in like in coffee.

21:08
And so naturally when they get those notifications, they’re not going to click and CTR does play a decent role, I think, in terms of rankings and momentum, whether YouTube is going to continue to promote your video to through the browse features, like on the homepage or through suggested views. Okay. So if I can kind of summarize, you probably want to start out niche and you want to focus on a different, on a specific category until you get followers who are really engaged with that specific category. then

21:35
After that, maybe you can branch out tangentially to other topics that are related. Yeah, that’s exactly it. So I’ll just give one more example. Like, let’s say you have a channel where you want to share recipes. You might start off with, let’s just say vegan recipes, and then you might eventually go off into, I don’t know, desserts or whatever it might be. And then you can kind of branch out and as you create videos, as you create content and you kind of want to create videos that are are as similar as possible. So.

22:02
A better example would be to go from vegan to vegetarian, and then I guess to continually branch out if you want to expand further. So for us, like we might go from SEO to general digital marketing, we might hit social media, we might hit et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens.

22:31
Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs,

23:01
policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergcouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECOUNSCL.com. Now back to the show. Okay, and then can we talk a little bit about

23:29
structuring the video itself. Like I like how you guys have been trying to emulate the structure that you guys have actually. You start out with an intro that explains what I’m gonna get out of it and then you go into the guts. And can you kind of talk about, you know, how deliberate you are in the structure of the actual video? Pretty deliberate. Like it’s, I don’t think about structure so much, like in terms of like, oh, my intro needs to be less than 10 seconds. Okay. But yeah, we’ll try and hook them in somehow, tell them why they should continue to watch the video and then just

23:59
have the little intro branding thing and then get straight into the video. But yeah, it’s usually more in the editorial process when I’m actually writing the scripts where we’ll be a little bit more strict, where we’ll cut out things where if 1 % of the audience will care but 99 % won’t, then we’ll cut certain parts out. So we’re trying to keep our video as packed with information as possible, but as short as possible.

24:25
So we’re just trying to be as concise as possible. Interesting. Is there a certain length that you guys shoot for for your specific category? I should say. No, there’s not. I don’t. We usually won’t publish a video that’s under five minutes, but like we don’t have a max length. It’s just if it’s too wordy or if it’s just unnecessary, then it’s probably not a good fit for video. At least with our current style. So we just try to pack in as much detail as we can without

24:54
like overdoing it and boring people because that’ll kill your engagement metrics. So you mentioned script. Do you guys use a teleprompter or is it just kind of bullet points and ad lib? No, I have to use a teleprompter. I’m I would feel miserably and people really. OK, I you seem so smooth up there, seriously. So, OK, it doesn’t look like you’re reading. You learn to read from a teleprompter like even from if you look at news channels and stuff, you can’t tell that they’re always reading from a teleprompter. Like there’s some people that are really good at it.

25:24
I think that I’m still horrible. Maybe it’s just because I know that I am reading from a teleprompter. Yeah, it helps a lot. And that really comes down to script writing in terms of like how natural you can write. Like I literally talk out loud as I’m writing because I want it to sound like I’m talking normally. And in terms of, cause I know what you guys do is you embed your YouTube videos within the blog posts. Would there be any harm in?

25:50
like using the same dialogue in your blog post within your video? Like does Google actually create a transcript and compare against what’s already out there in the blogging world, I guess, or the content world? They do create auto translations. I don’t know if they like cross check between Google and YouTube. But we never actually like, I won’t take a blog post and then just read it because it doesn’t come off naturally. It’s just the writing styles are different.

26:20
And the delivery will be different too. So yeah, it’s really about like choose your best format. So do you want to watch video or a blog post? We don’t repurpose everything. So for example, like I think we have something on keyword cannibalization on, on our blog, but I won’t turn that into YouTube because it’s going to be super boring. And so, uh, like it’s a very specific topic that a very small subset of people will be interested in. YouTube is not necessarily the place for that. I think YouTube is more.

26:49
more of a beginner’s channel in that sense, where people will click on things like how to rank number one in Google. Right, right. Yeah, a lot more broad, higher level information than what you can actually specify in a blog is what I found. I mean, I’m still new at this. So how do you get people to continue watching your videos? Is there anything special that you do? Oh, yeah, there’s there’s a lot you can do, actually. But it’s like so situational and depending on the topic. like, we do tutorials mainly. And so

27:18
like for the most part, do you edit your own videos? No, I have someone the Philippines edit for me. Okay, so usually when we look at a timeline, if there’s too much of just the talking head, then we change, we add in B-roll. So B-roll is something that I think works with any YouTube channel, just nobody wants to look at the same thing the whole time without any kind of dynamics or movement, like our attention spans are so short that we need to be entertained in another way. We also use custom animations, which often explain a concept better.

27:48
So if I’m explaining like the process of how Google crawls the web, then creating some kind of animation will actually help you to understand it as I speak. And then also tech screens work really well. And then from there, it’s basically just a matter of looking at your YouTube analytics. So you can look at the audience retention graphs and both the absolute and the relative, guess, but mostly the absolute. And you can kind of get an idea of places where people engage or where most people watch. So if you start to see a little

28:17
bumps in your graph, then look at why that bump might have occurred. So like an example that I have is in our keyword research tutorial, there’s a moment where I share a list of keyword modifiers and which are basically just add ons to a base keyword. So for example, instead of like gardening tools, a modifier might be best. So best gardening tools or best gardening tools, 2020. And I asked the viewers, I say, take a screenshot and let’s move on. So.

28:47
When I say that the keywords kind of pop out a little bit and I’m actually giving them a call to action. I’m saying to take a screenshot because these are going to help you and let’s move on. And then if you look at the audience retention graph, there’s like a big bump in that part. And the reason why is because people are rewinding back to that part to actually go and take a screenshot. And so you start to notice these small kinds of things that how people are behaving with your tutorials and things that people are interested in. And then you can kind of recycle and reuse those things.

29:16
in different videos going forward, or at least the concept and experiment with it. And then actually put your experiment to the test. Are people rewinding to watch that part again? Actually, how do you tell? And what does it look like when someone rewinds in terms of your retention graph? So from what I understand, the audit, the absolute audience retention graph is it basically shows you on a graph, the number of people that watched specific parts of the video. So like the time, so it’s always going to be declining overall as an, a trend.

29:46
But then when you see those bumps is people going back because now they’ve just watched that part again So that increases that number there and so those are like I don’t know if this is an official term, but they’re called true bumps of engagement and so if you can kind of create those throughout your videos then It works out well, or if you’re if your video like has a sharp decline right in the beginning of the video

30:12
from like 100 % down to like 30%, then your intro’s probably too long, it’s too boring, people aren’t really engaging, they’re like, I’m in the wrong place, or maybe your title doesn’t describe what you plan to show them very well, in which case, it’s just gonna kill your engagement, you’re not gonna rank, you’re not gonna get suggested, and it’s just not gonna work well for you. What are some good metrics for, I guess, engagement?

30:36
that you guys shoot for. So overall watch time is one. Another is audience retention. So like the actual percentage. And then there’s one that’s actually unmeasurable, which is called session watch time. And this is basically, I guess, the total time that people watch videos on your channel before they actually kill the session on YouTube. before they close YouTube, that is not exactly measurable per se, but it’s interesting because

31:03
You can kind of gauge it by looking at the cards that are clicked on videos and then measuring the audience retention on those videos and kind of summing everything up. But at the end of the day, you can’t really measure it fully. So it’s just about creating a good user experience for people on YouTube and trying to keep them on the YouTube platform, as opposed to telling them to go sign up for email lists on your website, because that kills the session. Yeah. I was just going to ask you, do you have calls to action outside of YouTube on your videos ever? Nope. We never tried to lead people off of YouTube.

31:33
So we figure that if people are interested in actually buying our tools or taking it for a trial or whatever, then they will go ahead and search for Ahrefs in Google or whatever, and they’ll eventually find us there. And it works for us. And it’s just people are there to watch videos, not to be sold something. And so we never try to sell anyone on anything. And then in terms of audience retention, is there a specific percentage that you go for? And if it’s less than that, do you take off the video? Like what’s the process that you guys have there for?

32:02
figure out what’s working. I wouldn’t say that there’s like a specific percentage because audience retention will, will vary based on how long the video is. like if you have a 60 minute video and you know, somebody watches one or six minutes of it, then the audience retention is going to be very low. Whereas if you have a video that’s one minute and people watch 50 seconds of it, then the audience retention will be very high. So it can be a little bit misleading. And so

32:30
Generally speaking, it’s just, they watching enough of the video? Like, I don’t know how to put it into, I can’t really put it into a scientific or analytical way because it’s just YouTube is an attention platform. So if we can get your attention, it kind of sticks with you. And if we happen to, if they happen to get exposure to our tools through the video, then, you know, we don’t expect people to sign up within seven days or within three days. It’s just sign up whenever you’re ready and we’ll still be there. So.

32:59
Naturally, we see people saying that they discovered us through YouTube and so something is working there and that’s continually going up So I was just gonna ask you how do you track conversions from YouTube? It sounds like there’s no real easy way to do it Yeah, like CRO just gets it gets really complicated if you’re Tracking things at a higher level. So if you’re doing things with like first touch, we can’t really measure it with like complete accuracy So we just don’t

33:28
What we do though is that whenever anyone signs up for a new trial, we ask, where did you first hear about Ahrefs? And a lot of people say YouTube now it’s, yeah. Okay. The growth rate on YouTube is actually quite high. And I think for SaaS companies, um, or even for, uh, for e-commerce stores that are selling products. Like YouTube is just such a great platform because people are actually seeing what they’re thinking about buying in action. Right. And if you can see it working, you’re like, Oh man, like I got to try that myself or.

33:58
Like that product is exactly what I want as you know, someone shares the features of that product. And so they’ll go and they’ll find that product, whether you tell them to go find it or not, or where to find it. So does that imply then that you don’t even put links to your product in the description? Well, we have one link to hrefs.com in the description. That’s just like, know, how they have like default descriptions that you can add at the end. It’s kind of like a signature, but yeah, we rarely to never include external links.

34:28
in the descriptions because we don’t really need to like usually if it’s the external link, it’ll be to like a Google Sheet that where we’re where we’re sharing a template. So yeah, we actually don’t do that. I think it’s fine to have external links in there. A lot of vloggers do that with affiliate links, because that’s how they make their money. Right. But for us, yeah, we don’t like we don’t really link to things. let’s say you sell like a very specific e commerce product like a purple

34:56
pansy, handkerchief or whatever that, I mean, would you not put that link in the description and just depend on someone typing that into Google and finding it? No, I think if it’s a very specific product like that, like I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t obsess over not including links in there. Okay. But at the same time, like I wouldn’t link to like all your like to the category page, to the homepage, to the purple one, to the red one, to the green one, like, you know, it doesn’t have to be crazy like that. Just do whatever’s natural.

35:25
And honestly, like people will find it or they’ll click on it. Or if you just tell them like the one that I was reviewing today, link is in the description, whatever. And then it’s fine. It just doesn’t need to be oversold in my opinion. Okay. And then do you guys do anything special with the video description? Is it important to write a lot of verbiage there that focuses on certain keywords that you might be targeting? I think so. I think to a certain extent, I think it helps with ranking in Google also. It’s just basically

35:54
Like video is still, it’s still very hard for search engines to understand what the video is about. Like, yes, they can understand it because they extract text from the actual speech, but usually we’ll include like our primary keyword in the description and we’ll give a brief overview of what the video is about and the things that you’ll learn. So things like that. Yeah. Again, I wouldn’t obsess over it, but if you’re going for YouTube SEO, Google SEO, then I would, I would definitely include context.

36:23
to help YouTube and Google understand more deeply what the video is about. So I know you guys, as I mentioned before, you embed video within your blog posts. Would it be okay to like just literally cut and paste a paragraph, like the intro paragraph of your blog post as a description, or would you suggest rewriting it completely from scratch in different language? I would just rewrite it. I don’t know if there’s any kind of duplicate content penalties. I don’t think there are, but at the same time, like I wouldn’t do that. If anything, I would take it from your script if you’re going to be scripting it.

36:53
and just paste that in there if you wanted to. But it really doesn’t take long. Like usually, like when I first started, I would literally just free write it and I didn’t really care whether it sounded perfect or not. It was more just like, is it concise to the point descriptive? And we always, for the description, we actually always include links to other videos on our channel in there that are related and relevant to the video that they’re watching because that can help increase session watch time.

37:23
And when you were talking about just when you’re editing the video and adding all these extras, like the animations and that sort of thing, is that something that you do or you have your editor do manually or is there a more automated way of doing that’s less time consuming? Everything is super custom for us. So we use Adobe products for the most part. So Premiere Pro as well as After Effects and Adobe Audition and then the Photoshop and Illustrator stuff.

37:54
specific needs for that. But usually, like in terms of our process, I’ll usually record the video and then I’ll make notes in my Google Doc for like the person who handles production and he’ll go and in Adobe Premiere, you can add markers at specific time codes. So if we want a specific part to pop out, then he’ll add a marker. And we’ve color coded it based on basically the common ones that we do. like,

38:21
like spotlights, for example, are green and then custom animations will be pink. And then our editor who doesn’t have experience in SEO can just go through the markers and he literally just does this thing. And so it just works in a much more efficient way where everyone’s just focusing on what they do best. And I’m just kind of curious, like I know this is best practice to try to keep someone on your blog post as long as possible. And you guys do that by embedding videos and other clips in there.

38:50
Is that true though? Like, do you guys have data? On which embedding videos, improving the rankings of a blog post? No, we don’t. We don’t actually even use Google analytics anymore. So, is that right? Okay. We’ve literally stopped tracking more or less everything. is that? Well, I think part of it is privacy. So like our, founder and CEO, Demetri, like he, don’t think that he wants to necessarily share all that information with.

39:21
with other companies in terms of, of everything that’s happening around the web from data that we should technically own, which we don’t. And so, and also like at the end of the day, our revenue is, is continually growing. so like tracking is not necessarily like obsessing over these tiny little metrics is more or less a waste of time if we’re not really going to do anything with it and see notable changes. so, yeah, we don’t really, I guess it makes sense for your company in particular, right? Because.

39:50
I’m not sure if Google likes you guys, right? Because they’re hiding all this data and I don’t know if that’s the case. Like we do use Google search console, but that’s basically Google’s data that they’re sharing with us, which is different. But yeah, like I don’t think it’s for that reason at all that Google doesn’t like us or anything like that. It’s just, I think it’s more like personal and moral reasons that he would choose not to do. So I think I read somewhere that you guys are creating a search engine. Is that accurate or yeah, it’s like our.

40:20
Dmitri has mentioned that, I think he mentioned it on Twitter and then some publications picked it up. But yeah, that’s something that we’ve been working on. Ah, interesting. Okay. Okay, so let’s switch gears once again and kind of apply what we’ve just been talking about for the last half hour. You got an e-commerce store brand new, you want to promote it on YouTube. What are your first steps and how do you lay out the plan? I would first try to find competitors. So like people who are actually creating videos on

40:48
similar topics that you would want to be visible for. And then I would use keyword research tools like Keywords Explorer, for example, and I would actually research that industry. if we’re selling.

41:03
here. Let’s we’re selling coffee. Okay, coffee. Like fun. Yeah. So let’s say we’re like we’re a roaster and we’re selling coffee and coffee accessories. Then I would probably take all the different topics like you know, how to roast beans, or I would probably type in things like coffee and put it into keywords, explore and then look at the keyword ideas reports and then see where there’s volume. And then I’d actually cross reference that with YouTube and search and start ranking for things or start targeting topics where I feel like we have potential to rank.

41:32
And that would kind of build the baseline of our traffic or of our views, because again, SEO traffic is passive and consistent. And then I would start to expand out from just looking at coffee things to look to different keywords like French press, which may not include the words coffee or aero press and different topics that people will be interested in. And I would continue to build that search traffic of a very tightly knit audience. And then once that audience is built.

42:01
then I would start to actually create things that might be a little bit more out of the box and interesting to that audience. And then this whole time, you’re not gonna link out if you can, or if you do in the description, but not within the video content itself, because you wanna keep people on the platform, right? To a certain extent, there are definitely exceptions where I would link to, like if I’m reviewing, I don’t know, specific, Colombian coffee beans and giving…

42:30
like showing people how to roast them, I don’t know if it’s different, but let’s just say it’s a different roasting process and we sell the actual green beans that you roast, then I would share a link to that because it’s the one that I’m using. Okay. And then in terms of that initial keyword research, I think we touched upon this earlier in the interview, you’re looking for keywords where the channel might not necessarily be that strong.

42:53
Or if there is a strong channel, you look at the views for the particular category of the video that you’re trying to create and you’re looking for a disparate ratio of users or subscribers. Is that kind of accurate? For the most part, yeah, it’s a pretty top level view of things. Like we have a blog post and a video on YouTube SEO, which digs more into the competitive analysis. Okay. One other thing that I often do is I look at the ratio of engagement to views. So engagement being

43:22
I guess, physical engagement, which would be likes, dislikes, and comments. So I’ll sum those up and then I’ll divide that by the number of views. And generally speaking, for videos that are getting views through organic, you’re probably looking at a 1 to 10 % ratio. Whereas if you see something less than 1%, then something’s fishy. So people might be buying views. Or if you see something much higher than that for a video that probably doesn’t deserve it, then in that case, then people are likely buying views.

43:51
And the case is much lower. People are likely getting traffic from either video embeds where you don’t really have the opportunity to like, dislike, or comment unless you click through or they’re paying for ads. In which case it may not be a good video for you to actually engage. If someone’s paying for views, can you just pay for thumbs up also? You can, but it doesn’t, from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t really work. Like I’ve never tried it myself, but yeah, like I see people.

44:20
talking about it. see some people on Twitter bragging about what they did and how they rank for some like super long tail keyword. But like I don’t see much value in it. And then you see those same people from Twitter disappear off YouTube. So it’s it’s kind of interesting to see. But I think it’s just better to just build honest engagement metrics and just improve your actual video skills and how you engage your audience. Like there’s a lot that you learn as you create videos like your first, you know, 10, 20 videos will likely be pretty poor.

44:48
in comparison to the videos that you’ll create after. So I feel like those are the people that end up winning in the long haul. Does getting thumbs up on a video even matter though? don’t know, like honestly, like I think it contributes in some way, shape or form, but I don’t think it’s like, oh, this video has a hundred likes and this video has 10. So therefore the hundred one is better. I don’t think it’s that elementary in terms of like the algorithm, but it’s mostly just on the actual engagement time. Like who’s watching, how long are they watching for?

45:17
then they’ll promote it to people who have similar interests to your viewers, and then are they engaging? it’s very much momentum channel, like how much momentum can you create with your videos? Okay. Sam, since I have you on, I do often solicit reader questions, and these don’t have anything to do YouTube per se. But what is your view on hiring an SEO agency? On hiring an SEO agency? think you just need to do your research.

45:44
see what their results are. And in that case, you kind of need to have an idea of like what good SEO looks like. So yeah, like our tools, a lot of them can actually help understand that to see if they’re, for example, if you’re hiring an SEO agency to build links, then are they actually building quality links? Or are they just buying low quality links and saying that they’ve done, you know, they built, you know, a hundred referring domains. So I think hiring SEO, an SEO agency is a great route to take if,

46:13
your time would be spent elsewhere. But at the same time, you need to do your research into work that they’ve actually done as opposed to just whatever their sales pitch might be. Okay. And then what about your views on the disavow tool? Do you guys ever use it? We don’t. I feel like Google is smart enough to know that certain negative SEO attacks, like I guess the old ones where people would use inappropriate words to, sorry, inappropriate anchors.

46:40
to link back to your site from a bunch of spammy sites. feel like Google just knows that these are negative SEO attacks because it’s pretty easy to spot. And I don’t think they will put much weight to that, but like we don’t really use it. And I probably, like if I was working on my own site and I saw, I probably wouldn’t touch the disavow tool unless I had a manual penalty or some kind of manual action against me. In which case that would, it wouldn’t even be my first line of defense.

47:09
Okay. Yeah. I sometimes when I publish a post, like I have like 10 or 20 sites, literally copy it word for word and publish and then link. You just leave that alone probably, right? Yeah, those are just scraper sites. So they’re basically just taking your RSS feed. And as soon as a new item comes up in the RSS feed, then it automatically gets published to your post. Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about that at all. And when you are a guest posting on a bunch of different blogs or getting links, how careful are you about just anchor text?

47:39
Pretty careful. Like I basically wouldn’t stuff an exact match anchor for the purpose of getting an exact match anchor. Just, I would just write naturally and link wherever it’s relevant, usually with enough context around it. So partial match anchors usually work well because just simply because they, they sound more natural, I guess, in the context. So I’ll usually write it and then link wherever is appropriate. And then what about internal backlinks?

48:08
Yeah, definitely add them. That’s something that we do for every post that we create. Two simple things you can do is go to Google and type in site colon your domain, uh, dog TLD. So.com and then the keyword that you’re trying to rank for. So if we had a new post on keyword research, we would type in site colon hfs.com and then keyword research after it. And then it’s going to show you all the pages on your domain that mentioned that specific word or phrase and wherever it’s relevant, link back to the new post.

48:37
Now, if you want to actually get a little bit more technical, then I would look in Ahrefs Best By Links report, and you can actually start to see the link authority of those pages. So basically, if pages have more quality links and they’re linking out to other internal links, then it can essentially pass page rank to those pages as well. But again, relevance is key. Okay. There’s no harm in internally backlinking in general, right? Like if you have a really strong page. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Cool.

49:07
Well, Sam, we’ve been chatting for quite a while and I just really appreciate your time coming on the show today. If anyone wants to get ahold of you or check out your YouTube channel, where can they find you? Yeah, you can go to YouTube and just search for Ahrefs and you should see our channel there or you can tweet me Sam S G O spelled O H. Awesome. Well, Sam, really appreciate your time, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. All right. Take care.

49:36
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now as many of you know, I’m currently actively trying to grow my YouTube channel right at this moment, and Sam’s tips have been extremely helpful in growing my subscriber base via YouTube SEO. For more information about this episode, go to mywifequitterjob.com slash episode 329. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post-purchase flow, a win-back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot.

50:04
So head on over to mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform, and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash Steve. That’s P-O-S-T-S-C-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve.

50:33
Now, I talk about how I use these tools on my blog. And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening to the My Wife, Quitter Job podcast, where we’re giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information, visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitterjob.com.