Does embedding YouTube videos boost SEO?, Over-optimized SEO features decline, and more

All right, so the next one is, does embedding YouTube videos on your website affect rankings?

Oh, you're picking mine. I have it, I have it open actually. Okay, so those of you that can see on YouTube right now, I'm going to pull up this tweet. So this comes from Darren Shaw, and so he says, here's why you should embed videos on your key landing pages, more specifically YouTube videos. So there's this graph over here. I'm going to pull up this graph. So those of you that are following along, so you can see this graph. I'm going to show it to Neil as well. This is where this one page was getting traffic. And at this point where they replaced the YouTube embed with Vimeo, the traffic dropped, right? And this is, when the traffic comes back, that's when they reverted back to YouTube. And so, you know, they're talking about the Google leak from a couple months ago, and this is just one of the things that reinforced that Google does favor its own properties. And it makes a lot of sense. Why wouldn't you? If you're running Google, like, you would favor your own properties, so.

I totally would. And what's funny is people hate on this. It's business. Google should do whatever they want from a business aspect. If people don't like it, they can use another platform. I know that's extreme, but it is their corporation. And you as a user have a right to use their platform or not use it.

Here's what it says. Well, we'll expand a little more here. So thanks to the Google leak, we now know that user engagement signals like time on page can positively impact your rankings. Video embeds can also improve your conversions because they tell your stories, tell stories about your work and why people should hire you, provide engaging content for visitors. But it also matters which video hosting platform you use. It's best to use YouTube, sorry Vimeo and Wistia, and then, I went through the link over there. So here's your to-do list. Create videos for each primary service you offer, upload to YouTube, embed on your web pages, and profit. I think that's really smart and I think all of us doing this, you know, Neil's team, my team, you should just do this.

We've been embedding our YouTube videos for a very long time in our content.

You know, I read something because you typically, when you embed it, are you putting it at the top or the bottom?

I'm putting it wherever it makes sense, whatever section.

So I read something recently where it's like it affects it more, it doesn't, Google doesn't really give you as much credit if you put it at the bottom, and my embeds are at the bottom. But if you put them up top, they say you get more credit for it. I haven't verified that yet, but it's something that's worth testing.

We haven't tested putting it at the bottom. We rarely, I don't think we really put it at the bottom at all. But we do put it somewhere in the middle. So like if we have a video on 10 SEO tactics to double your traffic, I'm making up a title, and strategy number 1 is how to do keyword research, we'll break down how to do keyword research, and then we'll put in a video on keyword research from one of my YouTube pages. And then if the next tactic on link building and affects your rankings, we'll describe it, show images and stuff, and I'll also put in a video from my YouTube page. We do that not for rankings, but we do that to also help our YouTube page consistently get views. And we found it to work and help with our YouTube rankings for youtube.com versus just google.com.

Yep. One more thing before you move over to yours on CMOs, I think. So this one's interesting to me, over-optimized SEO features associated with Google traffic decline. So this tweet's from Cyrus Shepard. So these are the top over-optimized SEO features we found associated with Google update traffic declines. Number 1 is anchor text variety. So 0.337, I think that's out of like 1 or so. Let's ignore the numbers. But so anchor text variety is basically if you just keep saying digital marketing agency, all your links, you know, a good chunk of your links are digital marketing agency, that's pretty obvious to an algorithm. And that's something you get flagged for, right? Clickbaity title tags. It actually has a higher score. So if your title tags are maybe misleading or like clickbaiting at the end of the day is misleading people, right? It's the same thing with YouTube. You can have clickbaity titles and then sometimes people will comment clickbait. That actually has a negative effect as well. Heavy schema usage. Do you want to explain schema?

Yes. So schema markup, you know, like when Google starts pulling stuff from your webpage and shows it in the search results, like reviews and ratings, like the stars. That's all coming from schema markup.

Yep. And I don't know if you know about this, you probably know about this one, but the number 4 is page updated frequency. So if it's updated way too much, that's also negative signal. This is the highest signal over here because it's got abuse. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a natural thing. So I didn't know that. It doesn't look like you did too.

Wikipedia updates really often. They do well. I think with some of this stuff, so let's go with the page updating first and then we'll want to talk about the clickbait. If you think about the page updating, I know a lot of marketers who update their page to try to manipulate Google, but they just update a sentence or so. Waste of time, does nothing. If you're going to update the page, it should only be updated if you can add more value to a user. Not with a sentence or two, but actually really updating. If you had to update a sentence or two because something's off, by all means, go and do it. But typically, updating your content a few times a year, assuming you actually have real value to add, you should do it. If you don't have real value to add, There's no point in updating, you're just wasting your time.

I remember the Abraham Lincoln page on Wikipedia. I looked at it over time and initially it was like 3,000 words and then moved to 6,000 words and 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 words. So it got bigger and bigger and bigger over time. And to your point, people were adding value to it. And the good thing about Wikipedia is there's a checks and balances system where there's, there's moderators that are kind of checking things. So they will also determine if you're adding value or not.

So if you also look at the Google document leak, If you end up getting more click rates when someone does a search, if you have a higher click-through rate and someone clicks on your result over the next one, you will actually rank better. We're finding clickbait titles to perform well, and we've seen and done a lot of tests on this. You know, I disagree with Cyrus, but I think there's one part that's not in here that makes sense. So he is right and he is wrong, and I'm right and I'm wrong. And here's what I mean by this. Clickbait typically means you're using an attractive title to get someone to click on your website, and then your content doesn't deliver for that title, right? That's clickbait. You're baiting them, but you're not actually delivering value. So what's happening is if you have clickbait in your title, you're getting a lot of clicks, which is good, but then people are clicking the back button and bouncing off, which shows search engines that users are not happy, so then they go to the next page. But on the flip side, if you have a really appealing title, some may consider it clickbaity, but the content more than delivers on what you said, what we find is it does boost your rankings extremely well. And that's what I mean, because when he's talking about clickbait, the real question is, does the content match up? And in many cases, if it's clickbait, it doesn't match up. So he's spot on. But if you can use appealing title and a meta description, and the content more than delivers on that quote unquote aggressive title, We, we find that your rankings typically increase over time from that.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, The ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So Again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

So CMOs, you know, we've talked about marketing a lot. A lot of these big corporations have CMOs. What do you think the average tenure for a CMO is now?

Less than 2 years.

Less than 2 years. So according to advisory firm Spencer Stuart, CMOs working for top— Who the hell is Spencer Stuart? I have no idea. But this is from one of the popular Ad websites, right? So CMOs working for top 100 advertisers in the US had been in the role for roughly 39 months. So it's roughly 3.3-ish years.

Oh, that's longer than I thought.

That's still low.

Yeah.

If you, depending on the organization size, CEOs are 7+ years.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, look, marketing is getting harder. A lot of CMOs I've seen, they've kind of like, actually I spoke with the CMO, the former CMO of Gong today, and he's actually like in an evangelist role. A lot of people have— a lot of these CMOs have dropped off to kind of do their own thing or they've shifted into another role. And I just think it's really tough because everyone— it's very easy to blame the CMO. It's easy to blame your Chief Revenue Officer and your Chief Marketing Officer.

Spot on. When something's wrong, hey, marketing didn't do a good job or sales didn't do a good job. All right.

Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. We'll talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint And our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more and we'll see you inside.

And funny enough, you know, speaking about not doing a good job in marketing, what do you think of this title? AI will make marketing harder, not easier.

I think it's whatever.

It's whatever?

Yeah.

That title usually would've hit for me because it's contrarian.

Say it again.

AI will make marketing harder, not easier.

Okay, fine. I would click that.

You would click it, right?

Yeah, but it's just, I've seen that format before, so I'm like, whatever. But then you repeated it, so yeah.

Yeah, so that usually though does really well. Engagement metrics on it early on, funny enough, it was on a tweet. I just wanted to talk to you about it. It has nothing to do with the tweet, but it was just showing like, I posted that, we were talking about Twitter not getting engagement earlier.

Did it get engagement?

It has good comments, it has good likes and all this stuff. And I'm getting a similar amount to what I used to get. Just the total view count has dropped quite a bit lower. Because you have to remember, I'm getting what I used to get. I'm not getting extra likes because they hid likes. But other people are getting extra likes.

You know, I'm reading a book. So when I go into the sauna now, there's this book called Self-Reliance. And it's written by something Emerson, Waldo Emerson. I forgot his— Ralph Waldo Emerson. Yeah. So, okay. This whole thing is about how as a man, if you want to stand out, you have to speak what's on your mind. You can't stand in the middle. And, you know, great people, great people say what's on their mind. And I'm like, yeah, you know, but sometimes it's really dangerous to say what's on your mind. But to your point, if you do genuinely say what's on your mind, you know, you'll get way more engagement. But it's also too dangerous because you have a pretty significant operation at the same time. So. You know, I think you have to pick your spots to say what you want. Like, we can say it to each other, or you can say it in small groups, but you can't— I don't think you can say it publicly sometimes. And not to say that Neil has a lot of bad things to say. It's just he has a point of view, you know, and I have a point of view. Yeah.

And funny enough, I was on a podcast today, we were talking about corporations. And they were like, yeah, when you look at the average stat for marketing, it's getting harder and harder and more and more expensive. And I was like, yeah, because if you look at the internet, what cloud did to the internet, it made it easier to crank out a startup and it made it cheaper. And AI is making it cheaper to create a company and easier and faster. So everyone's like, okay, if it's easier to create a company, that means it should be easier to get customers and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, it's not actually cheaper to create a business anymore. Because if it's easy to get a product out due to AI in the cloud, what ends up happening is people start shifting that money towards marketing. You have more players in the space, which means more competition, and people are more efficient because of these AI tools. So where do you take that money? You start dumping it into places like ads and sales.

Yeah, I mean, that's like when we talked about Klarna a couple months ago where they're going to save $40 million in operating costs and they're going to dump it back into sales, back into marketing. They might take some off the table, but they're going to try to grow the company bigger. There's actually a really good— everyone should read this. If you Google situational awareness AI, this guy that used to work at OpenAI, he actually wrote, I think he wrote like 5 or 6 essays and they're huge essays talking about where all of this is going to go. And interesting enough, I just landed yesterday and I spent some time reading one of his first essays. And he just talks about how we're kind of in this phase of ChatGPT right now. The next phase is agents. So where agents are talking to each other, they're doing things for you. But right after that is drop-in remote workers where basically you have AI, it gets onboarded onto your company. It's looking through all your company documents, all your code, all your Slack, all your emails, and then it just figures out what to do. And we're going to get to that phase where someone like you can direct 1,000 of these and you're just going to be able to get a lot more things done faster. Now, here's something he's saying. AGI might happen in 2027. So AGI is artificial general intelligence. By the way, it's like 3:41 AM for Neil right now, so he's starting to nod off. So I will take it from here, guys.

But, but, but, right, right?

It's like 3 or 4 AM for you, right?

Yeah, dude, I'm like, I'm feeling it now. It's 2:41 exactly from where I was.

So it's— see, these long conversations are hard. But anyway, so what I was saying is artificial general intelligence, that's where you are going to have an AI that's just smarter than human beings, right? And there's a potential blocker for that. So, the blocker is we might run out of enough data to crawl, right? There might be a data wall.

Yeah.

That's what it's called, right? But there's an argument that there's going to be a lot of synthetic data that's going to be created, right? So, we'll see what happens. Neil and I, we're not AI scientists or anything. I just think it's fascinating to read this stuff. And I think all of you that are interested in this, just Google situational awareness AI. Read the paper however deep you want to go because this guy's really smart. This guy was valedictorian at Columbia at 19 years old. Then he worked at OpenAI. And he just seems like a genius to me. So go read it, guys.

And speaking of AI, did you see how Google's testing link cards at the top of the AI overviews?

Link cards at the top of the AI overviews?

Okay, so you know when you see—

Oh, it's not at the bottom anymore, it's at the top.

They're testing at the top. So they still have it at the bottom. So for— I know many of you guys are in different countries outside of the United States. With the AI overviews, imagine doing a search and it just giving you answers. So the search could be, What's the best place to hike in Los Angeles, California with a 5-year-old? All right, so then an AI overview will try to create a response for you and say, hey, here are the best places to hike and just give you an overview of it. And, you know, they also put it in links when it makes sense, but they typically put in links at the end of the response. So a link card could be like 3 small links, 3 different sites. where they gathered all the information from. But what they're testing now is you type in the question, they do like 2 or 3 link cards at the top, then they give you the response. And I'm curious to see what's going to happen with click-through rates, but I bet you it's going to increase click-through rates. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. Guys, this is where we'll end. Go to marketingschool.io/agency to learn more about the Agency Owners Association. Join before we start to jack up the price more and more. And the good thing is there's no contracts to it. And don't forget to rate, review, It helps us grow. Let us know what you think about this format. We put a lot of time and effort into this format, so we've been hearing great things, but give us more great things to hear. So that's it for today, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Thank you.