Why I Recommend My Clients To Expand From SEO To YouTube

YouTube can be an effective source of B2C or B2C customers, but most companies look at it through the wrong lens: a performance channel.

They are held back by the desire for companies to immediately push users away from YouTube content.

After helping dozens of businesses expand from SEO to YouTube, I’ve found that YouTube is the ideal channel for expansion once SEO has matured. But to do this successfully, companies face three key challenges: attribution, metrics, and conversion.

Overcoming those three challenges means you could unlock a new customer acquisition channel. Failure means a competitor could gain an advantage by moving to YouTube first, and you could miss out on a way to repurpose your SEO content.

Together, YouTube and SEO make a perfect pair, but only after you get up to speed on SEO. First, you want to cover your SEO bases: rank for critical branded and non-branded keywords and drive steady organic traffic and customer growth.

Premature expansion on YouTube means:

1. You spoil yourself too much.
2. Viewers might search, but they wouldn’t find you on Google.
3. You may not have enough data on which topics are driving business performance.

Once you gain traction or maturity in SEO, there are five strong reasons to invest in YouTube:

1. YouTube is the second largest search engine and the #1 podcast platform, with 75 billion people watching it every month.¹
2. YouTube is a critical source of quotations in Google AI Reviews and Answers in LLM chatbots.
3. YouTube stands out in search results as part of Google video carousel SERP feature.
4. YouTube can also send important traffic diversification signals to Google. For example, affiliate site GarageGymReviews is winning against its much larger competitor, Barbend, by using a multi-channel strategy.
5. B2B buyers watch YouTube, not just B2C buyers (note that 50% of B2B researchers are millennials):

Seventy percent of B2B buyers and researchers watch videos on their path to purchase. That’s a 52% jump in just two years. And it’s not just seeing the light.

According to US YouTube data, more than 895K hours of some of the best B2B brand videos were watched in 2014. Nearly half of these researchers watch 30 minutes or more of B2B-related videos during the research process, and nearly one in five watch over an hour of content. What caught their attention?

Product feature videos top the list, followed by how-tos and professional reviews.²

Bottom line: Chances are your audience is on YouTube, and visibility is positively impacting your sales funnel. The part that is often forgotten is how YouTube content can also increase your presence on PhDs and solidify your position on Google.

So how do you solve the problem of attribution, metrics and conversion?

The solution is to approach YouTube with a mindset of brand building rather than performance:

• Understand the inherent problem of attribution
• Focus on the right growth indicators
• Test different conversion tactics (examples included)

The problem of attribution

Most businesses want to measure the direct impact of YouTube, much like they do for SEO or advertising, to determine the impact of an action. This makes sense because you want to effectively prioritize your resources.

However, YouTube wants to keep users on the platform, which means that referral traffic from YouTube is extremely low.

I looked at two sites, one in B2C and one in B2B, and found that YouTube referral traffic was only 0.2% of the total traffic for both, even though they were generating vastly different amounts of total traffic.

The fact that two very different sites get the same relative amount of YouTube referral traffic says something.

A typical user journey is that users watch a bunch of videos and after a while often come directly to the website. Our telemetry cannot detect this. In short, YouTube attribution is not linear. it is sloppy.

The solution is a mix of post-purchase surveys and UTM parameters. Post-purchase surveys (PPS) ask post-purchase customers how they found a company. You can find tons of software on the web that can do this for you.

UTM parameters allow you to track clicks to specific videos, but require a structured approach: keep track of all the UTM parameters you use to mark CTAs for each video.

Do not forget, however, that CTA clicks on YouTube videos are much lower compared to other channels, because YouTube wants to keep users on the platform.

A true growth metric

Since YouTube is not a performance channel, it is very difficult to get internal buy-in without the right metrics.

As a leader, you want to make sure performance is measured properly so you can gauge whether or not your team is on track to make an impact.

But what are the real benchmarks if you can’t measure linear attribution?

The answer is a set of cascading metrics that work their way up the ladder to customers. You may know this example from SEO, where you have leading indicators such as impressions, rankings and clicks and lagging indicators such as conversions or revenue. The same goes for YouTube.

I call it the inverted pyramid of YouTube metrics. The main metrics I recommend are views, subscriptions, average watch time and CTA clicks.

Lagging indicators could be new clients or YouTube revenue – again – measured through self-attribution.

Ladders work because leaders can more easily track impact over time. When views grow, so should subscriptions and average watch time, but with a time lag.

The right conversion tactics

There aren’t many known benchmarks for what you can expect from YouTube as a channel. One reference I found is that Ahrefs and Surfer convert about 12% of leads and 10% of sales from YouTube, as measured by post-purchase attribution.³

YouTube is not a direct or linear conversion channel, but you can still increase your chances of increasing linear conversion.

The problem is that too many companies are very uncreative when it comes to converting viewers into customers on YouTube.

Here are some ideas:

1. Try to get viewers to watch your other videos instead of clicking through to your site for videos that don’t reflect strong purchase intent.
2. There are audio CTAs and text CTAs. Audibles are spoken or displayed in videos, as opposed to overlays or text in the video description. Experiment with both.
3. Encourage users to click the CTA with a lead magnet, such as a pdf template or calculator that they can download or use on your site.

The Big Picture: The Era of Big Swing

The challenge with expanding from SEO to YouTube fits into the bigger picture: linear cross-channel attribution is shrinking, so marketers must take bigger swings based on judgment, logic, and qualitative signals.

I see the same trend across many organic channels: Reddit, podcasting, social media, and YouTube as well. We all know they get a lot of attention, but the impact is hard to measure unless you advertise.

Why?

1. Privacy regulations such as GDPR or CCPA and ad blocking programs limit tracking.
2. Platforms like Google, YouTube or Meta share less data with marketers and use more black box algorithms.
3. Users use many devices to consume content.
4. More content is shared in closed messaging apps like WhatsApp or email.
5. Organic channels take a long time to show an effect (often six months or more) compared to advertising channels.

One thing companies can try to test is to advertise on the platforms first and then make the decision to create content for them. But beyond advertising, we’re back to an age where marketers have to take big swings to win.

But the biggest takeaway is that we need to take more big swings based on conviction, logic, and qualitative data. Welcome to the era of big swing.

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¹ 49 YouTube Stats 2024: Engagement, Views, Revenue (and More)

² The changing face of B2B marketing

³ Source

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Featured Image: Paul Poetry/Search Engine Journal