Does embedding YouTube videos help with SEO rankings?, Over-optimized SEO features associated with Google traffic declines, CMO tenure falls to lowest level in more than a decade, and AI will make marketing harder, not easier

0:00Alright, so the next one is, does embedding YouTube videos on your website affect me? Oh, you're picking mine. 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 a YouTube embed with Vimeo, the traffic dropped.

0:35right? 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.

1:08Here'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 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.

1:37I think that's really smart. And I think all of us doing this, 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 affects it more. Or 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.

2:09We haven't tested putting it at the bottom. I don't think we really put it at the bottom at all. But we do put it somewhere in the middle. So if we have a video on 10 SEO tactics to double your traffic, I'm making up a title. And strategy number one is how to do keyword research. We'll break down how to do keyword research. and we'll put in a video on keyword research from one of my YouTube pages. And then if the next task is 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.

2:45And 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 CMO. I think so this one's interesting to me over optimized SEO features associated with Google traffic decline so this tweets from Cyrus Shepard so these are the top over optimized SEO features we found associated with Google update traffic declines number one is anchor text variety so point three three seven I think that's out of like one 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.

3:27Clickbaity title tags actually has a higher score. So if your title tags are maybe misleading, or clickbaiting at the end of the day is misleading people. It's the same thing with YouTube. You can have clickbaity titles, and 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 when Google starts pulling stuff from your webpage and so did it in the search results, like reviews and ratings, like the stars. That's all coming from schema markup. Yeah, and I don't know if you know about that.

3:59You probably know about this one, but the number four 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 yet. 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.

4:29Waste 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.

5:01So 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 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.

5:33You 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.

6:21And that's what I mean, because when he's talking about clickbait, the real question is, 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 a peeling title and a meta description and the content more than delivers on that quote unquote aggressive title, 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.

6:54So 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 Alian, 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 slash agency.

7:23This 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 slash 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 tenor for a CMO is now? Less than two years. Less than two years. So a current advisory firm, Spencer Stewart, CMO's working for a top 100 advertiser. I have no idea. But this is from one of the popular ad websites, right? So CMO's working for a top 100 advertiser in the US had been in the role for roughly 39 months.

8:05So it's roughly 3.3-ish years. Oh, that's longer than I thought. That's still low. Depending on the organization's size, CEOs are seven plus years. Wow. Yeah. I mean, look, marketing is getting harder. A lot of CMOs I've seen, they've kind of, actually, I spoke with the CMO, the former CMO of Gong today, and he's actually in an evangelist role. So a lot of people, 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 it's very easy to blame the CMO. It's easy to blame your chief revenue officer and your chief marketing officer.

8:39spot 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.

9:05We're also auto optimizing, auto updating from 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, 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 have 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 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 want to talk to you about it has nothing to do with the tweet um 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 well other people are getting extra 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.

10:37I forgot his name, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

11:08You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today. at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school and make this black Friday one to remember. 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.

11:43You can't stand in the middle and, um, 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, you know, you'll get way more engagement, but it's also too dangerous because you have a pretty significant operation, um, at the same time. So, you know, you have to pick your spots to say what you want. Like we can say to each other, um, or you can say in a 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.

12:17Yeah. And funny enough, I was on a podcast today when 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 it's not actually cheaper to create a business anymore because if it's if it's easy to get a product out due to ai in the cloud what ends up happening is 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 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.

13:27They might take some off the table, but they're going to try to grow the company bigger. Everyone should read this. If you Google situational awareness AI, this guy that used to work at OpenAI, I think he wrote five or six 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 chat GPT 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.

14:04It'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 a thousand 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 a.m. for Neil right now, so he's starting to nod off. So I will take it from here, guys. It's like 3 or 4 a.m. for Neil right now. Yeah, dude, I'm feeling it. It's 2.41 exactly from where I was.

14:39See, 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. That's what it's called, right? But there's an argument that a lot of synthetic data is 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.

15:12Read 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 AI? Okay, so you know when you do a search? 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 I know many of you guys are in different countries outside the United States. With the AA overviews, imagine doing a search and it just giving you answers.

15:45So the search could be, what's the best place to hike in Los Angeles, California with a five-year-old? So then an AA 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 three small links three different sites where they gathered all the information from but what they're testing now is you type in the question they do like two or three 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.

16:27Oh, for sure. Yeah. Guys, this is where we'll end. Go to markingschool.io slash 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, subscribe. 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.

16:57Thank you.