How To Use YouTube Backlinks To Boost Your SEO Strategy & The Best Tool to Help
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Sending YouTube backlinks to your online business can help raise the profile of your website and - more importantly - keep the increasingly fussy Google Gods happy.
You’re probably aware that YouTube is a subsidiary of Google. Like Google, YouTube strives to provide users with the best possible experience, giving them access to relevant, high-quality content.
Videos are great for marketing and valuable for SEO, making it easier to understand concepts, arguments, products, and strategies.
They’re also entertaining, easier to consume, and stimulate emotive engagement. Best of all, they linger longer in viewers’ memories, ultimately having a monumental impact on your brand.
And using YouTube backlinks as part of your SEO strategy to ensure your content ranks highly on the SERPs is a savvy approach. In this post we’ll explore how the varying types of YouTube backlinks work and how you can use them to your website’s benefit.
In a hurry?
We recommend you use the tool TubeBuddy to optimize your YouTube so you'll get more views and subscribers clicking through to your site!
Contents
Understanding How YouTube Backlinks Work
Let’s look at some pretty eye opening stats:
- 62% of US-based users access YouTube daily, and the global user count tops 2.9 billion. YouTube is now the second-largest search engine in the world, handling three billion searches per month.
- Additionally, over 40% of YouTube viewers take some kind of action after watching a video ad.
- YouTube’s traffic and daily activity have soared, with 65% of people saying they learn best via visual perception.
It helps to start by knowing what backlinks are to understand how they work.
Are YouTube backlinks the same as other backlinks? The truth is that they're somewhat similar but they are also distinctly nuanced. We'll show you why here.
What Are Backlinks in Simple Terms?
- Your website, blog, or social media platform earns a backlink when a website or online publisher puts a hyperlink pointing their users to yours.
- Google and other search engines trust your website more and rank it higher on SERPs when multiple publishers hyperlink to your website.
- Backlinks from high-authority publishers earn more trust from search engines than low-authority backlinks.
- It doesn’t hurt to have a mix, and more is always merrier as long as the backlinks don’t come from irrelevant and spammy sources.
How Do YouTube Backlinks Work?
- Backlinks from YouTube, which may be dofollow or nofollow, are links that point to your website.
- User profiles, custom links, video descriptions, comments, cards, and end screens may all contain YouTube backlinks.
Why Use YouTube as Part of Your Backlink Strategy?
Users watch over five billion videos on YouTube daily and use keywords to find content that interests them. Using YouTube as part of your backlink strategy could be the move that tilts the SEO game in your favor.
What advantages come from using YouTube to gain backlinks?
1. Connect with New Audiences
The YouTube user base is noticeably different from other audiences on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and more. Your blog could benefit significantly by accessing the audience on YouTube that’s alien to your brand.
Every business and blog is always looking to access new audiences to expand its market share, influence, and profitability.
Why would you ignore such a ripe opportunity that the other 95% aren’t leveraging? (An incredible 95% of pages online have no backlinks pointing to them!)
2. Diversify Your Marketing
Diversifying your marketing mix is the trick to growing your blog or brand to its maximum potential. It’s more difficult to achieve your objectives when you have all your eggs in one basket.
Suppose you get banned from Google or Facebook, or they change their algorithms in a way that significantly reduces your traffic.
At the time of writing (October 2022), Google has rolled out yet another major update. This is one of several they’ve pushed out in 2022 - much to the dismay of SEOs worldwide.
With this in mind, you’ll be glad you diversified your marketing mix and didn’t depend on just one or two methods.
3. Enhance Your SEO
The whole point of using backlinks is to improve your SEO so that you rank higher on SERPs.
When you use YouTube as part of your backlink strategy, you give your website a better chance to sing and dance on page 1 of Google. As we mentioned, Google owns YouTube, and it’s in its best interest to ensure its properties rank highly on its search engine.
It’s one of the many factors that give YouTube backlinks an edge over other types of backlinks.
4. Get More Leads and Sales
One of the main reasons you market your business is to get more leads that could become customers or clients. If you’re not making more sales, then something is amiss, and you need to change your marketing strategy.
YouTube backlinks to your website give you an opportunity to get in front of a new audience that could turn into leads and sales for your business.
5. Build Brand Awareness and Equity
When you use YouTube as part of your backlink strategy, you get an opportunity to increase your brand’s awareness. The more people see your brand, the more they become familiar with it, and the more likely they are to buy from you. It all adds to your site’s social proofing.
6. It’s Easier than Other Types of Backlinks
Of all the types of backlinks, YouTube backlinks are perhaps the easiest to get. You don’t need to be an expert in SEO or copywriting to get quality backlinks from YouTube.
To increase your chances of getting a backlink, ensure your videos are high-quality, informative, and entertaining.
Important tip: Include a link to your website or blog in the video description.
7. Increase Your Brand Value and Credibility
It helps increase your brand value and credibility when you use YouTube as part of your backlink strategy. The more credible your brand is, the easier it is to convert leads into customers.
Credibility is essential for any business that wants to succeed in the long run. It’s what sets you apart from the fly-by-night businesses that are always looking for a quick buck.
What Are the Different Kinds of YouTube Backlinks?
Just like people and landscapes, YouTube backlinks are not equal and come in different shapes and sizes. There are many ways of categorizing YouTube backlinks, depending on how a channel publishes them on the platform.
The most common distinction of backlinks is the dofollow vs nofollow backlinks debate.
Dofollow vs Nofollow YouTube Backlinks: What’s the Difference?
Before we start, let’s agree that dofollow backlinks are much better than nofollow backlinks, but it’s worth pursuing both link types to gain exposure and traffic from YouTube. Okay, let’s get into it.
Dofollow backlinks
These hyperlinks are not restricted by Google and other search engines. When a dofollow link is given, the link passes on what’s called 'link juice,' the ranking power that helps improve the target site’s position in SERPs.
Nofollow backlinks
Nofollow links are those that have been restricted by Google. These links don’t pass on link juice, which means they can’t help improve the target site’s position in SERPs.
Dofollow vs. Nofollow backlinks: Which is better?
It’s simple. Dofollow links are much better than nofollow links because they help improve the target site’s position in SERPs. It can result in increased traffic, leads, sales, and revenue for the site.
Nofollow links, on the other hand, don’t help the target site’s ranking or have any SEO benefits.
They can, however, still bring traffic to the site.
So, which type of backlink should you pursue?
Both! While dofollow links are better for improving your site’s ranking, nofollow links can still bring traffic to your site.
Additionally, if all your backlinks are only dofollow it could trigger a manual check by Google. This is something all sites should very much avoid.
So, it’s worth pursuing both link types to both gain exposure and traffic from YouTube and keep in Google’s good books.
Where Can I Place DoFollow YouTube Backlinks?
Dofollow YouTube links are intentional, and you can place them in four prime areas, including:
- Video card links
- Channel custom links
- Video end-screen links
- Channel profile links
Your channel profile is the most prominent display area on your YouTube platform, and it consolidates all your videos and shorts. It features on your about page and allows you to post several links to your website and other social media profiles.
Custom links all come from your channel profile links, but YouTube displays them as icons on the channel banner. In contrast, card links are only available to channels in the YouTube partnership program.
How Do I Use My YouTube Channel to Get Backlinks to My Website?
Having a YouTube Channel or multiple channels for varying brand goals is worth it if you’re trying to rank your blog or eCommerce site on Google and other search engines.
You can have multiple backlinks for your site by actively leveraging YouTube for super helpful SEO juice.
Compelling video material captures audiences more than text only. Thus, a YouTube channel is an effective way to harness the power of social proof and social shares.
So, how do you use your YouTube channel to get backlinks for your website? Let’s go over potential opportunities on which to maximize.
1. Optimize Your Channel Profile
You can earn your website pretty awesome dofollow YouTube backlinks even before you publish your first YouTube video lithesome of these tips:
- Create a YouTube channel for your blog and spot-check to ensure there’s brand consistency across multimedia and social media platforms.
- Align your channel name with keywords that go with your blog.
- Keyword research goes a long way if you do it even before selecting a name for your channel, and it helps curate an effective content strategy.
Optimize your channel name for YouTube’s search engine. That way, the profile backlinks you place for your website get maximum exposure.
Example: The Food Ranger on YouTube has “food” in his channel’s name. His audience gets what the channel is about and so do Google’s web crawlers.
You can easily place multiple dofollow YouTube profile backlinks by editing the about section of your YouTube channel. That means that you can use one channel to backlink to multiple websites as long as they’re relevant.
And you can optimize your channel in all sorts of ways using TubeBuddy. So, what is TubeBuddy?
Since late 2014, TubeBuddy has given YouTubers the resources they need to expand their channels.
In essence, TubeBuddy is a free chrome extension and authorized YouTube SEO tool for your YouTube dashboard. Once installed, your dashboard will be completely upgraded with a truck load of new features like keyword research and productivity tools to boost your video SEO.
Think of it as the Ahrefs of the YouTube creator world.
2. Use Custom Links
It's another way of bagging the coveted dofollow backlinks every website needs for better SERPs.
You can add as many links as you desire on the custom links section, but only the top link and another one you choose will be dofollow.
Don’t get distracted by this generosity, as you may place your main link lower than other non-priority links.
Important to remember: Your main link should always top the other custom links you want to publish on this YouTube section.
For example, there are four custom links on the Food Ranger’s channel below. In order, his:
- Website
- Patreon
The channel has multiple custom links, but only the one pointing to his website - The Food Ranger Blog - is a dofollow, and the rest are nofollow links pointing to social media channels.
3. Create Personal and Brand Channels
You can enrich your collection of dofollow YouTube backlinks by creating multiple specialized channels.
For instance, having a personal blog allows you to create friendly and personable content that connects with friends and family while earning your website some SEO juices.
Example:
Psycho Traveller is a channel built by travel vlogger Alyshia Ford.
But Alyshia also has a more personal channel that focuses on all things non-travel, her day-to-day life, how she tries to keep her mental health as robust as possible, and more.
Important to remember: A brand channel adds to the menu and demands a more professional tone. It allows you to connect with strangers for business purposes, completely detached from personal bias.
4. Create Interesting and Valuable Video Content
A key statistic to keep in mind during this whole process: videos are the most shareable content on the internet and have an impressively massive reach.
Always develop a consistent content strategy after comprehensively analyzing your keyword research. You want your content to attract and appeal to the right kind of audience, and not folks who’ll find your niche irrelevant or dislike it.
- Every video you publish on your channel gives you a unique opportunity to embed multiple nofollow backlinks to your website.
- The video description section allows up to 800 words to summarize the entire video.
- Video descriptions are priceless for optimizing your SERPs on YouTube engines. It’s the best place to maximize your keyword research and #hashtag game.
- Using the keywords on your website as hashtags on your YourTube content makes it easier for your target audience to find it across multiple platforms.
- Blend your channel video lengths for healthy algorithm diversity. Short videos help to catch attention and are best for promoting other products or videos. They’re also effective for maintaining brands on the trending side of social media.
But ultimately it’s long-form YouTube content that offers the most value. They’re more educational than they are salesy, but educational content helps to drive long-term sales.
5. Leverage YouTube Cards for Backlinks
What are YouTube cards? Well, they’re call-to-action buttons you can click on a YouTube video redirecting you to some other videos.
While using this strategy doesn’t directly link to your website, it increases the reach of videos with your website backlinks.
There are a few different types of cards:
- Channel cards
- Subscribe cards
- Playlist cards
- Video cards
- Link cards
In terms of SEO juice, we should be most interested in Link cards.
This YouTube card lets members of the YouTube Partner Program link to another website.
YouTubers with a loyal following may wish to direct visitors to both their sponsored partners and affiliate marketing possibilities. Similarly, businesses might want to direct visitors to their shopping basket or their website featuring their goods and services.
6. Leverage YouTube Video End Screens
YouTube end screens are a fantastic way of driving more clicks to your website by placing links as part of an end screen template.
End screens appear at the end of a video and feature multiple elements displayed in a tiled format. You can include up to four elements, and they can be any of the following:
- A subscribe button
- Links to other videos
- A call-to-action (CTA) overlay
- A link to your website or channel
Frequently Asked Questions about YouTube Links
Do Backlinks from My YouTube Channel to My Website Increase My DR Rating?
Yes, backlinks from your YouTube channel to your website increase your DR rating, but not as directly as you may think. Search engines consider many hinging and compounding factors when assigning domain rank.
How Does Your YouTube Channel Help Your Website Get Found On Google?
The goal is to improve your website’s authority by convincing Google that your site is trustworthy. Backlinks from your YouTube channel indicate you’re not some spammy bridge page.
YouTube backlinks shared by other creators also indicate video publishers find your work valuable enough to share with their hard-earned audiences.
Can I Use My YouTube Channel to Build a Mailing List?
Yes, but you’ll need a deliberate strategy to build a mailing list from your YouTube channel.
Using YouTube backlinks to redirect your YouTube audience to your website is the most efficient way to do it, as websites are better at collecting email contacts from visitors.
Final Thoughts
We’ve determined YouTube backlinks are priceless for any SEO or general marketing strategy. These backlinks generate trust from search engines and also increase your website’s audience reach.
We’ve also explained the different types of YouTube backlinks and how to earn them.
Still not convinced? See how this YouTuber makes $40K per month with YouTube affiliate marketing.
And we're sure you've heard of Miles Beckler in recent years too (we had an in depth chat with him back in 2020). He's leveraged the attention of his 200k YouTube subscribers by subtly pointing them towards his courses and website on his channel's custom links section.
The end result - before he slowed down his YouTube output - was an incredible one million dollars in income.
Bottom line: You should always take advantage of the massive opportunities that YouTube backlinks present to grow your website and brand.
Make use of TubeBuddy to to grow your channel.
And as always, best of luck on the SERPs.
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