Having a YouTube Channel for your business or organization is almost a no-brainer. It’s a great way to archive and share your video content, as well as interact with a huge network of users. But is it ever a good idea to have more than one YouTube Channel for your brand?
The answer is: maybe.
Two Bad Examples
Let’s say you’re a non-profit with three videos: an overview video that explains the charity, a fundraising video and a volunteer recruitment video. What you don’t want to do is create a separate channel for each. You’ll fragment your audience, giving each channel less authority.
Let’s say you’re an auto dealership with three physical locations, and a lot of really nice videos. What you don’t want to do is create a channel for each location, and add the same videos to each. This would definitely represent duplicate content, running you the risk of being penalized by Google.
One Good Example
One company that makes an appropriate (and incredibly effective) use of multiple YouTube Channels is Toyota. In addition to having their mothership branded channel at YouTube.com/Toyota (which is apparently a German-centric channel), they have other branded channels for other geographic regions and individual product lines.
Channels like YouTube.com/ToyotaUKTV and YouTube.com/ToyotaUSA allow viewers in those regions to see the vehicles available to them.
On YouTube.com/Sienna, Toyota showcases their highly successful and entertaining Sienna Family mini-series. Here’s an awesome example of how this content would have been lost amongst one enormous Toyota channel. Having a short link to just Sienna content allows Toyota to send a very clear call-to-action on all of their Sienna commercials.
The most important aspect of this multi-channel strategy is that no content is duplicated across any channel. In other words, every channel has a unique set of videos that is tailored to the audience that it is promoted to. In addition, the volume of videos produced demands that they be segmented.
For a smaller company with less video, but strong topical distinction between those videos, the best way to segment them is by utilizing YouTube playlists.
In the Ask An SEO Expert video below, I’ll illustrate a fictional example of when it might be a good idea to create multiple YouTube Channels for one organization:
Transcript:
Today’s question comes from Katie, and she wants to know if having more than one YouTube channel can affect your SEO. The answer to that question is, maybe.
So, if you’re a big enterprise brand, you might want to create multiple YouTube channels for each of your smaller sub-brands.
As an example, a GM might want to create several different YouTube channels for each of their different car brands. They may have a Chevy YouTube channel, they may have a Cadillac channel, and they may also have a Buick channel, as an example. Then for each channel, they’ll only have videos about Chevy on one, videos about Cadillac on one, and videos about Buick on another.
It’s a bad idea to have, for example, three Chevy channels or three Cadillac channels, and having the same kinds of videos across three YouTube channels. It’s definitely a bad idea to put the same video across more than one channel. YouTube may see that as duplicate content, and plus you’re kind of cannibalizing your videos by doing that. You’re splitting up all of your analytics. It’s just a bad idea in general.
What’s a good idea for maybe a small or a mid-market sized company is to definitely just have your one core channel, and split your videos up into playlists. Users really like that. So, if you have maybe customer testimonial videos, you could have those in one playlist. If you have product demos, put those in one playlist.
Just sort them that way, and then users can easily find your content and you’re not splitting it up across channels or even duplicating your content. Definitely fill out your titles, your video descriptions, and fill out all those keywords. One of the best things you can do for video SEO is to transcribe your videos. That’s a big thing to do for sure. So, I hope that answers your question, Katie. Good luck with YouTube!
Steven Shattuck
@stevenshattuck
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Tags: SEO, Video, Video SEO, YouTube, YouTube Channels
