Best YouTube SEO Channel and 1 Million Views on TikTok With Craig Campbell & Ryan Darani

What happens when you put two brilliant SEO minds together? You get a healthy mix of inside jokes, friendly banter, and invaluable SEO advice.

This AMA features Craig Campbell, the man behind the best SEO YouTube channel and the #1 most influential SEO of 2020, and Ryan Darani, former SEO lead at Zazzle, now a freelance SEO consultant rumored to be the best-looking SEO expert.

In this AMA, we talked to Craig and Ryan about YouTube SEO, content promotion strategies, hiring writers, and more. 

YouTube SEO

Q: What are the steps you took to grow your YT channel to 65,000 subscribers?

Craig: Consistency is key, a lot of people don’t realise i posted 400+ videos in year one, that’s more than a video a day. I also gave away 3 courses so I could get people onto the course or into the funnel. It was hard work, alongside youtube ads and using my website and social following to get to those numbers. But consistency and keeping the quality up can be difficult. But you gotta put in the time, it’s not as easy as it looks

Q: Craig what are the biggest changes and challenges you anticipate to YouTube SEO in the near future?

Ryan: I won’t speak on Craig Campbell’s behalf. But I definitely think it’ll have something to do with the algorithm no longer being able to understand his deep Glaswegian accent and thus, no longer offer automatic subtitles for his fans. Resulting in a sharp decline in subs.

Craig: Trying to get more subscribers is difficult, people watch but rarely subscribe and engage, and with a system that relies on engagement to rank well that does prove to be a bit of a problem. As more people like to remain off radar, so as someone who creates content that becomes a bit of a pain, hopefully they give less weight to the engagement and more to other things.

Q: Craig, some people say you have a voice made for the newspaper. How did you overcome your accent to become the biggest SEO influencer on YouTube?

Craig: Haha, you simply have to adapt and try and turn it down. My accent is still strong as hell but if people keep complaining they can’t understand then it’s on me to somehow change that around and make sure that people can understand me. 

If they can’t, then they will go somewhere else, but i also try to make sure i give more away than the average joe, so content wise they have to come back.

Q: What are you using for comments on YouTube?

Ryan: Real people. I’d start by building an audience. It could take months/years to get a decently-sized audience. Put content out consistently + distribute it – you’ll build people up that way.

Hiring Content Writers

Q: How do you know your content writer is good and you can work with him/her for a long time? I’ve found that some writers who create amazing articles eventually start outsourcing the work to cheap writers. 

Ryan: It’s a risk that everyone takes. There isn’t a sure-fire way to make sure that somebody is going to be reliable for the long-term. It’s the same with hiring full-time employees in any business. One way to avoid losing the quality of your content over time is to introduce an SLA (service level agreement). Bake in what you expect, quality assurance, etc. 

Craig: This always happens with content writers especially when outsourcing. WIth all the agreements in the world this still happens, so i rely on a number of writers, and simply get rid of anyone who doesn’t perform and replace them. Don’t let them have you relying on them is the key.

Content Promotion

Q: How do you promote a blog? How do you get big players to share your content?

Ryan: Promote your blog without being a spammer. Paid social traffic, build an email list, find where your audience hangs out and promote it there as a useful resource.

Regarding the big players, what works best is ego bait and having astounding levels of value in your content. Big players aren’t going to risk their reputation for mediocre content.

Craig: Ego bait for big players works very well, but as Ryan stated, paid social, email list, push notifications, facebook groups and wherever the audience hangs out is where you want to promote your blog.

Ecommerce and SEO

Q: Ryan, how much lift can e-commerce owners generate by retargeting their organic SEO traffic?

Ryan: Hard to put a number on it. It can vary depending on the product cost/type of audience. All I know is, if you don’t do it, you’re missing out on additional revenue and you have a leak in your sales funnel.

General SEO Advice

Q: What’s the end-goal for every SEO?

Craig: Diversify your income streams, take advantage of the opportunities you have to make that happen.

Ryan: To stop working with clients, sell their business, generate passive income and move to Chiang Mai with Nick Jordan.

Q: What is your buying criteria for expired domains? Is it possible to buy something that doesn’t have a completely clean history and disavow the bad links or is that a waste of time?

Craig: There is no 100% way to say for certain, but yeah you can clean domains and run with them for sure and that can work. But will they ever work 100% that is debatable. Personally I’d rather avoid that risk and go for something fairly clean that has had no penalty. I personally think they work better so i stick to that

Ryan’s Approach to SEO

Q: Ryan, can you tell us about your biggest wins in SEO and your approach?

Ryan: Absolutely. I’m unable to mention the clients directly due to NDAs (boo) but my most notable win was being able to generate an additional £1m in revenue for an online retailer. Using strictly technical SEO fixes. It took around 3 months to get the fix implemented and a further 8 months to generate the additional £1m.

I’ve worked with banks, sports teams, insurance providers, designer brands, etc. It’s always been the same no matter how I look at it.

My approach to SEO is simple and similar to yours: focus on where you can consistently grow the site for the next 12 months. Minimum. This depends on budget and it’s where people go wrong. They try to spread themselves too thinly and end up with little-to-no traction.

New sites take a lot more work to get that momentum going. So I’d focus on establishing yourself as an authority as soon as possible. That means scoping out a solid content strategy that will cover you for the next quarter + how you plan to distribute it to get traffic into the site. This is on the basis your site is technically built for expansion and has no underlying indexing/crawling issues.

More established sites are about cutting the shit and fine-tuning. Old sites naturally accrue problems: whether technical or outdated content. It happens. Spend your time fixing the issues that’ll give you the most return quickly. In enterprise businesses, everything has a dev queue and a chain of command. So fixes don’t happen quickly (typically). 

For example, eCommerce sites will normally have some kind of index bloat or duplicate content issue being caused by a CMS or faceted navigation. Cleaning up wasteful pages and tightening up where crawlers spend their time, engagement happens and, where links are picked up and it’ll see a positive ROI.

Craig’s “Rise to Infamy”

Q: What are your biggest SEO accomplishments? I’ve watched a lot of your content but I don’t know the story about your rise to infamy. What are the deets?!

Craig: In short, been a freelancer, built up a successful agency, but hated managing staff and working with clients and focussed more on the affiliate side of things. 

Nothing majorly exciting, ran the agency for 9 years, had 17 staff turned over a lot of money but didn’t make a lot of profit as my processes and system wasn’t right and i learnt a lot doing it the wrong way, so now i have a much more refined team and make some money these days.

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