YouTube is the stage, your site is the archive
YouTube is very good at putting a new video in front of people for a few days. After that, its job is mostly to recommend whatever comes next, which is often someone else's video.
A page on your website works the other way round. It doesn't get a launch-week spike, but it stays put. Someone searching for "how to cut dovetails by hand" in two years can land on your page, watch your video and see the rest of your work, with no other channel's thumbnail beside it.
You don't have to choose between the two. ShowHub makes the website pages from your channel, so you keep uploading to YouTube exactly as you do now.
What each page has
- The YouTube player. Plays count on your channel, the same as any embedded YouTube video.
- Your title and description, pulled from YouTube.
- The transcript (Pro). Built from your YouTube captions where they exist, created automatically where they don't. This is the part that gives a video page real text for search engines.
- Chapters, when your source provides them.
- Video structured data. Code that tells search engines this page contains a video, with its title, thumbnail and description, which is what search engines use to show videos in their results.
- Links to your other videos, so visitors keep watching on your site.
Video podcasts
If you put full episodes on YouTube and also publish the audio to podcast apps, connect both your channel and your podcast feed. ShowHub matches videos to audio episodes by comparing titles, dates and lengths, then shows both on one page. Visitors can watch, or switch to audio-only, on the same page.
This also keeps your site from having two half-empty pages for the same conversation.
Getting more from the pages
A few YouTube habits make the website pages better too:
- Write descriptions like show notes. A paragraph on what the video covers, then specifics. The first two lines of a YouTube description are all most people read on YouTube, but the whole description appears on your page.
- Turn on captions or upload your own. Accurate captions make accurate transcripts.
- Name videos for what they teach. "Dovetails by hand, no jigs" will be found. "Shop day #84" won't.
Your own address
On Starter your pages live at a showhubco.com address. On Pro you can use your own domain, like woodshopwithdev.com, so every page builds up search value for a site you own. Add that link to your YouTube channel's links section so viewers can find it.