How to Increase Website Traffic From YouTube With Social Media SEO

Google has started showing which search queries lead people to your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube posts. It launched platform properties in Search Console in July 2026, a reporting view built for social and video rather than websites. The rollout is gradual, so you connect each account and the clicks, impressions and search terms start landing in your dashboard.

When it reaches your account, that report will make thin reading for a lot of businesses. Their profiles were built for people who already follow them, and search traffic was never part of the design.

What social media SEO is, and how it differs from posting

Social media SEO is the work that makes your profiles and posts findable in search, posting is a separate job.

Most businesses treat social as a publishing function. You plan a calendar, make the content, schedule it, check the likes on Monday. That work is a great starting point, but it leaves discoverability and potential customers on the table.

Publishing mainly reaches the people who already follow you. Everyone else has to find you, a little bit more work on what words to write in captions, titles and bios can be just as useful as how you planned or filmed the content.

The six things that decide whether people find you

Six inputs decide whether a platform surfaces you, and none of them takes longer than an afternoon to fix.

1. Your handle, display name and bio

These are indexable text. If your bio reads “Crafting moments” and your customers search “wedding photographer Perth”, you’ve given the platform nothing to match against.

Use the display name field for the category you want to be found for, alongside the business name. “Hendricks Studio” on its own gives a search engine nothing to work with. Add “| Wedding Photographer Perth” and you’ve handed it two terms while still reading like a brand.

Your bio then carries the specifics: what you do, where you do it, who for. Keep the same link across every platform so the profiles connect back to one website.

2. The words you use, and where you put them

In our experience the same person phrases things differently in a social search box than in Google. They’ll type “knockdown rebuild cost perth” into Google, then something closer to “how much to knock down and rebuild a house” into TikTok.

Doing SEO for social media means translating your existing keyword list into that spoken phrasing rather than pasting it across. Your website terms are the starting point.

Those phrases then need to appear where platforms can read them: captions, on-screen text, alt text, video titles and descriptions. Alt text is the one most businesses skip, and it takes about 5 seconds per post.

3. Consistency across every platform

This is where many businesses leak. Same name, same handle wherever you can claim it, same link, same description of what you do.

When your profiles agree with each other and with your website, a search engine can work out they’re all the same business. Inconsistency forces it to guess, and it will sometimes guess wrong.

The common failures are boring and cheap to fix:

• An old handle on one platform and a trading name on another
• A Linktree on three profiles and a homepage on the rest
• An address matching your Google Business Profile in one place and a previous office somewhere else

4. Saves and shares, not just likes

Engagement depth counts for more than volume. A save or a DM share tells the platform someone found your content worth keeping.

This changes what you make. A post designed to be saved has to be worth returning to. Think a price range, a checklist, a comparison, or a process explained properly.

5. Content that answers the question

Someone who arrives from a search box came with a question. Say they search “how much does a knockdown rebuild cost in Perth”. If your post gestures at the idea without answering it, the discovery was wasted.

Answer the question in the first two lines or the first few seconds, then expand. Search traffic has no patience for a build-up, because the viewer has not chosen you yet.

6. A next step that exists

Your CTA decides what happens after someone finds you. A profile that surfaces in search and offers no obvious step forward turns the visit into nothing.

Match the step to the intent. Someone who found you through a cost question wants a price guide or a quote form rather than a newsletter signup.

How to optimise a YouTube channel for search

YouTube is where this work pays fastest, because the content is already built to be searched and it’s a part of Google’s network.

Video keeps working long after the upload date, so an optimisation applied today also applies to everything you published two years ago. Most channels have a back catalogue titled for subscribers rather than searchers, that back catalogue is free inventory.

Titles

Use the phrase people search, and put it near the front. An electrician’s video called “Job of the Week: Switchboard Upgrade in Innaloo” is written for people who already follow the channel. Retitle it “Switchboard Upgrade Cost in Perth: What You’ll Pay and Why” and it starts answering the thing someone typed.

Descriptions

The first two lines show in search results, so they carry the summary and the phrase you want to rank for. Below that, give the specifics: what the video covers, the location, the price bracket, and a link back to the relevant page on your site.

Chapters and captions

Timestamped chapters break a long video into labelled segments, which helps the viewer and the systems reading your content. A walkthrough with labelled chapters turns one video into a set of answerable questions.

Captions matter for the same reason. Auto-generated captions handle Australian accents and suburb names imperfectly, and correcting them cleans up the text your video is understood by.

Thumbnails and on-screen text

Thumbnails drive whether anyone clicks once you do surface. On-screen text reinforces the topic and holds people past the first few seconds, and retention is the thing we see moving rankings most reliably.

Playlists

Group videos by the question they answer rather than by upload date. A playlist called “Switchboard upgrades, start to finish” gathers one topic in one place. That keeps a searcher moving through your content instead of back to results.

How we grew Easystart’s YouTube traffic 14x

We rebuilt a Perth home builder’s YouTube channel around search. Traffic to their website went up roughly 14 times.

Cam on our SEO team rebuilt the Easystart Homes channel for discovery following the steps outlined above. He aligned titles, descriptions, on-screen text and metadata to what people search while weighing up building a home in Perth.

Titles were rewritten around what people search rather than who appears in the video. Tags went from none at all to a full set covering the design name, the buyer type and the suburb. Chapters were added, pinned comments were written, and the filler words were stripped out of the transcripts.

For example Karin’s video was titled “Karin’s Story of Building with Easystart Homes“. It now reads “Karin | From Renting to Homeowner | Building Your First Home in Perth with Easystart Homes“.

Descriptions grew from a short paragraph into something that names the home design, the location and the guarantees. Each one links through to the page that answers the next question. More context, more information and more evidence about what the video is about or who it’s for.

An engaged view is YouTube’s term for a viewer who stayed long enough to count as attention rather than a scroll-past. Monthly engaged views went from 8.9K in April to 40.6K in May, then held at 36.4K through June. Page views arriving at the Easystart website from YouTube went from roughly 9 a day to roughly 124.

How to check where you stand right now

Six checks, about twenty minutes, and only the last one needs a tool.

1. Search your main category plus your suburb in the Instagram, TikTok and YouTube search boxes. If you don’t appear on the first screen, your profile isn’t set up to be found for the thing you sell.
2. Open your profiles side by side and compare the handle, display name, link and description. Note every place they disagree.
3. Read your bio as though you’ve never heard of your business. Work out whether it says what you sell and where, or whether it says something about how you feel about your work.
4. Look at your last ten posts and count how many have alt text. Then check whether any caption contains a phrase someone would type into a search box.
5. Open your best-performing organic post from the last year. Ask whether someone searching that topic today would find it, or whether it worked because it went out to your followers on a good day.
6. If platform properties has reached your Search Console account, connect your channels and open the queries report. The terms already bringing people to your posts tell you what you’re known for. The distance between those and the ones you want is the work.

Anything failing those checks is a gap, and gaps are the cheapest work in SEO because the content already exists.

Where to start, depending on your business

Audit before you optimise. The right order depends on your business.

If you’re a local services business, start with your Google Business Profile and the consistency between it and your social profiles. Nothing you do on social will outperform being correctly identified as the business you are.

Selling to consumers under 35 puts in-platform search on Instagram and TikTok first. That audience runs product research inside the apps before a search engine gets a look. Captions, on-screen text and alt text come before anything else.

For B2B with a long sales cycle, LinkedIn and YouTube is your best bang for buck, and your main job is depth. Your profile has to make sense to someone who’s already heard your name from a colleague.

And if you’ve got video sitting on a channel nobody optimised, start there. It’s usually the widest gap between effort already spent and value currently returned.

We open every engagement with a cross-channel audit because these answers change per client.

Who should own this work

Social media SEO is search work on a different surface. It belongs with the people who do search.

Google has shipped this three times since December. Social channels arrived in Search Console Insights, generative AI performance reports followed in June 2026, and platform properties landed this month. Your social content is part of your search footprint.

AI search makes it urgent. AI Mode is Google’s conversational search experience. Ask it or ChatGPT for a business like yours, and the answer gets built from what those systems can find about you. Your social profiles are part of that picture, whether or not you’ve optimised them.

Instagram content has been showing up in Google’s results for a while now, and AI SEO works on the same principle.

In most businesses, social sits with the social team, search sits with the SEO team, and social media SEO sits with no one. The social team optimises the feed and the SEO team optimises the website, which leaves nobody owning your Instagram profile’s visibility in Google.

The skills barely overlap. Someone who understands search intent won’t necessarily know how a platform weights a save, and the reverse holds just as often. If your social media marketing and your SEO run through different agencies, assume this is falling through the crack. That’s usually where we find it.

What to do next

The businesses getting found on social have built accounts that answer a search. That work sits between your social team and your SEO team, which is why it tends not to get done.

Run the six checks above first. If they turn up more gaps than you want to work through, that’s what our social media SEO audit is for. Let’s talk.

Ryan Wilson

Marketing Team Lead