Empowering Your YouTube SEO: Make it a Team Effort

It’s essential that you have YouTube marketing as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Like everything else, the list of “best practices” is steadily getting longer. It’s almost impossible to put forth a full effort unless you have team members collaborating on your YouTube channel, whether it’s videographers to make the video, content creators to write and optimize descriptions and titles, or SEO assistants to take care of details like tags, captions, end screens, cards, and so forth. Don’t fall into the trap of handing out your credentials to team members. Not when there’s a much better alternative: add members of your team to your YouTube channel as managers. In this video we should you how you need to be set up, and then how to do it.

Video Transcription

Hi, I’m Ross Barefoot with Horizon Web Marketing and the Horizon Web Marketing Academy. Are you trying to manage and promote your own YouTube channel? If you are, especially if you’re doing it for a business or an organization, you probably need some help. It might be another member of your team, an employee, maybe an agency partner. Whoever it is, how can you grant access without sharing your own personal YouTube login information? There is a way, and I’m going to show you how to do it, coming right up.

So the first step in this process is going to be to log into YouTube. Now the most difficult part of figuring out how to add someone to YouTube is going to be figuring out whether or not you have something called a brand channel. And typically when you set up a YouTube channel, especially if it’s an older YouTube channel, YouTube might’ve set it up under your own personal identity or you may have set it up and tied it into your organization’s brand. And that’s going to govern whether or not you can add somebody as a manager on your YouTube account. If you have a YouTube account where the channel is just under your own personal name, you’re not going to be able to add somebody else as a manager unless you tie it into a brand channel. Now, the point of this video is not to show you how to tie your channel to a brand channel.

Identifying Whether You Have a YouTube Brand Channel

For right now, we’re just going to show you how to identify whether you have a brand associated with your YouTube channel. So here I am, I’m at the YouTube login screen. The first thing that I’m going to do is I’m going to log in just with my personal identity to YouTube. All right. Now as I log in, because under my login I do manage a number of different YouTube channels, YouTube recognizes this and it’s going to ask me whether I want to log in with one of the other identities, with one of the other brand identities that I have associated with my account. In this case, I want to just illustrate to you what it looks like if you don’t have a brand channel. So I’m going to just use my own personal identity, and I don’t really use this, I don’t promote my own personal YouTube channel.

So basically it’ll just come up and it’ll look like this. And the first step that I want to do is go up to the top right, click on the little round circle, and then notice how it’ll give me a number of choices here. And one of those choices is YouTube Studio beta. Depending on how you’ve been using YouTube, it might say Creator Studio. Right now as of summer of 2019, YouTube is in this long-drawn, multi year process of switching over from their original management suite called Creator Studio over to their new management tool, which is called YouTube Studio. Let’s go ahead and select YouTube Studio, and I’ll show you basically, and you can’t still do everything on YouTube Studio that you could in Creator studio. And so Google gives you down here at the lower left an option, Creator Studio classic. And then you can go into Creator Studio Classic.

Right now you can’t do what I’m about to show you in YouTube Studio. So you’re going to have to switch back to Creator Studio Classic. If you’re viewing this a year from now, like in 2020 or 2021, might’ve switched a little bit, but bare with me on this. Who knows how long it’ll be that Google is going to force you to go to their older suite, Creator Studio Classic. And I’ve done that right now. I’ve gone to Creator Studio Classic. Once I’ve done that, when I click on my icon up here in the top right, notice how it switches to Creator Studio, and next to creator studio is this little gear called YouTube Settings, and I’m going to click on that.

You can get to settings from YouTube Studio Beta, but it doesn’t offer you the same choices. Once I’m in settings, I’m going to drop down here and I’m going to look at advanced settings and click on that. Now it’ll say at the top, “Set up YouTube exactly how you want it,” and then notice down here as I go under account information. Do you see where it says move channel to brand account? All right. This is the way I identify that, with my under my login, Ross barefoot, I don’t have my channel associated with a brand account. And so I’m not going to be able to add a separate manager to my YouTube channel.

This is also the beginning of the process if you want to associate your YouTube account, your YouTube channel, with a brand account. And again as I mentioned before, that’s a different process so we’re not going to get sidetracked with that. I’m going to jump over here to another browser window, and here again at the YouTube log in screen. Now in this case I’ve logged in, and I’ve logged in under a brand account, Horizon Web Marketing. Now I’ve got the same choice, YouTube Studio beta. I’m going to do the same process. Click on that.

And then I’ll drop down the lower left and click on Creator Studio Classic. And now I’m going to go back up to the top right, go to Creator Studio and click on the gear icon. I’m back at the same screen here, which is my general account settings. I’m going to drop down again to advanced settings. Now here it’s going to look a little different. Notice what it tells me. You’re a manager of this channel and the connected brand account. If this is what you’re seeing, then you do have your YouTube channel associated with a brand account and you can add a manager.

So let’s go ahead and add a manager to this account. Somebody who can help out, managing posting videos and so forth. So I’ll click back up here on account. And because I’ve got a brand account, I have an additional choice here called managers. Let me go back to the personal account just to contrast that. I’ll click on account and notice how it does not have anything about managers here. It just gives me a choice to fool with my account settings.

To Add Other Managers to Your Brand (YouTube) Account, You Need to be the Owner

So at this point I’m going to click on add, remove managers, and now it will come up with this brand account details page. Once I’m at this page, you’ll see this choice up here that says users and it says change roles, invite, and remove users. Now I’m about to show you another gotcha that YouTube has built into their platform which makes it so much fun. And I’m saying that sarcastically. And that is you go over here and click on manage permissions, and I’m supposed to invite, add users, so forth. And I look and I have a list of users and I can’t do anything with any of these users.

What’s going on here? Google told me I could add or remove users. It turns out the only user I can do anything with is myself. I’m logged in as Horizon Web Marketing. I can remove myself as a manager. Well, why is it that it’s not giving me those choices? Here’s where YouTube is really cryptic. They don’t tell you the reason you don’t have the choices they promised you is because I’m not logged in as the primary owner, Carolyn Renaud of Horizon Web Marketing is the primary owner.

Let’s, if you reach this point, you’re going to have to then talk to the primary owner of the brand channel in order to get it done. Let’s go and take a look at what this looks like if I’m logged in as the primary owner. Here, I’m logged into one of the many accounts that I maintain in order to do my job. In this case, it’s my account, but I’m also in a channel called Rocky Mountain S.E.A. That’s a channel I don’t use any more. Rocky Mountain Search Engine Academy. Notice in this case, I am listed as the primary owner. Now what I see up here at the top right is a little button to invite new users. I can click on that and I add an email address and I select a role.

So for example, if I add test@gmail.com, then I can say, okay, what’s the role? Is it going to be owner, manager, communications manager? Now each of these has a different set of privileges from the most privileged, owner can do just about anything, manager can do almost anything, communications manager has a very limited set of options of what they can do. Things like post new videos and so forth. And you can invite more than one person at one time.

And once you’ve assigned a role, we’re going to say communications manager for the purpose of this illustration, I’m going to go ahead and click invite. That invitation is going to go out to whoever has that Gmail account. I’d hate to have that Gmail account, I bed I’d get a lot of this type of stuff. Now if you’ve invited somebody and you choose, and you have second thoughts, or you don’t need them on the account anymore, you can click remove. And here I’m going to go ahead and revoke the invitation. So those are two different situations. Someone who’s already on the account and just an invitation that’s gone out there. And once I’ve done that, then I’m done adding somebody as a user.

So that’s basically the process. As you can see from the demo, the primary thing here is it’s not that hard to add somebody as a manager user to your account. The primary challenge is just navigating your way through the options. You’ve got to make sure, one, that you have a brand account that you’re working with that is associated with your YouTube channel. So if your YouTube channel is associated with a brand account, you can manage, you can invite users, and so forth. And if it’s just your own personal YouTube channel, you’re not going to be able to do that.

Second thing is you have to be the primary owner on that brand account in order to be able to invite users. So as long as you got those two ducks in a row, you should be good with this and I hope it’s been helpful to you. I’m Ross Barefoot, thanks for watching, and please give us a subscribe if you found this useful.

Again, if you liked this video and found it useful, give it a thumbs up and subscribe. That lets YouTube know that it’s valuable content for other users as well. If you’re looking for some tips on using YouTube to promote your business, check out our video optimization course on YouTube. Now we discuss everything from keyword research for YouTube all the way through to special tools like cards and the end screens. We’ll tell you about YouTube ranking factors and how to figure out whether your videos are hitting the mark with your audience. I’ll drop a link to that course in the description below. That’s it, so bye for now.

Ross Barefoot

Ross Barefoot got his start in small business managing an importing company in the bicycle industry.  While there, he tried his hand at programming to find more effective ways to track, market and sell his company’s range of bicycle parts. He loved the web marketing side of things so much he became a professional web developer in 2001, starting a website design business in Western Colorado. He took his first SEO certification course from the Search Engine Academy in 2002, followed it up with another in 2004, and decided to jump full time into SEO training and consulting in 2011, becoming a Master Certified Instructor with the Search Engine Academy, where he continues to serve on the Board of Directors. Today, Ross is CTO, trainer and chief SEO strategist at Horizon Web Marketing (www.horizonwebmarketing.com), a full-service digital marketing agency based in Las Vegas.