Get our Newsletter!I just saw this post on the YouTube Biz Blog.
A company named BooneOakley (BooneOakley.com) has done something very cool, using the YouTube annotations feature to present each “page” of their site as a YouTube video. It’s a very cool idea, though one I don’t really agree with entirely.
First of all, BooneOakley is a full-service ad agency. They have redirected their web domain to their YouTube channel, effectively piggybacking on YouTube’s bandwidth and syndication.
They’ve obviously done something right here, creating a viral web campaign to spread their name. I had never heard of them before (not that I know anything about ad agencies), but if YouTube is willing to blog about them then this viral campaign is a wild success. If I’m blogging about how YouTube blogged about them, it’s an even more startling success.
On the other hand, YouTube doesn’t give you the ability to build a broad SEO campaign. Sure you can optimize your videos within YouTube and Google video search, but that doesn’t mean customers are going to find you in MSN, Yahoo, YellowPages, etc. Maybe that’s a consideration BooneOakely decided wasn’t important for them (they’re targeting a specific market I know nothing about… very possible).
Nevertheless, I don’t understand why they didn’t simply build their flash videos and embed them within their own hosted domain – thereby allowing for organic SEO, landing page construction, and more control over every aspect of their web presence. They could still have their videos on YouTube (a great idea!), but I honestly think that redirecting their domain to YouTube was a missed opportunity for broad SEO growth.
My friends at Fathom SEO might very well disagree with me. . . but I guess I’m entitled to my opinion. Kudos needs to be given to BooneOakley for their viral campaign, but I’ll be curious to know how long it takes them to rethink the need for a static website.
