Perth Digital Marketing Agency harnesses the power of YouTube for organic Social Media Growth
Announcement posted by Distl 02 Nov 2026
Page views arriving at the Easystart website from YouTube went from roughly nine a day to roughly 124. Monthly engaged views - YouTube's measure of viewers who stayed long enough to count as attention rather than a scroll-past - climbed from 8,900 in April to 40,600 in May, then held at 36,400 through June.
Over the same period, Google Ads traffic to the channel fell 38% while both engaged views and website visits from YouTube kept rising.
"That's the number we care about most, because it's the one that rules out the easy explanation," said Ryan Wilson, Marketing Team Lead at Distl. "We spent less on pushing people to the channel and more people arrived. We can't run a controlled experiment on a live client channel, so we won't claim we've proven causation. But the paid line went down and the organic line went up, and that's about as clean as this gets in the real world."
Google has started showing businesses what they are missing
The work lands as Google begins making social search visible to businesses for the first time. In July 2026 it launched platform properties in Search Console, a reporting view built for social and video rather than websites, showing which search queries lead people to a business's Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube posts. The rollout has been gradual, with each account connected individually.
Distl expects the report to make uncomfortable reading for a lot of Australian businesses.
"Most profiles were built for people who already follow them," Wilson said. "Search traffic was never part of the design, so when that report arrives it'll show very little. That's not a failure of the content. It's that nobody wrote the words a search engine could match against."
It is the third time in under a year that Google has pushed social content further into search reporting. Social channels arrived in Search Console Insights in December, generative AI performance reports followed in June 2026, and platform properties landed in July.
What Distl changed on the Easystart channel
Easystart Homes already had a back catalogue of video. None of it had been built to be found.
Cam Dobie, Senior SEO at Distl, rebuilt the channel for discovery - aligning titles, descriptions, on-screen text and metadata to what people actually search while weighing up building a home in Perth.
Titles were rewritten around the search rather than the subject. A customer video titled "Karin's Story of Building with Easystart Homes" became "Karin | From Renting to Homeowner | Building Your First Home in Perth with Easystart Homes". Tags went from none at all to a full set covering the home design, the buyer type and the suburb. Chapters were added, pinned comments written, and filler words stripped out of the transcripts so the captions read cleanly.
Descriptions grew from a short paragraph into something that names the home design, the location and the guarantees, with each one linking through to the page that answers the buyer's next question.
"Video keeps working long after the upload date, which means an optimisation you apply today also applies to everything you published two years ago," Dobie said. "Most channels have a back catalogue titled for subscribers instead of searchers. That back catalogue is free inventory - the content is already made and paid for, and nobody has asked it to do this job yet."
Distl argues YouTube is where the work pays fastest, because the content is already built to be searched and the platform sits inside Google's network. The agency's guidance is to put the searched phrase near the front of the title, use the first two lines of the description for the summary and the target phrase, add timestamped chapters, correct the auto-generated captions - which handle Australian accents and suburb names imperfectly - and group playlists by the question they answer rather than by upload date.
The words people type into a search box are quite different to the words they would typically type into Google
Distl's position is that social media SEO is not a matter of pasting an existing keyword list into captions.
"The same person phrases things differently depending on where they're searching," Wilson said. "They'll type 'knockdown rebuild cost perth' into Google, then something closer to 'how much to knock down and rebuild a house' into TikTok. Your website keyword list is the starting point. It needs translating into how people actually speak."
Those phrases then have 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 five seconds per post.
The agency points to five other inputs that decide whether a platform surfaces a business at all, none of which, it says, takes longer than an afternoon to fix.
A handle, display name and bio are indexable text, and most are written as slogans. "If your bio reads 'crafting moments' and your customers are searching 'wedding photographer Perth', you've given the platform nothing to match against," Wilson said. "Put the category in the display name alongside the business name and you've handed it two terms while still reading like a brand."
Consistency across platforms is where Distl says most businesses leak - an old handle on one profile and a trading name on another, a Linktree on three and a homepage on the rest, an address matching the Google Business Profile in one place and a previous office somewhere else. When profiles agree with each other and with the website, a search engine can work out they belong to the same business. Inconsistency forces it to guess, and it sometimes guesses wrong.
Engagement depth also counts for more than volume, which changes what is worth making. A save or a DM share tells the platform someone found the content worth keeping, and content built to be saved - a price range, a checklist, a comparison, a process explained properly - earns that where a post designed for likes does not.
The last two are the simplest and the most often missed: answer the question in the first two lines or the first few seconds, because search traffic has no patience for a build-up from a business it has not chosen yet, and offer a next step that matches the intent.
"Someone who found you through a cost question wants a price guide or a quote form, not a newsletter signup," Wilson said.
The work could fall to nobody
Distl's sharper argument is organisational. Social media SEO, the agency says, is search work happening on a different surface - and in most businesses it has no owner.
"Social sits with the social team, search sits with the SEO team, and social media SEO sits with no one," Wilson said. "The social team optimises the feed, the SEO team optimises the website, and nobody owns whether your Instagram profile shows up in Google. The skills barely overlap either. Someone who understands search intent won't necessarily know how a platform weights a save, and the reverse is just as common."
"If your social and your SEO run through different agencies, assume this is falling through the crack. That's usually where we find it."
Distl's view is that AI search turns the gap from a missed opportunity into a live problem. Ask Google's AI Mode or ChatGPT for a business like yours, and the answer is assembled from whatever those systems can find - social profiles included, whether or not anyone has optimised them. Instagram content has been appearing in Google's results for some time.
"Your social profiles are part of your search footprint now, and that's true whether you treat them that way or not," Wilson said. "The businesses that decide who owns this get a say in what those systems say about them. The ones that don't still get described - just by whatever happens to be lying around."
Distl's recommended starting point varies by business. Local services businesses should begin with the consistency between their Google Business Profile and their social profiles, because nothing on social will outperform being correctly identified as the business you are. Consumer brands selling to under-35s should prioritise in-platform search on Instagram and TikTok, where that audience runs product research before a search engine gets a look. B2B businesses with long sales cycles get the best return from depth on LinkedIn and YouTube.
And any business sitting on unoptimised video should start there.
"It's usually the widest gap between effort already spent and value currently returned," Dobie said. "The videos exist. Someone has already paid to make them. All that's missing is the words that let people find them."
About Easystart Homes
Easystart Homes is a Perth home builder specialising in helping first home buyers and renters move into home ownership.
About Distl
Distl is a Perth-based full-service agency working across branding, web development and digital marketing. A certified Google Partner, Distl works with Australian businesses on brand strategy, website builds, SEO, paid media and content.