Panel Discussion: Video SEO with Vasilena Spasova, Vyara Stefcheva, Viktoria Jancurova, and Ramona Joita

About the Speakers

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Panel Discussion Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Lazarina Stoy: Let’s start the panel. We’re ready. You have mics. Please introduce yourselves to the guests, how the panels are going to work. And bear with me because this is my first time doing this. Like I said, I wanted to try something new and challenge myself, and I’m also, it’s the first time that I’m hosting a panel as well.

That’s why I’ve invited amazing speakers who have the most experience in the room when it comes to panels. So please take some time to introduce yourselves briefly, what you do and your experience when it comes to video SEO. And I have very few questions prepared because I would like to go around the room if you have questions for them.

We do have 25 minutes for each of the panels, but after that we can continue the discussion in the networking session. Ladies, Ramona. 

Ramona Joita: Hello everyone. You have such a lovely community here. I have to say firstly, and thank you for having me, [00:01:00] Lazarina. My name is Ramona Jota. I’m an SEO consultant and also the founder of Marketez.

I’m from Romania, quite close to you. I’ve been in the SEO business for more than 15 years now, and I’m also, uh, mitigating for having a omnichannel approach when it comes to SEO. Why that? Because being number one, it’s not enough anymore. And in the Google page we have feature snippets, we have knowledge panel, we have videos, we have images.

So let’s take advantage of all that space when we are optimizing for our clients. And when it comes about YouTube, sEOI have been promoting clients from the UK, internationally. And I’ve been doing this quite a while. And yes, it’s, I encourage you to do it as well ’cause it’s, it brings results. And I’m gonna pass the mic to the next speaker.

Thank you.[00:02:00] 

Viktoria Jancurova: Hello again. So you’ve heard from me earlier. Maria, my name is Victoria. I am all about LinkedIn. Started my business by accident back in 20 22, 20 23. It was a tough journey, but we made it all the way to 2025, soon to be 2026. Yeah, you’ve heard a lot from me today, so I’m not gonna take very much time.

Vyara Stefcheva: Hello, my name is Vyara. Just a month ago, I actually did an exit of my marketing agency. This is something new for me. Yeah, uh, I do digital marketing. I’m very interested in SEO. I’ve always done it for clients video, SEO too. And a few months ago I started with YouTube and my own channel. So this is another new thing for me this year, and I’m very happy to be here.

Thank you. [00:03:00] 

Vasilena Spasova: Thank you. You’re doing great with your YouTube channel. Hi, I’m Vasilena and I’m social media specialist. And currently I’m working as a freelancer and I work especially with healthcare professionals and I help them develop their personal brand on Instagram mainly, but also on TikTok and a little bit of Facebook and a little bit of LinkedIn, whatever they want.

And we are actually, we are testing because it’s still a new. Type of marketing in Bulgaria, like marketing, medical marketing. So we are going to see where this going to go. That’s it. 

Lazarina Stoy: I think I have done a great job with the panel. I’m very proud of myself. I just have to say.

I am very happy to have you ladies. So one of the key things that I think everyone wants to know, first of all why they are here is because they have expertise with different types of things. Ramona with YouTube, SEO, with agency clients, Victoria with [00:04:00] LinkedIn, Vyara with YouTube most recently, which I did want to highlight and you Vassy with.

All of the things that you do for social media for your clients, and that’s, again, simplifying it a lot. I just wanted to ask you, what are the core ranking signals that you’re seeing for the platforms that you are an expert of, and what do you think is actually meaningful for people to focus on if they want to grow in that particular platform?

Vasilena Spasova: Okay, so maybe I’m going to start, for me currently is like the, um. Watch time of a video because if you go beyond the third second, it’s performing better than the other ones. And I see that on Instagram, on Facebook, and also on TikTok For YouTube, I’m not really sure because I’m not that deep there, and that means that the first seconds of the video is important.

You already know it, but. I see that if you say in the beginning, once you are [00:05:00] going to talk and the question that you’re going to answer in your video, it’s typically performing better than the other. So that’s my advice to, oh, just say what you’re going to say in the video in the beginning and after that you can experiment.

Vyara Stefcheva: That’s a great point for me. I actually grow my channel from scratch very fast for the past 10 months, and one key indicator for me was also watch time and the thumbnails that I actually choose for YouTube videos. And it’s very different with short form content because the hook is important, but not that important for my channel.

On YouTube. On YouTube, I can be more descriptive with the intro. People tend to have more patience with me on YouTube. But something that is very important is doing SEO in the description of my video on YouTube. So this is something that I always highlight. Maybe I will [00:06:00] do a little bit more of a clickbait title, but the SEO description is a must have for me.

Tax they perform good, definitely, but mainly. Meta elements and the SEO description for me. 

Viktoria Jancurova: Okay, so LinkedIn is being LinkedIn and I wish I had a straightforward answer, but I, when it comes to LinkedIn, it’s slightly different. For those of you who’ve seen it, LinkedIn has pulled a video feed for a while that was basically copy of TikTok or Instagram reels.

Then they took it away again. Then they said, oh, video everything, and they were boosting all the videos. I think I have. One video that performed insanely well, right? It had over 17,000 impressions just on that one video, and then there is, they suddenly killed video altogether, right? So that’s why I look at video with slightly different approach.

I don’t look at it as, oh, this is what’s going to get most [00:07:00] visibility. This is what’s going to grow the account, right? If you really want to grow the account, video is not the best way to go with right on LinkedIn specifically, right? But video is absolutely essential if you want to build trust. Right. So think of video as your trust builder, as your relationship builder, how you’re gonna allow your audience to get closer to you, to get to know you, to, as I’m sitting here right now, you’re seeing how I’m moving my hands as I’m expressing myself, I can hear my accent and so on.

So when I’ll get on a call with you, if I meet you face to face afterwards, right? You know what to expect. So this is how I look at LinkedIn’s videos, because from. Doesn’t matter whether it’s long form, short form, if you put the SEO descriptions behind catchy title, anything like that, it will not outperform in 90% of cases the written post.

Ramona Joita: So for me, since [00:08:00] I’m an SEO specialist, I’m mainly focused on YouTube. And YouTube is the second largest engine still, so I encourage you to use it. I’ll start with the strategy because people are going to YouTube firstly for educational content, for how to videos. And people are searching differently on YouTube than how they are searching on YouTube.

So I encourage you to look on how people are searching on YouTube before doing a content strategy, a video content strategy. And of course, after that, what Vyara said, optimize the video, use the. Optimize the title. Use catchy titles, use emojis. I encourage you to do it. It’s really bring results because it’s eye catching people, and optimize the description.

Add links to your lead generation pages, add links pointing to the other social networks, [00:09:00] and optimize the description as well and the tags. Super useful 

Lazarina Stoy: insights. Yes, please grab the mic. I just going to add something. 

Vasilena Spasova: Go for it. A little hack that my little sister told me a month ago, because she’s a heavy TikTok user Of course, and she told me that if a video has a lot of comments below it, it’s mean more engagement because even.

The vi, even if the video is boring, you go there in the comments section and you read them. So spill the tea in the comments. Yeah, absolutely. 

Lazarina Stoy: Sometimes they’re even more funny than the video. Yeah. So we all do that. 

Vasilena Spasova: Yeah. Maybe if we can generate more comments, we are going to generate more views. 

Lazarina Stoy: I’m very, I love to speak for those of you that know me, so I, I put myself on the second panel, but I also want to join in on this panel, so I’m sorry.

Because I can speak with all of you tonight. You’ll hear me speak here. So just to say a couple of things. So on, on the point regarding LinkedIn and what [00:10:00] you said about the brand, you do have the video as like your business card. Like your a live business card, people see you and they get to experience you and build brand trust before you even meet them.

So before you jump on a call, before you jump on Google Meet, they already have this Parasocial relationship with you, which of course there is a discussion separately on YouTube, how healthy that is for people. But when you look at it from a business standpoint, if you’re a business owner, if you’re a business, if you are building trust with people that you want to convert to users, of course.

Use it. Use it to your advantage. People want to have a low effort way to connect with your brand and your business. And videos are a great way to do that because they might be a working mom who works after her kid goes to sleep. Just sing. No, I’m the perfect target and I normally can’t actually phone you because it’s 8:00 PM and I know people have a life, and if you are consuming someone’s videos and you’re building [00:11:00] trust with them, I will make an effort to phone you in a normal humanly time.

But it’s a great, really great way to get introduced and to actually. Capture a market that might not otherwise be able to reach you for whatever the reason. So yes, invest in videos, invest in courses, invest in video products, because I do think this is a great way to introduce yourself. So sorry for the tangent anyway.

Rise of AI thoughts. No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. But let’s say, let’s make it a little bit more focused and say. Good and bad case studies, and it could be good case studies of how AI has been used to scale a work of your client. Or maybe you have seen a brand that has really expanded their video, SEO presence, sorry, their video presence on different platforms through the use of ai.

It could also be case studies of what not to do, because I know that we have a lot of them in the room, so yeah. Take it away. And also, I just want to say, because [00:12:00] we’ll be going around the room, and besides the case studies part, something that I think a lot of us are interested in, at least I know I am, how do you think the platform that you’re an expert in will handle that rise?

What tactics will work for it, basically? So besides the case studies, what do you think is going to happen going forward? How are they going to handle AI generated videos? 

Viktoria Jancurova: Okay, so use of AI on LinkedIn is still a very touchy topic, especially when it comes to building the personal brand, right? With corporate brands or with bigger brands.

When it’s a company page, it’s a little bit like you can slide through. If you use AI and all is good, they won’t look at you so closely. But when it comes to personal brands, it is very, like I’ve seen brands being absolutely. Hate it on in comments for using ai. There is, especially when like LinkedIn, people have very, they hold their [00:13:00] opinions very strongly when it comes to you using AI in your videos.

It’s a big no-no people, the moment people realize, oh, that’s an ai, that’s not the person. They absolutely scroll past and they will lose trust with that person in seconds. Because what you’re building on LinkedIn from your pros personal profile, it’s a personal brand. So the moment it stops feeling personal, you lost the person completely.

So there is that. I do still think there is space to use ai. So for example, like we heard a presentation that was talking about adding captions, right? And use AI for that using cap cut. To cut it there is we Veed.io. It literally has templates that you just plug in videos and then it’ll create and cut it all for you, right?

So there’s space for, you can use it to help yourself, but never to actually do the whole work for you because it’ll really lose your audience in the process. And [00:14:00] yeah, there’ll not be anyone in there left and. I see this continuing in the future as well. To answer your second question, I do see people still hold their values dearly, and if it’s a personal brand, it needs to feel personal.

So while I see in the future more people using that, I don’t think it’s going to be a big boom. There are videos that I’ve seen and I just scroll past. And I believe I unfollowed the person because it was just very creepy. So, yeah. 

Vyara Stefcheva: I would like to highlight two examples. One is bad case study and one is a very good case study.

So I also like to try out new things and I did automated SEO inspired videos. I used V also for them and for my case study. I grow a channel very fast, which is faceless [00:15:00] channel with interesting facts for and regarding Bulgarians. And their traditions. And what I see that a trend is that this is a very fast way to get monetized.

Definitely because you gather all the views, but the quality is not that good and I’m not connecting with my audience. And I would say that this is actually. A bad experiment that I had. This is a bad case study because I had the views, but I didn’t have the connection with the audience and I didn’t have the subscribers.

I didn’t have the community, and I think that actually running a faceless channel is very soulless. And I’m definitely not a fan of that anymore. But a good case study that I would like to highlight is using AI in YouTube Studio, which encourages you to find topics that are interesting to your audience.

Every marketing lesson ever starts with understand your buyer persona, and here in [00:16:00] YouTube Studio you have this new AI features. That will be further developed, and they’re related to what your audience enjoys and what they’re watching. So I really love this AI feature that they have, and it gives me very good recommendations for videos.

Vasilena Spasova: I’m going to try it for sure. Can you, sorry. So for me, a good case is when I use AI to use like a wonk form content in. To speed it in short form content. But that’s it for now because in my daily job with medical specialist, I want their actual opinion on something. And there was a case where the doctor I was working with came to me with all the scripts written by ChatGPT, and it was horrible because it was soulless, it wasn’t personal and I didn’t like it, so we didn’t make it.

And I always tell my. Clients that I love doing like human stuff [00:17:00] because it sounds natural. And second, because when you follow a specialist, you want to hear their opinion and it could be ugly video or you, there is a case that we didn’t make any editing on the video. We didn’t put captions and so on, but the doctor were.

Explaining her opinion on one particular product. And we did have a really good results and a lot of clients or patients from them. So if I have to sum up, you people are going to want more and more personal content and not, uh, chat GPT or any other AI generated scripts. So yeah, that’s for me. Do you want to add something?

Okay. 

Ramona Joita: I’ve also been using AI to create, because I’m talking about strategy. I’m assuming you [00:18:00] already know that this is my thing. So I’ve been using AI to create strategies for YouTube, adding the keywords, and also finding interesting topics for the plan that I’m creating for my clients. But when it comes from about creating videos with ai, indeed people.

Don’t like them that much, at least not at this point, but as a personal opinion, I think that will change in the future because people and companies will want to produce more and more content using an ai, and I think that we will become better and better at using it. We are just at the beginning with it, and I think that we will see more videos in the future.

Uh, created with the ai and I think that at some point it’ll be quite difficult, as sorry, Larissa said, to make a, a, to identify which [00:19:00] video is created by a human and which video is created using the ai. 

Lazarina Stoy: Super 

interesting insights. I hope you all have questions because you’re next, but last question from me.

Vyara , Please walk us through your 90 day playbook. Of starting a channel from scratch. Feel free to include an example if you have it from your recent practice with agency clients as well. But if you want to focus on your personal, by the way, you have your phones on your hand fi, find her channel right now on YouTube and subscribe.

Yeah. Please also let her say, well, while you’re asked it, just do it. Don’t ask any questions. You won’t regret it. So I think it’s very interesting to hear your. Insights on this because obviously you did several experiments, and specifically I would love to know whether you are the importance of community.

Whenever you’re growing a personal brand. How would you approach a business coming to you? And if they’re trying to start the YouTube channel, which of the [00:20:00] strategies that you have learned from your experience with your personal brand and personal channel, would you apply to a business? How would they differ?

Would the strategies differ and so on. 

Vyara Stefcheva: That’s a great question. Thank you for that. So I would always start with picking a niche and sticking to it. You can definitely try out new topics and don’t talk always about the same thing, but find your niche and find the way that you talk about a certain topic through a interesting angle, I would say.

So for me, what I do with my personal brand is I love to talk about. What I do, which is marketing most of the time. But I found that most people are not interested. Obviously here we are an exception. Yeah. But most people are not interested in marketing. They’ll listen to me only if they pay for a course, for example.

But when I want to reach a new audience, I need to find a creative way to do that. So what I personally do is I [00:21:00] find what’s trending and I talk about it. But I start to analyze the marketing perspective and why this thing works. In terms of marketing and introduction, I do introduction to people, to the world of marketing, the basic principles that work, and even user behavior.

And this is what. Works very well for my personal brand, and I believe for a company also, because if you find the trends, this is pretty much the same thing, the same approach. You need to find a trend, but make it your own. And I think that this is a rule that applies for. Both Wong form content and short form content.

And one another thing that I want to add is that I personally make sure to invest more time and effort and value in won form content and then just cut it into pieces with AI for other formats such as [00:22:00] TikTok. And for me personally, my short form content that is just. Cuts from the won video performs better if when compared to when I’m trying to script something and be unauthentic.

So this is my playbook. Definitely. It’s very easy to recycle the content for different formats and also keep the quality of the content at the same time while growing. That’s amazing. 

Lazarina Stoy: I just want to ha, I have a couple of points here. Completely agree. From my experience with agency clients on long form content, scripting it in a way intentionally that starting from the script, you know which parts you’re going to take for short, for content and for which platform, because you don’t want to post the same short for.

Content on all of the platforms, right? It has to be slightly different so that, because they’ll have different audiences. And second thing, I actually wrote it down, YouTube’s [00:23:00] guidance. Is even if you have the same broad audience, but you want to do different topics, split it into two channels. So they, they actually advise this in their guide.

So for instance, if you want to do a channel, okay, I’m sorry to give this example, and I know like I, I’ve been at a conference and I gave example for El Elon Musk and Oh, hit completely. I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed. And so now I’m going to do a similar thing. So example, Mr. Beast. Sorry, hate me, but why has he split the channels in this way?

Because that’s what Google recommends. So you have a channel for all of the challenges, whatever. I’m not really that aware, but I will look aware for a short moment. But you have the channel for all the challenges. You have the channel for the charity, you have the channel in Spanish, you have the channel and all of the different audiences.

And he has 20, or I don’t know however many, but he has a ton of them. They are coming with features for translation. Which I think will change some [00:24:00] of the guidance regarding languages because they are trying to auto translate videos. And if you see for instance, videos in Spanish coming up in your field and they say this is auto dubbed, so they’re doing automatic dubbing.

Which is of course great feature, but I still think their recommendation is going to stay. You should create an authentic version of your channel, even if you auto dub it using the same Google Cloud, API, which you will learn in the course of Larissa and I are building. Even if you use the same API to do the video, if you have it on the separate channel with a separate language, it’s like your separate folders for your website, right?

So. Consider this for sure, splitting, niching down and having different channels for different audiences. So it’s very important to have your buyer personas at the ready. And if you have, from a business standpoint, it’s a little bit difficult to do, but especially if you’re a big organization, there’s room to categorize your channels in a very strategic way and actually grow in YouTube and reach different places where the algorithm will push you.

So now it’s [00:25:00] your turn. What are your questions? Tell me We have about five, six minutes for questions. But bear with me.

Just hold it first. 

Audience: How the hell do you keep up with everything? 

Vyara Stefcheva: Space should I start? It’s hard everybody. Everyone that says that it’s otherwise lies, it’s very hard to find the balance, but I’m trying to do my best. I would say that I’ve done this very hard routine for so long that I’m actually very good at time management, so I get.

Eight hours of sleep every day I go to the gym and I do my work. So for me, this is just work. I find a way to do better time management, but I believe this question is very important because whenever I work [00:26:00] with even younger people and Gen Alpha and they share to me that it’s very hard to focus on something and time management is a.

Very big problem, especially with people who are very difficult to find the right approach to, to pay attention to things. So yeah, time management, definitely. Girls. What do you think? 

Vasilena Spasova: For me, yes, it’s hard, but there are some tricks I think, especially for the social media. If you want to create lots of videos and if you want to make them good, you can try making a series because if you have a specific topic or a specific format that you’re doing over and over again, you get better first of all.

And second of all, you always have ideas what you’re going to talk next. So. It’s easier if you have a topic series, and I think it’s going to be more and more important, like the binge watch metrics on the platforms. [00:27:00] So it’s something, and you should definitely start from there. Yeah. 

Viktoria Jancurova: Okay, so I had a conversation about this earlier with other women in the room and if someone, every conversations, I had, every conversation like this I had before.

Everyone said, if we look like we’ve got, I’m not sure if I’m allowed to swear. Okay. If we look like we’ve got our shit together, we’re probably freaking the fuck out in our minds. This is a picture. Yeah. So we look like, yeah, we know what we’re talking about. Obviously we have the experience and we know what’s happening and we pick up on the trends.

We are like setting up during my presentation, I spend way too much time on LinkedIn, so of course you learn the platforms, algorithms and you understand the things and obviously if you’re doing it for clients, so you pick up on the things. But if I’m gonna, I wouldn’t dare to have a presentation at this moment and talk about transfer [00:28:00] 2026 on LinkedIn because I have no clue.

Like maybe next week they’re gonna announce the videos coming back and being trendy on LinkedIn. I don’t know. So I’m just working with what I’ve got and what is proven to work over the past. Few months, years, and I keep analyzing that. Time management was a great point as well, just knowing when you’re doing what, so you don’t lose your mind throughout the process.

Sirius is a great one, but yeah, just figuring out what works for you, listening to the world and not always being hung up of, this is the latest study that has been published about the recent algorithm changes on LinkedIn because within the three months that you’re like, okay, I’ve got it, I understand it, they’re gonna change it again, so yeah.

Ramona Joita: So for me, what it worked so far, besides being super disciplined and having a good time management, I’ve also set us as a KPI to do research as at least once a quarter. Myself, [00:29:00] I allocate at least 10 or 20% of my time for that besides what I’m doing for my clients. And this really works well, both for me, for better understanding what’s happening in the digital world.

But at the same time, it really worked for promoting myself and for doing digital PR and stuff like that. And secondly, I do follow a lot of people on LinkedIn. Because there are a lot of amazing people out there that are also testing, and I encourage you to follow them or, I don’t know, social media depending on which field are you working on.

I’ve also, I’m also active in Slack groups like the women in Tech, SEO or the SEO community. And yeah, and I’m hoping that I’m up to date with everything. Even though in the end I’m not sure, but this is life. We are in digital marketing. Things are changing so fast. So yeah, be patient with yourself. [00:30:00] 

Viktoria Jancurova: I’m just gonna add one more thing and that’s, you just gave me the idea.

Do not be afraid to test thing, like wearing marketing testing is everything, so don’t be afraid of testing, failing because, well, if you fail in marketing, nobody’s gonna see it. That’s literally it.

Audience: I still have time. So Vera mentioned the thumbnail and that’s the fact that it’s important and the fact that the title can be a little click bait ish. So how much click bait is two click bait and does it ever get. Punished 

Vyara Stefcheva: for me. It has worked so far, so I’m happy with what I achieved. So you can check out my channel to see how I did it and maybe copy the model.

I don’t gate keep my formula. I would say that I’m. [00:31:00] Right now I’m trying to focus on Bulgarian audience and I’m also researching what works here locally and this is what works. So I’m just copying the formula. However, I’m trying to make sure that in within the first seconds, the audience understands that I’m going.

To set a specific tone for this video, that this is not going to be comedy, that this is going to be a comment or analysis. So this is my approach, because if I do too much click bait, people will click out from my video very fast because within the first few seconds they will figure out that I’m trying to bait them.

So this is what works for me, and I believe that Bulgaria is, uh. A small country, people at some point will figure out that this is my style and my approach, and they will understand and remember what my style of video is. Yeah.[00:32:00] 

Ramona Joita: I think it also depends on the audience that you are targeting, because I’m sure that you’ve watched a lot of channels that are using click baiting in all their videos and they are super popular and Yeah. And. If you find your niche, if you find your voice, your tone, and you know which you are targeting, I think you should adapt those titles depending on that.

For example, I’ve promoted at some point in my life theme park, a Peppa Pig theme park from the uk, and in the titles I’ve added Emojis and Peppa Pig and come and watch and stuff like that because I knew that I was targeting kids. So yeah. 

Lazarina Stoy: Awesome. So we will move on to the next panel. We will try to do this as smoothly as possible.

Please. Before that, thank all of these wonderful professionals here for spilling the beans.

[00:33:00]