How to Go About with Keyword Research for YouTube Marketing?
In the present era of digitization, YouTube marketing has come to assume an extremely crucial place in the entire digital marketing landscape. There are quite a few reasons why YouTube has become the second-largest search engine, falling just after its parent company Google.
With a user base of more than 2 billion people worldwide, the video-streaming platform has emerged as the go-to medium for video-lovers. Anyone who wants to find information on something, such as a tutorial video or step-by-step guide video, simply goes to YouTube, searches for a term in the search bar, and finds a gamut of videos. It’s simple and quick.
The increasing preference for video content and the growth of YouTube as a popular video streaming platform has brought YouTube marketing to the forefront these days. Brands across the globe, irrespective of their niche, are leveraging the power of YouTube videos to engage, inform and entertain people. Much of the success of brands depend greatly on the kind of video content they are sharing with their YouTube subscribers.
However, getting real YouTube subscribers and a large number of YouTube views isn’t something you can achieve in a day. Most YouTubers struggle for years to get the much-coveted 1000+ YouTube subscribers. Just like written blog content, which needs to be keyword-optimized for it to appear on Google’s SERP, your YouTube videos should also have the searchability factor.
The significance of keyword research for YouTube marketing
You may have come up with the best-of-best video content, but all your efforts will go in vain if your audience cannot find your content on YouTube. This is why you need to focus on keyword research and video SEO. You can harness your potential to get a huge number of YouTube subscribers and YouTube views when your channel becomes visible to your target audience.
Keyword research is an extremely crucial component of the entire video SEO process. It holds great significance in YouTube marketing for the sheer reason that it can make or break a video campaign. Video marketing is an expensive affair, and not being strategic about the content and its distribution will only be a recipe for disaster and loss.
As a savvy marketer, you should aim to keep your video marketing costs as low and your ROI as high as possible. This is the reason why your primary step before running full-blown YouTube marketing campaigns should be to conduct a thorough keyword research. When you get this step correct, your audience will be able to find you easily on YouTube. In the end, you can see the number of YouTube subscribers as well as YouTube views and shares soaring.
Going about keyword research for YouTube marketing
Now that you have got an idea of how important keyword research is for YouTube marketing, you may be wondering how to go about with the process. Fret not, because keyword research isn’t tough as most novice YouTube marketers perceive it to be. If you need guidance, then look no further than the step-by-step guide below:
Start with YouTube’s Autocomplete
The intuitive nature of YouTube is clearly reflected in its autocomplete feature, which is the easiest way to go about with keyword research. The keywords suggested by this feature of the platform give you a fair idea of the popular phrases that are performing well. It’s pretty much YouTube telling you itself that these are the keywords that are searching the most on the platform.
Take, for instance, you are the owner of an e-commerce store that sells organic food items. You wish to educate your audience about your products by creating YouTube videos because this content can win the trust of YouTube users.
Type, for example, “organic olive oil” in YouTube’s search bar. When you do that, you will be suggested a number of keywords instantly. You can use these keywords and even related keywords after another search to come up with your own list of keywords.
Know what your competitors are doing
YouTube marketing does not happen in silos. You will have to be aware of everything that’s happening around in order to come up with valuable and meaningful content. Even it comes to doing keyword research for YouTube marketing, you will have to take into account what your competitors are doing in the space.
For this, you should stick to comparable competitors from your niche while doing a keyword research. Try to find competitors with approximately the same number of YouTube subscribers. YouTube channels with a huge number of real YouTube subscribers can get the best results by using broader keywords instead of long-tail keywords.
When you identify a competitor, sort out their videos by filtering the “Most Popular” ones. Analyze the video title and video description of all their top-ranking videos and see what keywords they are targeting. This will give you a good idea of what you need to be doing too.
Find out Video Result Keywords
Every video marketer leveraging YouTube will want to get the top rank on YouTube’s search results. That’s a great pursuit. But what’s even better is getting your video ranked on both YouTube and Google. When the top two search engines feature your YouTube video, getting real YouTube subscribers and achieving growth becomes a huge possibility.
For your video content to rank well on search engines, you need to identify “Video Result Keywords.” One crucial point to note here is that Google does not rank a video in its SERP for every single keyword. It only ranks videos for specific keywords. These keywords that yield a video result on Google are called “Video Result Keywords.”
More often than not, “Video Result Keywords” are related to topics like tutorials, sports, and funny videos. So, you should search these keywords properly on Google before finalizing your main keywords. Optimizing your video content around these keywords will surely help you get many YouTube views.
Leverage YouTube Analyzer for topics
The topics around which you create video content for YouTube marketing have a huge influence on the success of your brand. People visit YouTube looking for information on topics that pertain to their current situation. The COVID-19 pandemic is a classic example to cite here. During the lockdown and panicky times, people across the globe resorted to YouTube to stay up-to-date with valuable information.
But staying abreast with the latest trends and coming up with relevant YouTube videos can be challenging. To help you with that, you have YouTube Analyzer, which can assist you in topic and keyword research. You can get tons of amazing content ideas here and learn more about the finer aspects of YouTube marketing. These include the average video length, comments and engagement, and upvotes versus downvotes.
Use a keyword research tool
Crafting a YouTube marketing strategy isn’t a piece of cake. You will need a lot of data to back your decisions because one uninformed decision on your part can damage your brand greatly. It’s a given fact that keyword research is a critical component of the entire video SEO process. But its cumbersome nature often leads marketers to miss out on vital details that could have made a huge difference.
To make the job of video SEO strategists slightly easier, you can use a dedicated keyword research tool while crafting a YouTube marketing strategy. Once you enter your keyword type into their search bar, you will be presented with a variety of keyword ideas to choose from.
Most of these tools also provide valuable details about the search volume and clicks that each keyword gets. You can go for keywords and key phrases that show high numbers for both these parameters. You should also know that most of these keyword research tools show rounded yearly averages for keyword search volume. So, you should keep seasonal or declining trends in mind before finalizing your keywords.
Run YouTube ads
Last but not least, you can create and run a YouTube ad to show your video content on YouTube search for any search term. These ads can be used prior to making any heavy investment in full-fledged video campaigns to know the effectiveness of your keyword research.
Create a YouTube ad by targeting a few popular keywords in your niche. Run the campaign for 30 days and see the Search Terms report at the end of the period. The report will clearly show you the number of impressions your ad received for every keyword used.
However, you should note that the number of impressions that your video gets because of a particular keyword is often an underestimation of the search volume. That’s because the ad won’t show the impression for every keyword search. Nonetheless, it can surely be used to roughly estimate the potential search volume of the keyword.
The above are some of the ways in which you can go about with keyword research while running YouTube marketing campaigns. The video-streaming platform is quite a competitive space, and you will have to stay ahead in the game. It’s only through effective keyword research that you can come up with video campaigns that gives you growth in YouTube views and YouTube subscribers.