After a little time off from reading Greg Jarboe’s YouTube and Video Marketing, I’ve returned to it. Being a video company, my partner and I figured we ought to be taking fuller advantage of YouTube for our own marketing purposes. In an earlier post, I gave Jarboe’s definitions of video SEO, YouTube optimization, and video optimization.
Jarboe has some helpful ideas for YouTube optimization. One of the first steps is the same as for basic website SEO – identifying the right keywords. You then use these keywords in the titles and descriptions for your YouTube videos. Below are a few of his tips for keyword research.
1. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool
With Google’s keyword tool, you enter a possible keyword and receive a list of keywords similar to the one you have entered. The list shows you approximately how many times Google users searched with each keyword, and how much competition there is for each.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Other tools
Google trends (www.google.com/trends), Keyword Discovery’s free search tool (http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html), and Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions (http://labs.wordtracker.com/keyword-questions)
3. Check out YouTube’s query suggestions
This is a clever idea of Jarboe’s. When using YouTube’s search box, you can begin to enter a search term and YouTube will automatically give you a list of suggested results to help you find what you want more quickly. Seeing these suggested results can help you identify terms to use for your own videos.
4. Analyzing Keyword Effectiveness
This may only be for the ambitious among us, but Jarboe points out that a really effective keyword is one that is popular and not super-competitive, so he recommends doing some simple math to see which keywords are most effective. The higher the KEI (keyword effectiveness index) the better.
KEI = Monthly search/competition
This is actually not very hard to do, and Google’s keyword tool can help. I entered “online video” into the keyword tool and grabbed five of the results that were returned to me. The keyword tool allowed me to download the data straight into an Excel spreadsheet. I then just added an additional column for the KEI and created a simple formula to divide Column B (searches) by Column C (competition), which equals Column D (KEI).
Next up: using our keywords in YouTube.
