So you’ve labored long and hard over keyword lists and competition rankings, and now you’re ready to start making videos. Surely they are going to easily rank, in Google — right?
Not necessarily. Having that kind of attitude just sets you up for failure and frustration. There needs to be one extra step in the keyword research phase. Instead of simply guessing that you’ll end up on page 1, you need to know whether you can rank for a keyword phrase before getting started on your video.
But how can you tell?
Perform a manual check to make sure you can rank for the keyword phrase you want to create a video for. Visit Google, and copy+paste one of your pre-researched keyword phrases into the search bar. Do you see any videos among the search results? If you don’t see any videos, there’s a good chance your video won’t be able to rank for that keyword phrase.
For example. At the time this article was written, there were no video listings for the keyword: “tea tree oil uses.” Even though there were hundreds of videos listed in Google (check by using the “Videos” tab), Google chose not to rank any of them in the first page of the search results.
Now, from this point, you could either dismiss this phrase and try another from your list, or “play around” with the phrase a little. A simple way to do this is to try adding or subtracting words form your keyword phrase, to see if videos appear in those search results.
Figuring out why Google ranks some videos, and rejects others…
Try to understand things from Google’s viewpoint. Their goal is to find the most useful results for the searcher. Searching “tea tree oil uses directions,” for example, does show video results on page 1 of Google.
If the competition was a little easier, it would be a good idea to go ahead and make a video, and optimize it for that phrase.
Optimizing for your chosen keyword
Videos can also sometimes hint at other keywords or phrases worth ranking for.
The bottom of page 1′s search results for “tea tree oil uses directions” showed video content. However, the videos displayed were somewhat unrelated, such as “Soap Making Instructions - Tea Tree Oil Soap.”
I then copied and pasted “tea tree oil soap instructions.” For this search, the videos appeared at position #2 instead of the bottom of the page. This would be the best keyword phrase to now optimize the video for.
If you are concentrating on gaining search engine traffic from video marketing, using the above technique will be a very useful factor in determining whether it would be worthwhile in creating a video.
The added time to do additional research may be frustrating, but it will pay off as your videos achieve better rankings and greater success.
Alex Murry also writes about local search marketing.
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