How do you assess YouTube keyword opportunity? Phil Nottingham shares three unique metrics for evaluating search demand, competition, and value.

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Hello, I'm Phil Nottingham, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to be talking about YouTube opportunity and YouTube keyword opportunity.

So, how can you work out what the value is of a given keyword on YouTube? How can you assess the opportunity in the same way that you might with Google? 

So for those of us experienced in SEO, we have a way of doing this that relies on the sort of metrics that you get in tools like Moz, metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and organic CTR. 

The search volume is going to show you the overall demand for a given query. Keyword difficulty is going to tell you about the competition. And organic CTR is going to tell you about the overall value relative to other keywords. 

So how can we kind of think about this in terms of YouTube? 

Well, firstly, it's good to notice that YouTube is slightly different from Google in terms of a search engine. Yes, it's driven partially by search, but it's also a discovery engine for content in a much broader way.

You can get views on YouTube through the YouTube homepage, through the subscriber fee, through suggested videos, and other methods across the platform.

So YouTube kind of sits halfway between a search engine and a social network.

And so, therefore, when we're thinking about these kinds of metrics that we might traditionally, in terms of Google search, use to quantify the value of a given query, we need to kind of adapt them and think slightly differently to find analogous metrics that apply to YouTube across the board. 

So firstly, search volume, now this might be useful for Google. It's not actually that useful for YouTube.

One, we have no way of actually knowing the search volume on YouTube. Google doesn't provide this information. There are tools that claim to be able to offer this. But in reality, what they're offering you is kind of an approximation based on other variables. Nothing that actually reflects the genuine search volume.

And more broadly, for most channels that get lots of views, the search is not the means in which they capture most of them. They will capture most of those views through other aspects of the YouTube platform, with search being perhaps one of many systems and feeds in which they can actually generate views across their full channel.

So search volume only tells us part of the story. So we need to think slightly differently for YouTube. So instead of thinking about search volume, we can think about a different metric.

Now what we have with YouTube, that we don't have with Google, is information about the amount of people that have watched a given video, the age of that particular content, and also the number of subscribers. And we can use these particular variables to tell us a story that we otherwise couldn't on Google.

So for search volume, the metric that we should care about, the analogous metric is MMVV, which stands for median monthly view velocity.

Now we get this metric by essentially finding the top 100 videos for a given query, looking at how many views they have got per month, and then finding the median. So the median, rather than the mean, because that removes the outliers. And this is going to tell us really what the demand is for a given keyword over time, taking into account all of the different areas in which views can be captured from the YouTube platform.

So that's essentially how we're going to measure demand. 

For keyword difficulty, well, we need to think about a different metric that's going to tell us about the competition. And luckily, with YouTube, because we get the subscriber data, we can rely on a metric that is median subscribers.

Now, median subscribers is a proxy, but it kind of tells us roughly how much competition there is for a given keyword.

So if we go and get the top 100 videos and we look at the average, the median number of subscribers those videos have, it's going to tell us roughly how difficult it's going to be for us to rank, because if we have a fresh channel and every single video on there has lots and lots of subscribers to the channels, it's going to be very difficult for us to be visible.

Whereas if, perhaps, the ranking videos are largely from channels that don't have as many subscribers, it's a bit easier for us to probably fit in.

So this kind of tells us how hard it is to be visible for a given topic.

And then, lastly, organic CTR, well, this tells us roughly the value of a given query compared to sort of the paid search demand, the other sort of keywords, features, and stuff that appear on the SERP.

Well, how can we think about sort of the value in terms of YouTube? Well, we don't have some of those things. But what we do have on YouTube is the average age of the content. So we can look at the median age. And this is important because if a given video is going to be visible for a long period of time, you're going to be able to get more views over time.

Whereas if the average age, the median age of content is essentially only a few days or a few months, you really have a very short window in which to actually capture views before just the general churn and the freshness means that your stuff isn't going to be as visible anymore. 

So if you find queries that have high median monthly view velocity, low median subscribers, and a long median age, that's indicative of a very high level of opportunity, where you might be able to rank, be visible, and get lots of views.

So that is the way in which you can really quantify the value of different keywords on YouTube that you might want to create videos for, rank for, and get lots of views.