Keyword research is essential to the success of any digital marketing strategy, and video marketing is no exception. Producing and marketing videos around specific keywords, known as target keywords, will allow you to reach your business’s prospective audience, generating more conversions and a higher return on investment (ROI). Unfortunately, though, many business owners neglect this otherwise critical step, believing it offers little or no benefit. Whether you’re trying to sell a product, a service or simply create stronger brand recognition with your videos, you should perform keyword research.
What Is Keyword Research?
Keyword research, in the most basic sense, involves analyzing keywords for your video marketing campaigns that are most likely to drive conversions. You probably already know some keywords. If your run a wedding photography business, for instance, keywords like “wedding photography” and “bridal photography” may work. However, keyword research goes one step further by analyzing these and other keywords to better understand their true value. By conducting keyword research, you’ll create more targeted and effective videos that drive conversions for your business.
Identify Your Audience
Understanding your business’ audience can help you uncover the right keywords for your video marketing campaigns. Hopefully, you already know who buys your business’ products or services. If you don’t, you should analyze your company’s sales data to gain insight into this topic. Your keywords must be closely aligned with the needs of your target audience. Otherwise, they won’t prove effective at attracting video views and driving conversions.
Relevancy
When choosing target keywords for your video marketing campaigns, make sure they are highly relevant to the content of your videos and/or what your business offers. This is arguably the most important factor in the effectiveness of your target keywords. Irrelevant keywords will attract irrelevant traffic, thus lowering your conversion rate. Choose target keywords that accurately describe the content of your videos.
Search Volume
In addition to being relevant, target keywords for your video marketing campaigns should also have a moderate or high search volume. So, how do you know the search volume for a specific keyword? There are several tools available that will provide this information. Google’s AdWords Keyword Planner tool, for instance, is a free-to-use service that reveals the average search volume of specified keywords. After entering a keyword into the tool, it reveals the average monthly search volume.
To use the AdWords Keyword Planner tool, you’ll need an AdWords account, which is Google’s paid advertising service. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to purchase ads through the service. You can create an account simply to access and use this tool without purchasing ads.
Competition
The competition of a keyword will affect its ability to attract video views and drive conversions. If dozens of other businesses are producing and marketing videos around the same keyword, you’ll struggle to achieve results with your video marketing campaign. Therefore, you should choose target keywords that have low or moderate competition. Some competition is perfectly fine; in fact, it indicates the keyword is profitable. But you should avoid keywords with an excessive amount of competition from other businesses and publishers.
Autocomplete
You can find keyword ideas for your video marketing campaigns using the autocomplete function in search engines like Google, Bing and YouTube (yes, YouTube is a search engine). Once you’ve identified some keywords to use in your campaigns, enter them into search engines for autocomplete suggestions. The aforementioned search engines provide autocomplete suggestions based on the popularity of related searches, meaning these keywords usually have high search volume.
To expedite the process of finding autocomplete keywords, consider using keywordtool.io. You choose a search engine — Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay or the App Store — and it reveals the autocomplete suggestions. Although it requires a paid subscription for complete details, even the free version of keywordtool.io can provide useful ideas for your video marketing campaigns.
Optimize Videos for Target Keywords
After identifying target keywords for a video, you should optimize the video around those keywords. First, create the content of your videos around these keywords. If you want to target a specific keyword, the video must be relevant and closely related to that keyword.
Second, try to include target keywords in the SEO elements of your video, including the title and tags. Search engines will see these elements, increasing your chance of scoring a top search ranking. When creating titles, though, you should limit the number of characters you use. Statistics show that search engines typically only display 60 to 65 characters of the title in their listing headlines, so stay within this limit.
Video Promotion With Keywords
Finally, promote your videos with their respective target keywords. When sharing links to your videos, for example, use a keyword as the anchor text. Why is this important? Well, search engines will analyze the anchor text to determine an appropriate ranking for your videos. By using your target keywords as anchor text, you’ll encourage higher search rankings for those keywords.
