Quantifying YouTube Keyword Opportunities — Whiteboard Friday - Moz

Quantifying YouTube Keyword Opportunities — Whiteboard Friday

June 12, 20265 min read

Written by: Phil Nottingham Edited By: Meghan Pahinui

Table of Contents

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

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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 shows you the overall demand for a given query. Keyword difficulty tells you about the competition. And organic CTR tells you about the overall value relative to other keywords.

How is YouTube different?

Firstly, YouTube is slightly different from Google. It's driven partially by search, but it's also a discovery engine. You can get views through the YouTube homepage, through subscriber feeds, suggested videos, and other methods.

Median monthly view velocity

Search volume might not be useful for YouTube. Instead, we use MMVV, or median monthly view velocity, which helps assess demand for a given keyword by analyzing the top 100 videos for that keyword.

Median subscribers

For keyword difficulty, we use median subscribers as a proxy to assess competition. This shows how difficult it would be for new channels to rank for given keywords.

Median age

For organic CTR, we analyze the median age of content to understand visibility duration. Videos with a longer median age may receive views over a longer period.

Finding the highest level of opportunity

If you find queries with high median monthly view velocity, low median subscribers, and a long median age, that's indicative of a high opportunity level. This helps identify keywords to create videos for, rank for, and attract a larger audience.

The author's views are entirely their own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.