How to Do Topic Research for Video SEO

Nearly a quarter of the world is using YouTube to look for information.  This presents brands and influencers with a huge opportunity to grow their audience. In this video, I’ll walk you through my process for researching topics to create compelling videos for video search and video SEO. 

Video Transcript: 

One of the most time-consuming and often frustrating processes, at least for myself, is finding content to create or topics to write about, and make sure that I’m adding the value and I’m not just creating more noise. That’s really one of the biggest keys to having success, creating content that people actually want to engage with and want to consume, and that calls them to action. In this video, I’m going to walk you through a little bit of my process for researching topics to create compelling videos for video search and video SEO.

Create for Video Search

Video search has a huge upside. The reality is, there are a lot of people still not leveraging video search. Video still has a long way to go. I think there are a lot of barriers to entry for a lot of people. One is, how do I create content for it? A lot of times, people don’t like being in front of the camera, don’t really know how to leverage video technology, and they just feel like there’s a lot of effort that goes into it with a lot of unknowns. But search, specifically Google search, as well as YouTube, are growing more and more every single day. As Google adds more and more rich features, there are more and more opportunities for video to show up within the search results. In fact, they show a thumbnail next to a search result about 26% of the time.

Today YouTube has 2.3 billion users monthly that are actually logged in. That doesn’t even account for the people who aren’t logged in watching videos. Considering there’s like, what, seven, eight billion people in the world, we’re looking at a quarter of the world is using YouTube to look for information. And this is not just something for B2C companies. Anybody can leverage YouTube or video search, specifically B2B companies as well. Over 50% of B2B decision-makers are using YouTube during their research process. And the reason there’s such an upside is only 9% of small businesses in the U.S. today are using YouTube. So if you’re a small business, you’re looking to get leverage, you’re looking to grow and maybe expand your reach, YouTube and video search could be a huge opportunity for you.

Finding Topics for Video Content

Now, how do we find topics? How do we find ideas and how do we make sure that the content we create is actually going to be seen by people? You need to make sure that you’re creating content that they want to engage with. These are the three things that I do when I’m looking to create content for our videos and for our clients’ videos, and some of the things we look for before we actually go into the shooting process. We’re going to look at YouTube, as well as an extension of YouTube called Tube Buddy. We’re going to take a look at some SEO tools and how they can help steer the ship and direct us. And lastly, we’re going to look at the physical SERP results and allow them to help educate us on both ideas and the types of content we should be creating.

YouTube, in and of itself, is a pretty powerful tool. They allow us to see some pretty awesome metrics right within the studio section of YouTube. To get to your studio section, you just click on your icon. You click on YouTube Studio. If you want to look at the analytics and get an idea of what people are searching within your channel and how they’re finding you, this is a great place to start.

If you don’t have a YouTube channel, you can’t have these metrics because you obviously have nothing to create. But if you have created stuff, this is where you can use your analytics to help you create more of the type of content people like. You just click on the analytics section, and the first thing you can do is check outreach. In the reach section, it’s going to show you how people came to your channel and some of the terms that they’ve used in order to find your content. If you scroll down a little bit, you’ll see YouTube Search, and this is where we can look at those search results or the terms that are driving people to our videos.

I like to look at this as far as themes and topics. For instance, my number one right now for the last 28 days is schema.org. The great thing about schema.org is there are over 700 different types of schema. There are a lot of people who are interested in learning how to leverage structured data. This is an area that I’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to for myself. I really have almost an endless pool of content. As Schema continues to update and create new content, I can create videos around all those different types of markups, and for the most part, this is what’s driving a lot of traffic and visibility to my channel.

I know that my audience is interested in schema.org, so I can use this information based on the views, the average duration, and what percentage of people view these videos. I can really use this information to help create more content. I can also go down and look at some others. I don’t just want to look at views. I also want to look at what engages people. So Google page experience update. Anytime I do an algorithm update, right? It seems people engage with that. Schema markup here. Structured data is another topic, Google data studio. I’m looking for videos and topics that people spend time really, really investigating what I’m talking about, and listening to, right? I want to create content that’s going to drive engagement. This is a great place to start, if you have a YouTube channel, to kind of take these topics and look for long-tail opportunities and variants of these.

You could take something like schema, like Schema markup for WordPress. See, that’s a long-tail opportunity. Maybe I could use schema markup for an HTML website or schema markup for web flow. There are tons of different things that we could leverage and spin off of that to create other related pieces of content that might be in something that my audience is looking for.

Doing YouTube Keyword Research

If you are a YouTube user, or you’re not yet, or you want to get into YouTube and you want a little bit more YouTube specific research, you can also leverage a tool called Tube Buddy. You might’ve noticed this little icon up here that says TB; that stands for Tube Buddy. Over here, we’ve got keyword explorer, which we can look at using Tube Buddy. We can have some other really cool tools as well within this tool, but really keyword explorer is what we’re going to look at today. This allows us to do some keyword research within YouTube to help us find better content.

I could actually type in a term here, so let’s say I wanted to do more on schema, specifically schema.org. I could type that here. It’s going to give me some results, right? The keyword volume, the competition. What’s the likeliness of me actually earning some visibility here? We found a couple of videos that we’re ranking for, and now we’ve got all of these different long-tailed video opportunities, organizational schema, schema.org videos, schema.org recipe, a video transcript, structured data, all of these great topics that I can go and spin off of.

But I don’t just look at YouTube. I can actually look at what Google is showing and some of the related results from Google search results. I can look at video topics. Some of these aren’t going to be relevant, so you’ve got to dig through these to make sure that you’re finding video topics that might be good. Notice there’s a lot of what is, how to, so I can say, maybe I need to create some how-to videos. Maybe I need to create some “what is” type videos. Now I’m starting to get a little bit of an idea around search intent. Tube Buddy allows you to do this pretty quickly, looking at your keywords. You can also check out the results to see which of the channels own these results. The top-ranking just happens to be my channel in this case. When we’re looking at schema.org, we’re owning 4 of the 20 results, which is a pretty cool thing to see. But I’ve used these tools to help build a strategy and to help create topical authority around this type of content, so this is a really good tool for you to do that as well.

What Are the SEO Implications?

Now let’s say you want to look a little bit more at the SEO implications and Google search results specifically. This is where we can take this further using a tool like SEMrush. So SEMrush has a tool called Keyword Magic Tool, which you can go ahead and put your keyword that you’re focusing on in here. What this will do is it will give you the volume and it will give you the trend. It will also show some SERP features here. One of the things that’s nice about this is you can actually narrow it down to just questions. The reason I like doing this is it actually will give you video titles that you can work with. These are questions that people need answers to, and oftentimes they’re looking for video answers. What is schema.org? We’ve got a video carousel. We’ve got how to use schema.org and WordPress. We’ve got a video carousel. Within this one is, again, how to implement schema.org. We’ve got a video carousel.

Some of them have SERP features and some of them don’t, and you can continue to expand your research. Maybe we wanted to look at something related to this and use structured data now instead. Again, we can do this exact same process, keep it on questions, and it’s going to give us some opportunities here. What is data structure? We might have to filter this a little bit more, but does structured data help SEO? I bet there’s a video here. Yep. And then we can always take these results, and what we want to do for our final step is actually look at Google search itself. The reason you want to do that is you want to see the video that’s ranking for this specific query, and what you might need to do or the type of content you might need to create in order to rank for it as well.

Once we make this query in Google search, we can see that this result has a featured snippet. It also has “people also asked.” This is another great place to pull content ideas and topic ideas, or related content ideas that you might want to answer as well, that are very similar or at least related to your query. We’ve got four more questions right here. As we scroll down, we can kind of see the certain results that Google is pulling in, like what is structured data, best practices, understanding how it works, and how important is it.

As we scroll down though, you might notice one thing. SEMrush said that there was a video within the search results, but then we go and make this query and we’re actually not seeing it. Now that could be because there’s a video within the mobile search results, or that could be Google decided they wanted to test something different or that they didn’t like the way that video was showing up in these results. This doesn’t mean we’re all for loss here, because as you can see, we’ve got the videos tab up here within search. If we click on this, we can see some videos that are ranking, so Yoast, what is structured data, Neil Patel’s how to add structured data to your site. Here’s one of Matt Cutts talking about structured data. As we can see, there are a lot of different videos here. What we can do is we can leverage these results to look at answering this question.

One thing you might notice, there’s nobody that has the video does structure data help SEO, so that might be a good video topic to cover. Everybody is talking about how it can improve it, why it helps, but no one actually answers that specific question. You might be able to use that as your video title or a variant of that to try to talk a little bit deeper about this topic.

Putting the Research Into Practice

Doing video research and video topic research is not as simple as logging into a tool, making some queries, exporting the results, and going after it. You’re going to have to use a little bit of an organic approach in order to really understand the type of results that both Google and the users are expecting to see so that you can create the type of content that’s going to help you get that visibility.

Now, there’s one thing to notice. All of these are coming from video sites like Yoast, Neil Patel, freeCodeCamp, WebFX. These sites are probably using video structured data as well in order to show up within the search results. All of this information, the thumbnails, the time on the site, when it was uploaded, all of that is being pulled from structured information. In order to do that, you need to know how to implement the structured data into your site in order to help increase the visibility of these videos that you’re creating.

If you’re interested in learning how to leverage structured data in order to earn those rich features with your videos, we have a course that’s developed for you, and it’s not just going to show you how to use video, but also organization, FAQ, how to markup, and a whole lot more. Just use the code YouTube and get 25% off of this course. You can find all the details at learn.simplifiedsearch.net.

Thanks so much for watching this video. If you have any questions, please comment below. We’d love to continue that conversation. If you’re using any different tools, too, that we didn’t mention today, that you find helpful while creating that video content, please share that as well. Thanks again for watching, and until next time, happy marketing.