SEO News You Can Use: YouTube’s Search Insights Simplifies and Improves Keyword Research

YouTube is the second-largest search engine after its big brother, Google – and you know what that means: YouTube SEO is something marketers absolutely must consider. Today, video is one of the go-to marketing tools. And with YouTube being the biggest platform for video content, optimizing your videos for YouTube can put your business in front of a bigger audience than ever before. 

Luckily, there are plenty of guides out there for YouTube SEO. And with YouTube’s latest announcement, the process is about to become even easier. Early last week, the video-sharing platform introduced Search Insights, an experimental feature designed to simplify keyword research and create content structured around what users are actually searching for. 

The new features are located in two tabs within YouTube Insights: “Your viewers’ searches” and “Searches across YouTube.” Before you go running off to try it out for yourself, we should mention it’s currently in its early stages and being tested in YouTube Studio.

It may not be live yet, but it’s still got us extremely excited. Search Insights gives creators the ability to see what users have been searching for the past 28-day period. But the feature does more than show you what the general YouTube audience is looking for – it goes a step further, telling you what your specific audience is searching for, too. What’s more, it can give creators the estimated search volume for each query.

But perhaps even more exciting is another new concept currently being tested. Called “Content Gaps,” this feature lists searches that users have been unable to find a video result for. For any video marketer, that’s the ultimate gift for the holiday season.

The ability to have a precise view of what people are searching for is, in a word, huge. It’s evident that keyword data at so granular a level will be invaluable in highlighting new content opportunities and understanding your audience’s interests. Creators’ videos could become more relevant and attract a more targeted viewership – an SEO dream come true.

We wish we could share when the feature is set to roll out for all creators, but YouTube hasn’t given an indication. For now, though, you can get familiar with what’s to come by checking out Search Engine Journal’s (SEJ) blog, which walks you through the interface and gives you a pretty good idea of what you’ll be able to do with Search Insights and how you’ll be able to do it.

More SEO News You Can Use

The November 2021 Core Update Is Complete: On Tuesday, Google’s November 2021 Core Update officially completed its rollout – 13 days after its launch and just one day after Cyber Monday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year. It was an interesting choice on Google’s part, but here we are, having survived yet another algorithm update. Last week, we speculated how the update might affect rankings, and now we have some answers: Most SEO professionals are in agreement that this particular core update did not have a dramatic impact on search results. It seems the update that has barely been a blip on the radar and is not unlike the daily fluctuations seen on search engine results pages (SERPs) anyway. But as with all Google updates, what is true for most is not true for all. Other search marketers on forum discussions and comment threads have reported significant and unexpected drops in rankings and traffic. Roger Monntti at SEJ also published a blog collating feedback and opinions from respected SEO professionals. Does your experience sound similar to any of these?

Evaluating Site Quality Across the Web Takes “Months”: It’s nice to believe that if you update your website with unique, relevant content and expertly tweak it according to technical SEO best practices, Google will give you an immediate pat on the back. But as John Mueller said in a recent SEO office-hours hangout, this is not the case. Mueller explained that one of Google’s major challenges is understanding the overall quality of a website, specifically how a site fits into the rest of the internet. He said it can take Google a couple of months to half a year, and sometimes even longer, to notice significant changes to a site’s overall quality – and that’s true whether the site has improved over time or gotten worse. So, if you’re undergoing a site overhaul in the new year, give Google the time it needs to recognize your efforts. It won’t happen overnight, but you are guaranteed to reap the benefits eventually.

Check Out This List of SEO Tips From Google’s John Mueller: In case it wasn’t obvious, we’re a sucker for a good John Mueller quote. He’s the closest thing we have to a Google mouthpiece, and we’re still gleaning new SEO insights from him almost every week. So we’re pretty thrilled with SEJ’s comprehensive list of 57 SEO tips and tricks shared by Mueller over the past few years. Most of the information in the blog has been taken from Mueller’s weekly office-hours hangouts, where he answers SEO queries posed by users, and other tips have come from his equally insightful search explainer videos. Keeping up with what Mueller says is no small feat, but this SEJ blog certainly makes it a lot easier to remember the latest word on the street. Be sure to check out the blog and see if there’s anything you’ve missed – it could be just what you need to refine your 2022 strategy.

Moz’s STAT Tool Now Allows You To Track Your Indented SERP Results: Last month, Moz published a blog post where it revealed just how ubiquitous indented results have become on Google SERPs. The blog made one thing clear: Google has dramatically expanded indented results in recent months – and this could provide a major opportunity for SEOs. Now, Moz has announced that its STAT Product team has been able to implement indented results in rank tracking, meaning you can get an overview of all the indented results for your website. Even better? The tool will enable you to collect historical data to track the intended results you gain and lose over time. This could put you well on your way to “owning” a relatively huge chunk of valuable SERP real estate for your targeted keywords, so if you’re excited about the possibilities of indented SERPs, go check out the tool!

The Mobile-First Indexing Deadline Is No More: Over the past two years, the mobile-first indexing deadline has been being pushed out and then pushed out some more. In fact, the search engine started working on mobile-first indexing a number of years ago. Google’s latest deadline announcement was that mobile-first indexing would be complete by March 2021. Well, it’s December, and we’re still not there yet. So it’s not a major surprise that Google has now done away with the deadline entirely. That’s right – there’s no need to scramble because as of last Friday, Google’s mobile-first deadline has dropped, and the timeline is no more. Mueller announced the update in a Search Central blog post, where he explained that some sites are simply unable to move over to mobile-first right now. Google has graciously decided it won’t force these sites to do so by continuing to give deadlines then push them off. Instead, it’s decided there is no deadline. So if you’re one of the site owners that’s been having trouble migrating to mobile-first, you can take a breather.

Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.