I had mentioned the YouTube video keyword research tool in my Advanced Keyword Research Tactics presentation at SMX West in February, just a day after the tool was released. For those of you who weren’t there, however, you may have seen from vidiSEO or other video SEO focused blogs that YouTube released a keyword tool to help users find video-specific keywords. Video search behavior is often radically different than web search behavior, so the video keyword research tool can be used to mine popular video queries, which can be used to optimize video content or create YouTube sponsored listings.

An interesting way to find top YouTube searches that I didn’t cover in my presentation, hower: enter the keyword video in the keyword tool.

youtube keyword tool2

When I did it I found that 35% of the keywords that came up were also listed in the Hitwise report from December 2008 on YouTube searches. It seemed as though YouTube suggest keywords were returned in order of greatest search volume when I described how to do YouTube keyword research with the suggestion tool in May of last year. This seems to confirm that keywords are returned in terms of relative search volume in the YouTube keyword research tool as well.

Top YouTube keywords according to Hitwise, December 2008 data and the YouTube keyword suggestion tool:

top-youtube-keywords