Once you have done the keyword research , checked out the competition, you’re ready to start creating videos optimized for each keyword phrase. Surely they are going to easily rank, in Google — right?

Unfortunately, not for sure. Expecting these kind of results will only lead to frustration. There needs to be one extra step in the keyword research phase. You need to KNOW that it’s possible to rank an optimized video for one particular keyword phrase, before you start putting in the effort of creating the video.

How to tell?

In order to tell if it’s going to be possible to rank your video for a particular phrase, you need to check manually. Copy and paste one of your researched keyword phrases into Google. Any video listings in the search results? If there aren’t, you should forget trying to rank a video for that phrase, it may never happen.

For example. At the time of writing this article, there were no videos for the phrase: “tea tree oil uses”. Even though there were hundreds of videos listed in Google (check by using the “Videos” tab), Google chose not to rank any of them in the first page of the search results.

Now, from this point, you could either dismiss this phrase and try another from your list, or “play around” with the phrase a little. Add or take away words to the keyword phrase to see if any videos appear.

Understanding why Google ranks some videos, but not others…

Try to understand things from Google’s viewpoint. They only want to display a video in the search results if it is going to be useful to the searcher. To continue the above example, after adding the word “directions” to the phrase, (so it would be: “tea tree oil uses directions”) videos appeared in the search results.

If the competition was a little easier, it would be a good idea to go ahead and make a video, and optimize it for that phrase.

Optimizing for your keyword phrase

Continuing this, sometimes the videos themselves give a hint on other keyword phrases that could possibly be ranked for.

After typing in “tea tree oil uses directions”, videos appeared at the bottom of the page in Google. The title of the videos that appeared was “Soap Making Instructions – Tea Tree Oil Soap”, so they were not much related to the phrase I typed in.

Going a step further, I pasted in “tea tree oil soap instructions”. Much better – videos were ranking at position number 2 instead of the bottom of the page. This would be the best keyword phrase to now optimize the video for.

If you are concentrating on gaining search engine traffic from video marketing, using the above technique will be a very useful factor in determining whether it would be worthwhile in creating a video.

It may add an extra step to your keyword research, but the initial efforts will pay off in the long run, and avoid frustration..