So, firstly, search volume, now this could be useful for Google. It’s actually not that useful for YouTube.
First, we have no way of actually knowing search volume on YouTube. Google does not provide this information. There are tools that claim to be able to offer this. But in reality what they offer you is a kind of approximation based on other variables. Nothing that actually reflects actual search volume.
And more generally, for most channels that get a lot of views, search is not the means by which they capture the majority of them. They’ll capture the majority of those views through other aspects of the YouTube platform, and search is perhaps one of the many systems and feeds where they can actually generate views across the entire channel.
So search volume only tells us part of the story. So we have to think a little differently for YouTube. So instead of thinking about search volume, we can think about a different metric.
Now, what we have with YouTube, that we don’t have with Google, is information about the amount of people who have watched a particular video, the age of that particular piece of content, and also the number of subscribers. And we can use these particular variables to tell ourselves a story that we otherwise couldn’t on Google.
So for search volume, the metric we should be concerned about, the analog metric is MMVV, which stands for median monthly view rate.
Now we get this metric by essentially finding the top 100 videos for a given query, looking at how many views they got per month, and then finding the median. So the median, rather than the mean, because that removes outliers. And this will really tell us what the demand is for a particular keyword over time, taking into account all the different areas where you can acquire views from the YouTube platform.
This is essentially how we will measure demand.
