Within the last seven days, Google has integrated data from YouTube into its Google Trends facility – something that may lead to increased search engine optimisation techniques being employed over time by those using the video sharing site for marketing purposes.

Google Trends is a tool that allows searchers to view search volumes for a given word or phrase, also offering them the chance to compare search terms between one another. With data from YouTube searches dating back to 2008 now to be included – and an option included to limit results to searches made on the platform – users of the facility can see how such phenomena as ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘The Harlem Shake’ have performed over a chosen time frame, ranging from as wide as several years to as narrow as the last seven days, as well as on particular days of the week.

Marketers could, therefore, make use of the tool by seeing what videos people are searching for in their industry and seeking to use appropriate keywords in the titles, descriptions and tags of their video uploads. For SEO-minded website developers and business owners, it opens a potential minefield of ways in which companies can use the content on their sites to divert readers towards their video marketing campaigns, through such methods as hyperlinks and embedded videos. Alternatively, companies could optimise their YouTube videos to target the words people are searching and bring in traffic to their site by including the URL in the description.

YouTube, which is more heavily used than Yahoo and Bing for searching despite existing only as a search engine for videos, was acquired by Google in 2006. It has been increasingly used as part of the Google portfolio in recent years, with users now requiring a Google account in order to log on to YouTube, upload material, like or dislike videos and leave comments.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.