In many ways, it really is the wild west out there in SEO land.
Yesterday I posted a job on eLance requesting someone who specializes in Youtube SEO to help me improve the rankings of the videos on my channel,
Most of the offers I’ve had are clearly from bots, but one individual did take the time to write a personal offer and give his opinion,
I replied….
I should also add that my channel is ranked #1 for “rpg reviews” because of my Show page adding that keyword to so many of my videos.
It seems the going rate for SEO work is about $3.25 an hour, but I don’t understand if the individuals making the offers actually understand SEO or if they are just going from what they have read on SEO blogs. From my own experience working on my Youtube channel, there are additional factors in YouTube’s algorithm that make the high-volume keywords much tougher to rank for, such as number of total channel views and subscribers.
I’ve found it is better to rank for several search phrases that, by themselves, might only account for 1,000 monthly searches, but if a video ranks in the top position for 300 keywords like that, it’s possible to get 300K views a month to that video. The difficulty is in identifying those keyword combinations and getting your video to rank well for them all, which is why I expressed interest in hiring someone who throughly understands Youtube’s search algorithm. But this person would need to be more skilled than I am.
The ideal thing to do is to use a service like Tubular Labs. I haven’t used their system (they were trying to charge Enterprise rates when I first discovered them, and I personally don’t think their service is that valuable) but I imagine it works by using your Youtube Analytics data to see what keywords your videos currently rank for, and then recommends keywords related to your videos based on the YouTube keyword finder. Basically, something that can be done right now using free resources, but requires hours of work to achieve.
