YouTube Hashtag Search Increases Content Reach and Visibility

Not too long ago, YouTube made an exciting announcement to its community – they were creating pages for hashtag searches, so as to increase and improve the content discovery experience for users.

The announcement detailed the way they are organizing content and making it easily searchable for users. By clicking on hashtags in the video, it can now direct you to a dedicated page specific to that keyword. 

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The best part? Not only can users sort that page by the most relevant content, it also provides some limited insights into usage analytics on the very same page.

Using hashtags to boost your video content

The importance of using the right keywords to allow your content to be discoverable can sometimes feel like racing to the tracks to beat another piece of content that's targeting the same keyword. As marketers we know the importance of the strength of your keywords in order to allow readers to find your content. 

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Keywords are the basic building blocks for any content strategy, so using hashtags as you would keywords can help to inform your YouTube SEO strategy. This is the basis of this update, to help increase discoverability as well as compile all this discoverable content into a sort of content hub specific to hashtags.

According to YouTube, you can now navigate to these new pages by clicking into any auto-linked hashtag you see on the platform.

Source: Android Police

New data to optimize your video strategy

The second part of the update is the analytic usage insights. As marketers, we know just how important data is to fuel our strategies and efforts. Thanks to YouTube's new dedicated hashtag's page, it gives tons of insight into data that is useful to create a strategy that targets the exact audience you need to reach, at the exact time. 

These insights help by allowing users to click on a listed clip to get more analytics on associated hashtags, and to also see how often the hashtag is being used and searched. YouTube mentioned in the announcement that the best videos will be shown at the top of those results.

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• How to optimize YouTube for business (on-demand webinar)
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• 5 ways to ace your YouTube SEO strategy in 2021

This is a great way to learn and use the information to optimize on the videos at the top, and create the content you want to share, making it easily discoverable.

It's true that not every brand will reap the rewards of this new change. Still, it's important to reframe and optimize how you share your content via the platform, based on this product update from YouTube.

Meaning, this is likely one of many changes to come from YouTube (and other platforms), as tech giants continue to innovate new ways to make relevant content their users want easier to find.

Google, YouTube's parent company, is a perfect example of this, as it is constantly changing and evolving to better present information for searchers:

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However you decide to utilize this tool, whether it be to up your hashtag game, give you better insights into YouTube content optimization,  or just looking for better ways for your content to be discovered, it all leads back to – reaching a new or your existing audience in a more engaging, memorable way.