Hi Adria – Unfortunately, I don’t know any tool available to the industry that does this. We have our own tool that we build that allows us to do that.

Mo, not necessarily. A lot of videos for a topic may indeed indicate high ranking competition, but not always. How difficult it is to rank a video for a keyword depends on a lot of factors, such as how much search volume there is for that keyword. However, even if there are a lot of videos already, if few or none of them are high quality and/or don’t have good ranking signals (such as watch time, user engagement, etc), then creating a higher quality video that users will engage with might be the winner. Alternatively, if you find your main keyword is already filled with high authority videos, think about creating something for a longer-tail niche of the topic where there might be less competition.

So if I planned a website showing a large number of unboxing videos of iPhones and YT already has numerous videos with a large number of views, ratings, shares, subscribers and links (indicating authority) I would have a hard time ranking?

Mo, for a query like “unboxing videos,” the user intent (to find videos) is pretty clear, so it’s not surprising that Google shows mostly video results. In a recent keynote conversation with our CEO, Eric Enge, at the Pubcon conference, Google’s Gary Illyes explained that different elements “bid” for a position in universal search, and are awarded spots depending on a judgment about how suitable they are to the intent of the query. When a user says “videos” as part of the query, Google is going to give ranking relevant videos high priority.
So for a query like that, just seeing a lot of videos is not in itself an indication that there is tough competition for the query, as there is no indication of the relative authority of the top ranking videos.

Hi Jeremy – we definitely saw a strong correlation of links impacting the ranking of Google posts. We believe that this is one of the major ways that the ranking algorithms differ between the two sites. There was no apparent correlation between links to the video and ranking in YouTube.