It can be hard to know just what type of video you need to make to drive traffic and improve conversion rates on your site. What if there were free tools that you are probably already using that could tell you exactly what to do for your next video? Here is an indepth guide to using Google Adwords, Google Analytics, or Google Webmaster to figure out what to feature in your next video.

Google Adwords and Video

At first you might be thinking that paid search and video have very little do with each other. That’s not entirely true – video can help improve your quality score, for instance. In this case, however, we are after Adwords’ reporting tools and keyword data.

Go into your Adwords account, and look at your main campaign for the company or brand that you are looking to feature in your video. Open the Keywords report, and make sure you have at least one month of data to work with. Click on Details, then select “All” under Search Terms. This will display all the search terms entered into Google that triggered your ads (you check these regularly, right?). You may want to filter your keywords for a certain number of impressions to make sure your video will potentially be interesting to a significant number of people, and also filter out any negative keywords.

Next, depending on the goal for your video and the stage of your marketing funnel you want to target, you may choose to sort your data by different columns. For instance, if you want to use video to attract more top of funnel traffic, you may want to look at keywords that have a lot of impressions, but not as high a click-through rate as you might like. If you want to drive conversions instead, look at your keywords with the lowest cost per acquisition, highest volume of conversions, or a lower conversion rate than you would like.

For example, if you sell toaster ovens, and you want to increase top of funnel search traffic, you might find a lot of people are searching for long tail keywords, like “best toaster oven recipes,” or “new uses for toaster ovens.” Either one could potentially be an inspiration for a video series, and could even entail user-generated video content.

If one keyword phrase isn’t substantial enough to build a video around, you can broaden your approach and use several in one video. It’s important to select keywords that are all aligned with the same goal, and are closely related. The idea is to stay focused in order to keep your video short and sweet.

Google Analytics and Video

Google Analytics provides such a wealth of data about the traffic on your site, it can be hard to know where to look to get the most relevant data for a specific project. The Queries report nested under Search Engine Optimization in the Acquisition section is a great place to start for using video to drive organic traffic and conversions from that channel.

This report looks at all the search terms entered into Google that resulted in a page on your site being viewed by the user. That metric is tallied up as Impressions, and you can also see total Clicks, Average Position (your rank in the search results), and the Click Through Rate for different search terms. Note that this report excludes Paid Search data, which is partly why it’s important to also reference Adwords for keyword data.

The data presented in this Google Analytics report is less complex than the data presented in Adwords, which is a potential advantage. The same data can be found in Google Webmaster in the Search Queries report in the Search Traffic section.

Since we are now only looking at organic traffic, we are really talking about using video for SEO purposes. One great advantage to video is that you can create a keyword-rich landing page around your video, and also provide a video transcript, greatly increasing your keyword density on the page without being guilty of keyword stuffing, where you nonsensically cram as many phrases into a page as possible. With a title and description aligned with your targeted keywords, you now have a video that Google will like very, very much. Creating a video sitemap for your videos would be the icing on the SEO cake.

It’s not just about keywords, of course. Video has been shown to increase time on page and to improve site visitor engagement. These are increasingly important stats since Google and other search engines are becoming more sophisticated about how they judge link quality.

Again, make sure you have at least a month’s worth of data, and sort the data by impressions. You want to look for any keywords in this list that have a lot of impressions, but a less than great position in search results. Those keywords are optimal to target for SEO improvements.

Is it Working? Ask Google Webmaster

So, how do you know if this particular video marketing strategy is working for you or not? This is where Google Webmaster can come in. Not only can you check the same data we just used in Analytics to identify new keywords to target by going to the Search Queries report, you can also look at whether you have managed to increase content keyword density for targeted terms.

You can find this information in the section called “Google Index” in the “Content Keywords” report. Ideally, you will see greater significance for the keywords you targeted in your video after launching it. This should translate into higher search rankings and better CTR in your Search Queries report, although this does depend to a certain extent on external factors, like the level of competition for these keywords.

If you try any of these tips, we would love to hear about! Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.