Here’s How Marketers Can Work With YouTube’s New Hashtag Search Results Pages

Did you know that you can search for videos by hashtag? YouTube introduced the ability to search by hashtag in 2018 – albeit imperfectly. In the past, searching by hashtag would yield both hashtagged content and other related video content. Now, when you search by hashtag, you’ll see a dedicated search results page that only lists videos with the hashtag in question. Alternatively, users can access hashtag search results pages by clicking on a linked hashtag that appears in a video caption or description anywhere on YouTube. The panel above a video is another commonplace to find hashtags on a YouTube page.

The big question, then, is how the search results pages will be organized. According to YouTube, the “best” videos will rise to the top of the page – likely meaning videos with the most plays. Marketers looking to better understand rising trends in the YouTube universe can treat YouTube hashtags like any other SEO keyword they might research to know how it performs. Plus, each hashtag search results page shows the number of channels that have published content with a given hashtag and how many videos in full use the hashtag. The is valuable intel to marketers who want a more profound sense of how a given topic performs, either on YouTube or in general.

YouTube hashtag search results will not phase out the importance of the mighty search engine – but their functionality is likely to continue to improve, growing an ever-more robust SEO ecosystem that lives under Google. If your brand is ready for an SEO reboot, ASTRALCOM can help. Learn more about how we transform businesses with search marketing.