Jump shot confirms that after Google, YouTube is the most popular search engine. If you have a YouTube channel and are looking to get more views, your main goal is to focus on keywords that drive search query. This YouTube keyword research the technique helped Ahref growing his YouTube channel from 10,000 to over 200,000 monthly views in one year.
Source: Ahref
Note: Ahref also gained around 50,000 new subscribers during the same period.
Let’s discuss some simple YouTube keyword research techniques that will help us find relevant, high search volume keywords.
YouTube auto-suggestion
- YouTube has a feature called autocomplete.
- This feature only suggests popular keywords.
- With suggestion, when you type a keyword relevant to your niche, you will receive a list of suggestions related to the term.
For example, if you type in “digital marketing,” you get suggestions like “digital marketing” and “digital marketing for beginners.”
Note: According to WordStream, YouTube autocomplete is useful for finding long-tail keywords.
Instead of doing it manually, if you want to research keywords using a tool, we suggest checking out KeywordTool.io.
This tool helps marketers identify hundreds of autocomplete suggestions for YouTube, Google, and other search engines.
Keep track of your competitors
- Study your competitors’ campaigns by finding new profitable keywords.
- Look for phrases or keywords your competitors use in their video title and description.
Here is the important question: How to spy on the keyword?
- Go to your competitor’s channel and click on the videos tab, then sort by the “most popular” option. This way you will find a list of the best videos.
- Now choose a video and take a look at the keywords used in the video title and description.
- As a result, you have a list of keywords around which you can optimize your videos.
- Now let’s look at video tags. YouTube video tags can be viewed on the HTML page.
- To check video tags, right-click the web page and select View Page Source.
- Search for “keywords” (using the shortcut CTRL+F). The terms that appear next to “keywords” are the video tags used by your competitor.
- There is also another way to find your competitors’ video tags.
- Install Chrome Plugins – Through this, an individual can see the video tags on the web page itself.
- For example, VidIQ And TubeBuddyThe extension gives you the exact tags that your competitors are using for their videos.
According to an industry study, using keywords in video tags helps you rank well on YouTube.
Important Factors of YouTube Keyword Research
- Well-chosen keywords (primary and secondary) help your video rank well on YouTube.
- We should carry out keyword research based on:
- Search volume: Choose keywords with high search volume because they drive more traffic to your video.
- Competition – Low-difficult keywords rank well on YouTube.
- Relevance – Always prefer keywords that are relevant to your content.
- Primary Keyword – Choose a keyword that defines the nature of your business.
- Secondary Keyword – Prefer keywords that are highly relevant to your primary keyword.
For example, if you have a machine learning video, you can choose your primary keyword and secondary keyword as follows:
Check Google search results
- When doing YouTube keyword research, go for the keywords that Google shows on the video results page (because they have high search volume), which means your video can get more views if it’s also ranked on Google.
- According to Backlinko, Google ranks videos with keywords like “how to” and “tutorials.”
- For example, on Google, when you search for machine learning tutorial or how to become a machine learning engineer, you get results for the following.
Ahref Site Explorer using Scraper extension
- Identify high-traffic YouTube videos using Ahref Site Explorer.
- Identify your competing channel on YouTube and select the “Videos” tab to check their uploads.
- Now copy and paste the video URLs into Ahrefs Site Explorer.
Source: Ahref
- If you want the process to be done quickly, we suggest using the Scraper extension. Right-click anywhere on the page and click “Scrape Similar”, then add this code to the “Selector” field:
- Now, under the Columns -> XPath Name section, type:
concat (‘https://www.youtube.com’, @href) |
- On the right side, you will get a list of high-traffic videos. So, select “Scrape” and “Copy to clipboard”.
- Now paste the results into the Ahrefs Batch Scan Toolselect URL mode -> start search -> sort by “Traffic” column from top to bottom.
- To see the keywords in the video list, select the down arrow (from the target domain) and click “Organic Keywords”.
Source: Ahref
This was the YouTube keyword research tool.
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Final Thoughts
So we have come to the end of the article on YouTube Keyword Research. In this article, we have discussed the top six techniques that will help us find top ranking keywords.
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