YouTube gets over 30 million visitors per day. That’s more than enough traffic to go around; still, many YouTubers struggle to seize a decent share of this traffic. While several factors could hamper a channel’s success, poor keyword research is one of the most common.
If you want to get more views for your content, you must position yourself for more visibility. And that’s what proper keyword research can help you achieve. This article will help you understand the concept of YouTube keyword research and why it’s important for your channel. You’ll also learn to perform keyword research like a pro using a highly efficient tool.
What Is YouTube Keyword Research?
YouTube keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing words and phrases that people enter into the search box when looking for videos on YouTube. During the research, the YouTuber uncovers queries to target, the popularity of these queries, their ranking difficulty, and cost per click. The keyword researcher then includes these keywords in their content to rank higher on YouTube’s search engine results page (SERP) and attract more views.
The video description and title are the two best places to fix these keywords. They give YouTube’s algorithm clues as to what your video is about.
Why Is Keyword Research Important for Your YouTube Channel?
Why is keyword research a big deal for YouTubers? Here are three main reasons.
Get More Views
Keyword research is the best way to get consistent views for your content. When you know the right keywords and fix them strategically into your content, it gets the attention of the YouTube algorithm, which then promotes your content on the search results leading to a higher number of views, likes, and subscriptions.
Understand Your Target Audience
It gives you a clear insight into what your viewers are searching for. And if you know what your target audience wants to see, you can create content around their queries and cater to their needs. You can even build a well-rounded content strategy off keyword research. That way, you don’t have to struggle brainstorming content ideas every time.
Understand Your Competition
A keyword’s competitiveness is the second most important metric to check after its volume (total number of searches within a defined timeframe). Keyword research will reveal which keywords have already worked well for your competitors. The more competitive a keyword is, the harder it will be to rank for it. If an authoritative channel already ranks for the keyword, it’s best to avoid it and focus on less competitive keywords. But if the channel is about the same size as yours, you stand a good chance to compete.
4 Types of YouTube Keywords
To maximize the results of your keyword research, you have to understand the different types of keywords and how they work. These keyword types are listed below.
YouTube Channel Keyword
These types of keywords are meta tags that summarize the category or purpose of your channel. Specifically, they help YouTube understand the type of content you produce and who your target audience is. For example, if you own a channel specializing in delivering Italian cooking classes, your ideal channel keywords would be ‘Italian cooking, Italian recipes, or Italian cuisine.’ Ideally, you should select about seven keywords like this so that the extent of topics you can cover is neither too broad nor too narrow.
YouTube uses channel keywords to decide which videos to promote in the Suggested Video column. It also screens these keywords to suggest similar channels to users. So if you use these keywords correctly, you’re very likely to benefit from the extra exposure.
Short-Tail Keyword
As the name implies, short-tail keywords (also known as headwords) are search queries consisting of one to three words. These keywords usually have a large search volume; hence they are highly competitive. If you’re running a new channel, it’s best to avoid these keywords and target longer ones. Not only because they are hard to rank for, but because they have low conversion rates as they are not well-targeted.
Good examples of short-tail keywords for an Italian food channel would be ‘popular Italian dishes, best Italian food, or traditional Italian recipes.’ Most users begin their search with these keywords, but they don’t quite pinpoint their search intentions.
Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are search queries that have more than three words in them. These keywords don’t bring as much traffic as short-tail keywords, but traffic gotten from here would be more relevant to the channel. Long-tail keywords are more targeted than their short-tail variants; hence they drive more conversion.
Using the Italian food channel as an example, ideal long-tail keywords would include ‘best Italian dishes for a dinner party’ or ‘traditional Italian recipes for weight loss.’ If you’re looking to get easy wins for your YouTube channel, target long-tail keywords and see how fast your rankings improve.
Geo-Targeting Keyword
These keyword types target a specific neighborhood, city, state, or country. Some local businesses run YouTube channels to attract potential customers to their storefronts. If you run such a channel, endeavor to include the name of your location in the title or description of your content. Examples of geo-targeting keywords include ‘best Italian dishes in Colorado’ or ‘prices of Italian dishes in Alabama.’
Steps to Finding the Best Keywords for Your YouTube Channel and Videos
Pick a Topic: Find a Search Intent
The first step in discovering the right keywords for your YouTube video content is to find out what your audience wants to learn about. And to do this, you need to understand the user’s persona and journey. Who are they? What is their profession? What are their primary pain points? What do they value most? And what are their goals? What’s important to them in selecting a product or service provider? These are some questions you need to answer.
For example, users looking for video content on Italian food recipes could include a curious stay-at-home mom looking to try out new dishes for the family and a college student who wants to prepare a nice Italian meal on a tight budget. Or an amateur chef who wants to improve on his food decoration. These people are looking for your content for various reasons: new culinary techniques, economy, creativity. Once you figure out this part, you can move on to the next step.
Leverage Youtube’s Autocomplete Keywords
After you’ve determined which topics to cover, type in the short-tail keyword into the YouTube search bar (in this case, ‘Italian dishes for…’). While typing, you’ll notice a list of keyword suggestions under your search, which YouTube automatically generates for you. These suggestions are known as YouTube Autocomplete Keywords. YouTube suggests these keywords because many other people use them to find video content on the platform. So if you can take note of them and use them in your new content, you’ll stand a good chance to rank.
Did you notice how this step takes you from having only short-tail keywords to gathering plenty of long-tail keywords for your video content? With YouTube’s Autocomplete Keywords, you can generate endless long-tail keywords to rank for. All you need to do is type in your short-tail keyword and keep adding a new alphabet to its end from a-z.
Find Keywords From Other Popular Videos
Another way to find the best YouTube keywords for your videos is to look at what your competitors are doing. Instead of starting from scratch, visit one of your competitor’s channels and explore the video section. Sort the video list by ‘Most popular’ and take note of the keywords used in the description and titles of these videos.
You can also look at their tags if you want to extend your research beyond the videos’ titles and descriptions. Unfortunately, You won’t find these tags on the user interface because they are hidden, so you’ll need to check the page’s HTML. To do that, right-click on the page and click ‘view page source. It will reveal the page’s HTML code. Use Ctrl F to open a search box, type in ‘keyword,’ and explore the search results.
This method effectively finds top-performing keywords, but there’s a catch. Avoid the authoritative channels in your niche and only target channels about your size. It’s harder to outrank the bigger channels because they already have way more shares, likes, comments, and subscribers than you do. And these metrics give them a pretty solid advantage over your channel.
Evaluate Keywords
After doing your research, you’ll most likely have more keywords than you’d need. So you have to select the best and focus on them while giving up the rest. Ideally, the best keywords to stick with are those with moderate to high popularity and low competition. But using the above research methods, there’s no way to figure out precisely the keyword volume and its competitiveness. You won’t even be able to determine whether or not pursuing a particular topic is worthwhile.
If you choose to filter keywords based on your gut feeling about their potential performance, you’ll be doing so blindly. You need precise and comprehensive data to single out the golden keywords from the rest. And to do that, you need an efficient YouTube keyword research tool.
Use YouTube Keyword Research Tools
A YouTube keyword research tool provides comprehensive and precise data to help you make the most of your research. A tool like this can help you perform a competition study because it spells out the authoritativeness of other channels in terms of keywords they rank for.
There are dozens of YouTube keyword research tools, so deciding which one is best for you can be puzzling. Before subscribing to any tool, make sure it operates using a simple system ideal for beginners. That’s the idea behind the tool in the first place: to make research fast and painless. Also, ensure that the research tool combines many different features in a single program. That way, you get to enjoy the convenience and economy of using only one tool.
If this description matches your ideal keyword research tool, consider giving VidTechy a try. VidTechy is a free cloud-based tool that can help you grow your channel fast and outrank competitors through advanced search results and accurate metrics.
How to Do YouTube Keyword Research With VidTechy
Here’s a step-by-step guide to using this amazing software for your YouTube keyword research.
Topic Research
- After creating a free account on Vidtechy.com, log in to your account and go to your dashboard.
- Under the Research Tools section, you’ll see Topic Research. Click on it.
- On the new page, you’ll see a box that prompts ‘Type Any Keyword…’. Enter your desired keyword and click Suggest Keywords.
- The next page that comes on will contain a plethora of ideas around your keyword. These ideas are categorized into Questions, Prepositions, and Comparisons.
- Below the search box, you’ll see two buttons where you can select how you prefer to visualize the ideas, whether as mind maps or as linear data.
- Select the topics that interest you.
Keyword Autocomplete
- You’ll find this option next to Topic Research under the Research Tools section. Open it.
- On the new page, you’ll see four boxes. One of them is where you’ll enter the keyword related to your topic. The other three are labeled Provider, Country, and Language. Select the appropriate options and click on Start.
- The tool will start loading keyword suggestions indicating how many it has found. When you’re satisfied with the number of suggestions it has found, click stop, and your results will appear on the page.
- Alongside the keywords, you’ll find the keyword length, word count, source, country, top 10 badges, and a link to the keyword analyzer.
Keywords Analyzer
- You can proceed to the Keyword Analyzer directly from the Keyword Autocomplete results or find it under the SEO Tools section of your dashboard.
- If you access it directly from the Keyword Autocomplete results, you’ll find a page containing all the relevant data you need to evaluate your keywords. But if you open it from your dashboard, you’ll have to enter your chosen keywords and click on Analyze.
- The data contained in the Keyword Analyzer results include the search volume, competition, optimization strength, and the channel with the highest ranking for that keyword.
- You’ll also see whether any other video has ranked for that keyword in the last seven days or one month.
- Other detailed statistics in the Keyword Analyzer results include the total video search results, latest published video, closed captions, and the top 20 YouTube videos ranking for that keyword.
- The page also shows the minimum, maximum and average views, subscribers, likes, and duration. It also tells you the extent of opportunity you have to rank for the keyword.
With such precise information, you can decide whether or not to create content around the keyword. And if you decide it’s worthwhile, you can easily select the high-volume, low-competition keywords since VidTechy has shown them to you.
Final Thoughts
Are you ready to grow your channel quickly and outrank your competitors? If your answer is yes, you need a smart, reliable tool like VidTechy to assist you. Besides its research and SEO features, it also offers ad tools, auditing tools, and productivity. All these features are for free. So what are you waiting for? Sign up today and start growing your YouTube channel.
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