- So YouTube have just released their own
keyword research tool,
but is it any good?
And can we make it any better?
All right.
Confession first, I know I said this in the past
that I hate YouTube dark mode.
Now I love it.
My eyes hurt.
I wear glasses.
This really helps me.
I've been converted.
- No!
- This tool is pretty easy to find in the YouTube studio.
You click on analytics and the tab over to the right
is called research.
It's slowly rolling out to all creators and all languages.
The tool itself is divided up into three tabs.
The first is a search across YouTube.
Anything you want to search for,
it will give you a answer to.
So if we do a quick, simple search for cryptocurrency,
it will give you all of the related searches
that are coming up as well as the search volume.
A cool little addition here is if you click the three dots
on the right hand side, it can take you
to Google trends where it automatically shows you
the search traffic on YouTube over the last 12 months.
Why is this not in dark mode?
Now searches across YouTube are not specific
to your channel, which is where this second tab
your viewers' searches comes into play.
And what this is gonna try and show you
is what your viewers are searching for on YouTube.
And as you might imagine,
we're getting YouTube education kind of search results.
Now here's where I have my first little bit of confusion
with this tool.
How to edit videos for YouTube.
Yes, it's saying that it does have a high search volume,
but when I go to Google trends,
it's telling me that it's at its lowest search volume
in 12 months.
So should I make a video on this or not?
Now at this point, you can click on the search term itself.
This will do a direct YouTube search,
and you can find out a little bit more
about what's going on on YouTube.
And what I see here is
large creators have well established videos
with millions of views on this topic.
Is this something I really wanna investigate?
Well, the truth is Vid IQ already has done that in the past.
And when we tried to make videos
about how to edit YouTube videos, they did okay.
One did excellent,
the other one somewhat tan.
Now I don't wanna do a shameless plug
or anything at this point (sirens blaring)
Vid IQ has had a free tool
that has done this for many years,
and what it adds is competition.
So if we go back to this search,
how to edit videos for YouTube.
Yes, there is a high search volume,
but there is also high competition as we've established.
So should a small creator try making a video
on how to edit YouTube videos?
They're gonna have to offer something very fresh, very new,
a unique perspective for it to break through
such well established content
according to the search rankings.
Ah, but YouTube will say they have a solution
to this problem for small creators.
And it comes in the form of content gap.
So on this first bubble where it says all searches,
click it and then click content gaps only.
What this is now gonna show you is apparently search terms
that if you mouse over this question mark are underserved
on YouTube.
Now, if you'll excuse me for a second
I thought I could do this entire recording standing up,
but my back is killing.
I need to sit down. (machine whirring)
(bell ringing)
YouTube describes these content gaps
as when viewers can't find any results for their searches
which I find really hard to believe
in this day and age on YouTube.
Viewers can't find an exact match for their search,
which seems to suggest that SEO still has a part to play
at least in YouTube search
or when viewers can't find relevant videos
for their searches.
For example, the content is old or of low quality.
Does that mean low quality in terms of viewer satisfaction
or low quality in terms of video resolution?
As for old content, let's dive into that a little bit.
As we can see here, the content gap
is how to change YouTube channel name,
and in response to that, I'm gonna show YouTube
exhibit A, B and C.
Two years ago we made a video
on how to change your YouTube channel name,
and it got over half a million views.
And as YouTube's functionality for changing your name
has evolved over the last couple of years.
We've made updated videos
that have got progressively less views
and have been discovered less by the audience.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm doing my job
and serving up YouTube new content on that content gap,
but it's not rewarding me with the views.
Urge to kill rising.
In another more extreme example,
we have how to make a YouTube short.
Another content gap, but of a medium search volume.
I would've thought content gaps
would all be of a higher search volume, but anyway,
in the search results
I made this video almost two years ago now,
how to make a YouTube short, complete beginner guide.
It has almost a million views,
but I knew as the YouTube shorts platform was evolving
that this video would be soon out of date.
And so I made a follow up video, which is far better,
far more up to date information.
And it has exactly the same title,
almost exactly the same thumbnail
and yet it only has 44,000 views
because for some reason YouTube still prefers this video
that's out of date.
That's happened to you, hasn't it?
Where you've made updated videos
to your best search ranked videos and have not performed.
Why is that YouTube?
Now I fully accept that this could be me
just having sour grapes.
The videos made here by Justin Brown
and Think Media could simply be better
than my updated video,
but here's what I think I've discovered
from the content gaps at least for Vid IQs list.
Although it suggests there is a content gap
for the search term,
YouTube still tends to massively favor one particular video
for that search term or a couple of videos.
In this example, how to hide subscribe accounts.
We have videos of tens of thousands of views,
but there is one outstanding video here,
which is quite old at this point
with two and a half million views.
And if I click on to it and go to the historical data
that we have here from Vid IQ,
it is still getting hundreds of views per hour.
We go back to the search results.
We can see that Think Media
have tried to edge into this search term as a content gap.
Nolan made this video a month ago.
If I click on it,
and then go to the historical data here, no doubt
this is a more up to date video and of better quality,
but currently YouTube isn't rewarding this video
with the views.
They're getting four views per hour
10 views an hour, 15 views an hour.
The other video from a couple of years ago
has 10 times as many views per hour.
So should I make a video
about how to hide YouTube subscribers?
I'm not entirely convinced, but what I will say
is that sometimes search based content can take awhile
to take off because we made a video
on how to hide subscribers in the past.
And it wasn't until a hundred days after it got published
that the views really started to pick up.
And then 400 days after it was published,
it really picked up in traffic, but now it's tailed off.
Mm, I guess it would only take a few hours.
Maybe you'll see that video on the Vid IQ channel very soon.
One additional thing to add here
is that you can filter by country,
be it for viewers' searches and content gaps.
If I click this second bubble here,
I don't have that many countries to choose from right now.
But if I filtered by United States
that will modify this content gap list a little bit.
What I seem to be finding as I use this tool more and more,
and at least in Vid IQ's case
is that the results at the top of a list
tend to be single solutions to single problems.
How to hide subscribers on YouTube.
How to verify your YouTube account.
How to change YouTube channel name.
What it shows less of is overall strategies.
How to get more views, more subscribers, get monetized.
Those do start to appear in the list further down.
We have one here that says free YouTube subscribers.
YouTube subscribe.
That's a bit random into the medium search volume.
Then we get a little bit more specific
how to get a lot of subscribers on YouTube.
YouTube subscriber hacks.
And this is where I would offer you
the alternative viewpoint from Vid IQs daily ideas tool
which does tend to know a little bit more specifically
about your channel.
It's accessed down the left hand navigation bar.
If you just scroll down, you'll see all of our Vid IQ tools
and Daily Ideas is here at the top.
And from the 50 Daily Ideas that we've been suggested here
from the tool, we can see a nice mix
of strategy based ideas and specific solutions.
How to get more views on YouTube videos, very obvious
but that's right at the heart of what we do here at Vid IQ.
How to increase subscribers on YouTube channels for shorts.
That's gotten a little bit more nuance.
How to make a thumbnail for YouTube videos.
Make a professional logo for YouTube channels.
How to find the best keywords for YouTube videos.
Ranking tags for YouTube videos.
Ironically, that's pretty much
the video we're making right now
about YouTube's research tool.
I think what I'm trying to say
is that while this is a promising start
from YouTube's own research tool,
it's quite basic at this point.
And let me give you another example of this.
In the content gaps, we have this phrase here,
copyright claim.
Now we as YouTubers all understand the premise of that,
but there isn't that much context here for us to work on.
So what we can do through Vid IQs own tools,
through our web applications
if you go to app.vidiq.com,
you can put that keyword phrase
into our keyword search tool,
and it's gonna take you to this page
which is not only gonna give you the keyword score
and, you know, the search volume and the competition,
but it's also gonna give you related keywords,
matching terms. and this one of the new
and personal favorite tools here.
It turns a keyword or a keyword phrase
into as many questions as you can possibly think of
to combat this potential search on YouTube.
And it looks a little bit like this.
What you have here is not only a ton of video ideas
on the topic of copyright claims,
but pretty much ready, made titles as well.
How to remove a copyright claim on YouTube.
How to use NCS music without copyright claims.
Very specific but really useful for a lot of creators.
Does copyright claim affect monetization?
A huge question that we get asked all of the time,
and in this particular query,
it has generated over 300 potential options.
That'll keep you busy.
If you're a copyright claim YouTube channel for years.
Now that we're over 10 minutes into this video
and only the hardcore, most committed creators
are still watching, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret.
The stuff that we've been focusing on in terms of research
and planning is not as important as it once was.
These days the YouTube recommendation system
relies a lot less on the literal search engine optimization
keyword research,
filling out a title, a description and tags
that matches YouTube's indexing.
What the recommendation system now prefers
is the emotion, the human trigger,
what convinces somebody to click on a video,
which means that thumbnails and titles
are even more important today.
And would you believe it?
We've got a tool that can help you with that.
(siren blaring)
Too obvious, this, isn't it?
So back on the Vi IQ web app
on the channel dashboard screen
you can take that keyword that was suggested
by YouTube's research tool, copyright claim
and feed it through our AI title recommendation tool.
Now we're going beyond just the keyword,
just the idea and packaging it up
into something that a human being may actually click.
Why YouTube has a copyright claim
on your video and what to do.
This is defined in the target audience
and teasing a possible solution in that title.
How to fight a copyright claim on YouTube.
This is giving the viewer the confidence to know
that mistakes do happen with copyright claims
and the encouragement,
the permission to potentially fight what may be wrong.
The goal of a title is to make a human being care,
to create intrigue, to generate curiosity.
And these title recommendations are trying to do just that.
And if you're not happy with any of them,
all you need to do is generate new recommendations,
and you get a brand new set
of titles based around copyright claim.
Why YouTube thinks I stole a video?
What an intriguing title that is.
I could definitely make something out of that.
Now, just for completeness, I do wanna go back
to the YouTube research tool to let you know
what the third tab does.
Next to each of your search terms,
you have this bookmark icon.
If you click that and then go to the save tab,
this is where all of those search terms are saved.
What I hope we've all learned
on this little journey through YouTube's new tool
is that successful videos take a lot more
than just keyword research.
There is always more investigation that needs to be done.
You can't just take a keyword at face value.
You need to know what's already out there on YouTube
that represents that keyword
and figure out how to package that keyword
into something that's going to create curiosity.
And if you wanna learn more
about how you can create curiosity in your titles.
(siren blaring)
Yep, it's another one of them.
You'll discover seven ways to do that
in the video over here.