This is what our YouTube search traffic looks like.
And this is the day we started focusing on our video SEO efforts.
Now, with YouTube SEO, it all starts with keyword research.
And throughout the time of our exponential growth, I've tried seven tools to grow our channel.
But of the seven that I've tried, I'm only using four today.
Now, aside from my undeniable charisma,
I give a lot of credit to these tools for helping us grow our channel fast.
And today, I'm going to show you the best YouTube keyword research tools and how to
use them to find topics worthy of your time.
Stay tuned.
[music]
What's up creators?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors and dominate your niche.
If you're trying to decide on the best keyword research tools for YouTube, here's a list
of the popular ones I've tried.
TubeBuddy; vidIQ; Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer; Google Trends; YouTube Autosuggest; KeywordTool.io;
and Ahrefs' Content Explorer.
Now, rather than filling up our time together talking about each of these tools,
I'm going to focus on the four that I still use, making them the best keyword tools for YouTube in my opinion.
So with that said, let's talk about the tools and some actionable use cases.
The first tool that I use is called TubeBuddy.
TubeBuddy is a freemium browser extension for Chrome.
When you search for a keyword in YouTube, it adds some additional keyword data
in the sidebar called "Search Explorer."
Now, there are three sections that I want to talk about.
First is the Keyword Score tab.
You can use these little colored bars to estimate search volume, see the total number of global
searches that happen each month for your query, get an estimate of competition, and an overall
keyword score on a scale of 0 to 100.
And in my opinion, I think you should ignore these.
I think that the search volume bar is a nice visual representation of relative search volume,
but their number of searches per month is just way off.
As you can see, they're claiming that the keyword "SEO"
gets searched 7.1 million times globally on YouTube.
Now, I'm not the type of person to make bold claims without any kind of proof.
So let's compare this with our YouTube Analytics.
For the month of April, you'll see that our YouTube search traffic was very steady for this video.
And it's because we ranked in position 1 and 2 for the keyword "SEO" the entire month.
But if we look at the specific keyword data in YouTube Studio, you'll see that we had a total
of 68,629 impressions across all keyword rankings.
That's less than 1% of the 7.1 million monthly searches TubeBuddy suggests.
Now, as for competition score, I wasn't able to find a description of how this is calculated.
And seeing as there are numerous factors that go into a video ranking on YouTube, I don't know
if I can trust it because I wouldn't know what I'm trusting.
But there are two features that I consistently use in TubeBuddy.
The first is their Rank tracker tool.
Through their web app, you can add a list of keywords to track, schedule weekly or monthly reports,
and get search ranking results for your videos as well as your competitors'.
The second feature is their "Most Used Tags" widget.
Now, while I don't believe tags have a huge or maybe even any impact on search rankings,
it gives you a general idea of tags other competing videos are using for their videos.
So by using relevant ones, you can help YouTube understand your video better and possibly
heighten your chances of getting suggested impressions and views.
I'll touch on this more in a bit.
For now, let's move on to the second tool, and that's vidIQ.
vidIQ is also a Chrome extension.
And when you perform a search in YouTube, it also has similar data as TubeBuddy in the sidebar.
They give you some stats of the top-ranking videos, provide a keyword score, related queries,
and top-search keywords.
But they have two unique features that are worth mentioning.
First is their Keyword research tool.
To me, their global search volume numbers seem closer to what matches our YouTube analytics data,
although still slightly overinflated.
But again, their competition score is a little bit strange.
They describe it as, "a measure of how many videos are competing for this keyword in YouTube's search results.
A lower number represents less competition."
As far as I know, this score is based on engagement stats,
number of subscribers of the top ranking channels,
social shares, and more.
But from my experience, ranking videos on YouTube isn't exactly linear.
For example, I've found topical relevance of videos within your channel to impact rankings
as well as your ability to keep viewers on the YouTube platform in a single session;
also known as session watch time.
I don't think these can be measured accurately by a third-party tool, which is why I don't
usually recommend paying much attention to competition scores.
The other feature that vidIQ has that I think is the best in the industry is their trending
videos feature, specifically for channels.
Basically, you can go to any channel, click on the "Trending" tab, and see the channel's
top videos by "view velocity."
For example, if I had a channel where I reviewed various gadgets and electronics, I might go to
a competing channel like this one who clearly has gained a lot of views.
Next, I'll click on "Trending."
And you'll see a handful of their videos with the highest view velocity, meaning the videos
with the highest number of views per hour.
Now, why is this valuable?
With YouTube, videos tend to get a ton of traction in the first 48 hours.
And that's because YouTube will promote your videos to your subscribers.
And if it was a good one, they'll promote it to new audiences through browse features and other places.
So what you want to look for on this trending tab specifically in regards to keyword research
are videos that were published a long time ago,
yet they're still getting a consistent number of views.
Reason being, consistency usually comes from YouTube search or suggested, meaning there's
a high probability of the video having a longer shelf life.
So you'll see this one on the best mirrorless cameras in 2019, which was published 5 months ago,
and it's still generating a ton of views today.
This might be a topic you want to create a video on
and work on ranking it in both YouTube search and YouTube suggested.
The next tool I use is Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.
And this is our keyword research tool, which runs on a database of over 760 million YouTube keywords.
You can search for almost any keyword and see metrics like country-specific and global search volume,
and the number of clicks that happen on the search results.
Now, the power of Keywords Explorer is in the Keyword ideas reports.
You can use any of these reports to find a ton of topics that have search demand.
For example, if I go to the Phrase match report for the keyword "makeup,"
you'll see nearly 200,000 keywords that contain this word along with their keyword metrics.
Now, this is probably too many to filter through manually.
So assuming I had a makeup channel with tutorials, I can click the "Include" filter and search
for keywords that also contain "tutorial" or "tutorials."
Now, if you have your own list of keywords, you can enter up to 10,000 queries at once
and instantly get a list with all their keyword metrics.
This is where combining TubeBuddy's "Most Used Tags" or vidIQ's related searches can help.
So let's say I wanted to create an "eye makeup tutorial," which gets around 8,400 monthly searches in the US.
I paste that into YouTube search and then I'll go to the "Most Used Tags" box.
Next, I'll select all of these keywords and click "copy."
Then I'll go to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer and paste them in the list with YouTube set as my search engine
and United States set as my target country.
And to keep things relevant, I'll set the Word count filter to only show queries that have 2 to 5 words.
Now, I can skim through the list, and add other relevant tags like "makeup tutorial for beginners,"
"eyeshadow tutorial," "makeup for beginners," and more.
Alternatively, you could create dedicated tutorials on these videos since you can tell right away that they
all have decently high search volumes.
The final tool and probably most unique way to improve your video SEO is Ahrefs Content Explorer.
And when I say video SEO, I'm referring to ranking these videos in Google too.
Content Explorer is a searchable database with over a billion pages of content, where you can get
social and SEO metrics for each page.
Now, as for SEO metrics, this tool provides data for Google SEO.
So why is this important for YouTubers like you?
Well, Google is the world's largest and most used search engine.
And I'm sure you've seen features like this
and this appear in the search results.
Well, Content Explorer can help you discover these keywords,
so you can double-up on your views from two search engines.
And I've actually been putting this in practice to get more views to our videos.
And as you can see, the traffic we get to our videos from Google, is no joke.
Here's how it's done.
Type in a query like site:youtube.com inurl:watch.
And this part of the query will narrow down results to just YouTube videos.
Next, add title: and then a broad keyword related to topics you create content on.
Now, this will narrow down results to videos that have the word "makeup" in the title.
Let's run the search.
Now, to see which videos get traffic from Google, I'll sort the results by organic traffic.
And you can immediately see great topic ideas that have the potential to attract a ton of views
from Google in addition to whatever traffic you'll be getting from YouTube.
Click on the organic traffic number, and you'll see all keywords this video ranks for in Google,
as well as the estimated amount of traffic the keyword accounts for.
And there we have it folks, all of the keyword research tools that I think are the best
to find topics that will get you more views.
Let me know in the comments what your favorite YouTube keyword tools are,
and make sure to subscribe for more actionable SEO and marketing tutorials.
And if you want to learn more about the actual keyword research process I use,
watch the next video and work your way up to getting more views consistently.
I'll see you in the next tutorial.