How to Rank Videos on YouTube with Keyword Research
Creating a video is pretty hard. It costs time and resources to make a good YouTube video that will get tons of views. But, the effort is worth it. This is why so many videos are out there. A good video will do a great job of selling your goods or services, taking traffic to your website, and driving conversion. But making a decent video probably won’t be enough to achieve those goals. You need to make sure that people can find the video you made. You have to put your video ahead of your target audience. This is where YouTube keyword research plays its part.
Keyword research is an essential part of YouTube SEO. But few people love keyword research. Keyword research can also be challenging, as nearly 44% of us only do it when needed. When you rarely do keyword research, it can seem like a massive project, and many pitfalls make it even more time-consuming.
Unfortunately, there is no official YouTube research tool, as is the case with Google. Worst of all, several popular third-party tools do nothing but kick back worthless Google Keyword Planner numbers.
Luckily, there are some excellent free and paid YouTube keyword tools. Below, we’ll explain what these are and how they function.
1. TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is a freemium research and analysis software for YouTubers. The tool links directly to your YouTube account to suggest videos, keywords, rankings, and just about all you need to grow in real-time. By analyzing your channel and so many others on YouTube, TubeBuddy can determine TubeBuddy can specify what works and what you may rank for to get the views that contribute to subscribers’ growth.
Through continually gathering data from the videos and channels on YouTube, the TubeBuddy app will direct your decisions on which video subjects to pursue, how more viewers can watch your videos and how your channel compares with other similar channels.
TubeBuddy does this by integrating effectively with your YouTube account. On related pages, apps tend to provide information and suggestions for change. For example, when you upload a video, you will see tag recommendations and a checklist of the best practices relevant to the YouTube algorithm.
2. vidIQ
It is another freemium chrome plugin that adds additional data to the YouTube UI. It has a pro version starting at only $10/month. It may sound too expensive for an entry-level Youtuber, but after learning about the services, you’ll feel that $10 is a peanut price we’re paying for such a great tool.
Most of its features resemble TubeBuddy. It displays search volume, competition, overall keyword score, related searches, keyword stats, and tags from top-ranking videos in the search results.
VidIQ doesn’t tell us the exact formula they’re using to rate the “competition.” they claim that they check the “total amount of engagements (through YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook), view the video’s velocity, and views.”
The figures you see on video reports are almost similar to TubeBuddy’s. One minor but useful difference, however, is the ability to export video tags to CSV in one click (without first adding to the tag lists).
VidIQ shows channel tags as well alongside video tags, while TubeBuddy does not. It helps have a sense of the main subjects of a channel, and whether it is worth reviewing more of their videos for new video ideas.
Like TubeBuddy, when you upload a video, vidIQ recommends tags, too.
3. Ahrefs keyword explorer
Keywords Explorer runs on a database of more than 640 million keywords on YouTube. You can search almost every keyword and see clickstream data-driven metrics, including local and global search volume (for nearly every country), clicks, percentage clicks, etc.
What does that mean in practical terms? It means you can see how many users are searching for a question on YouTube every month, as well as how many of those searches result in clicking on the search engine results. Looking at clicks and volume together will tell you more than just looking isolatedly at the search volume.
Keywords Explorer also helps you to search the SEO metrics for up to 10,000 keywords at the moment. Simply insert them in, or upload a file. Alternatively, if you are short of keywords, look for a seed keyword and check out one of the five reports of keyword ideas.
4. YouTube (Autosuggest)
Go to YouTube, then type some keyword in the search box. You will see the particular suggestions there. Such recommendations are based on similar questions that people have already searched for on YouTube and are a fantastic video inspiration source. This is a great free way to do youtube keyword research, however, it can take a little bit of time. Use an underscore (_) between words, for even more ideas. This works almost like a wildcard.
YouTube, unfortunately, does not show search volumes. The relative importance of the queries is not shown either (i.e., how much more popular one word is than the other). You can paste data into a premium keyword tool such as the Ahrefs keywords explorer for accurate search volumes.
5. KeywordTool.io
KeywordTool.io is a freemium software that is basically a bulk autosuggestion scraper for YouTube.
What is it that we mean by bulk? Well, it scraps the autosuggest results for the keyword that you are searching for. Yet it also adds and prepends the question with various letters and numbers, scraping the autosuggest data for those.
It then splits down the keywords into four tabs:
- Keywords suggestions: All auto-suggested keywords (excluding those written as questions)
- Questions: Auto-suggested asking keywords
- Prepositions: Auto-suggested keywords with propositions (from, for, after, etc.)
- Hashtags: Auto-suggested keywords with hashtags
Usually, you come up with a list of some hundred keywords ideas. You can quickly search these results, and add “negative keywords” to screen out questions that include specific words or phrases.
The downside is that free users don’t have search volumes available. You will have to pay for those if you want to. Paid users often get up to twice as many recommendations on keywords as opposed to the free version.
That said, I’ve never seen the free edition kick back more than 800–900 keywords. So I’m pretty sure that even the paid subscription will max out at about 2,000 keyword recommendations.
Final Thoughts
If you want more views on YouTube, it’s important to target keywords with YouTube search volume. So, use the software in this post to your benefit and check for specific keywords, then create videos using them.
Did we skip any useful YouTube keyword tools for youtube keyword research? Inform us in the comment section, and we’ll bring detailed content about them.