The Complete Guide to YouTube Keyword Research and Planning

When we create content, the first thing we do is to optimize it so that people can find our content, right? The same thing goes with YouTube. 

YouTube doesn’t need any introduction. As per the reports from JumpShot, YouTube is the second most used social media platform. Not just that, it is the world’s second biggest search engine after Google. 5 billion videos are watched daily and it covers almost a third part of the internet users, globally and if you are still not using video as a marketing tool, you are losing your business.

The numbers specified above clearly states that YouTube is a paradise of marketers. According to a study in 2018, videos generate 1200% more shares than graphics and text. The reason is the human brain which is bewitched by the movement. 

When you consider these facts, one thing is comprehensible and that is YouTube is the right platform for the brands who are looking to create awareness and interact with their audience.

As I specified, YouTube is the second highest used search engine, creating an engaging and valuable video is not enough. You need to go for SEO. 

Yes, you guessed it right! On YouTube, SEO plays a major role to increase your organic impressions, views, and subscribers just like on Google. To ensure that your videos reach your target audience, you need to do two important things - SEO of the video and the keyword research for the video.

To rank your video on YouTube, you need to perform the following steps - 

1. Video Keyword Research

Whenever we talk about SEO, be it a website or a video, keyword research is the primary step. YouTube keyword research lets you figure out what people are looking for and how you can serve them or in other terms, it helps you to understand the people’s search intent and what sort of videos you can create for them.

To initialize this, you can use any of the YouTube keyword research tools that I will cover in this blog. You should have a general idea of the keywords related to your business or service. Just put the general keyword and get the relevant keywords with the average traffic on them. 

You can perform the keyword research on YouTube itself with the help of YouTube autocomplete. All you have to do is to type a keyword idea on YouTube and you will receive a list of suggested results in the dropdown. This will help you to generate keyword ideas.

You can also perform competitive research. You can analyze your competitors’ videos or videos that are ranking on the top positions. Check out the keywords that have been used in the meta title and desc of the videos. After generating keyword ideas, you can use a YouTube keyword research tool to find the search volume of these keywords and can choose the other keywords that are relevant to your business. 

2. Create engaging and retaining videos

You should create videos that can retain and engage users. Always remember, your goal should be to retain the audience because a video with a high retention rate is much preferred by YouTube than others. No matter your video has a great meta title and desc with good ranking, but if your video retention rate is low, you can face a drop in the ranking.

Always focus on creating content that is useful, encouraging and valuable to people who are watching it. This can help your videos to rank well because interesting and valuable videos will have high retention and engagement rates. YouTube analyzes the performance of a video through these rates.

Retention rate refers to how much time people are spending on your video and engagement rate refers to how people react to your videos. Engagement includes the likes, dislikes, views, comments, and subscribers count. You can increase these rates by creating quality video content.

3. Appealing Video Title and Thumbnail works well

Whenever searching for a video, you may have noticed that the videos on the top positions have appealing thumbnails and interesting and relevant titles. These types of videos attract the attention of the viewers. It not only increases their CTR (click-through rate) but also impacts on their ranking. Just like engagement and retention rates, CTR is also important in terms of ranking.

Suppose you have a video that is ranking well on YouTube but viewers are still not clicking it. Then what will be the problem here? The problem lies in the title or thumbnail of your video. It not only decreases your CTR but also the rank and YouTube is smart enough to understand these factors and it can demote your video. To avoid such things, use an appealing thumbnail and interesting and bold title that is relevant to your video. Always use your target keyword in the title of your video.

4. Video optimization

If you have created user friendly video content, then video optimization is the most important step that can improve your video’s ranking. Nowadays, YouTube can put subtitles in your videos by transcribing your video content, automatically. Therefore, putting subtitles in your video can have an impact on ranking. You can use your targeted keywords in the subtitles, a couple of times. Don’t try to stuff keywords in the video content; just put them in a natural way. 

Not just the video content, you should optimize the video title and description with the targeted keywords. You can optimize your video’s meta title and desc by using the following guidelines

• Target your primary keyword in the title.
• Create a relevant description of 250 words or more.
• Add your primary keyword in the first 25 words of your video’s description.
• Don’t just focus on the length but also the relevancy and quality of the content.
• If possible, start the content with the primary keyword
• Use your 2-3 targeted keywords in the content 3-4 times.
• Add the relevant and target keywords in the meta tags section of the video

Using these guidelines, you can optimize your video and serve the people with amazing content.

5. Video Promotion

Video promotion is one of the best ways to increase the views and likes on your videos. You can promote your videos on various platforms and channels such as other social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. You can add your video to your website.

You can promote your video on YouTube, itself or other video promotion websites. Remember, the aim is to generate the audience and engagement for your videos.

Best YouTube Keyword Researching Tools (Paid and Free)

As you know, SEO is all about keywords. Without proper keyword research, you cannot get anywhere. To get the relevant keywords for your video, you can use keyword researching tools. As I specified above, here I am sharing the list of some tools for YouTube keywords that include both paid and free tools. 

1. TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is considered to be the easiest YouTube keyword research tool. It is a Chrome extension with free and premium versions. This extension displays a sidebar to the YouTube window where it shows the keywords insights. It provides information such as the competition, traffic volume, and the keyword score. 

The keyword score is calculated out of 100. It provides you the complete information related to a particular keyword such as the views on a keyword, searches per month, subscribers count, etc. 

Not just that, you will be provided with a list of relevant and quality keywords that you can utilize in your video. This tool is effective for long-tail keywords that you can use to optimize your video.

It also serves as a rank tracker which can track your YouTube organic search ranking and your competitors’ ranking too. You can schedule the report download with TubeBuddy.

2. vidIQ

vidIQ is similar to TubeBuddy in terms of functionalities but with some differences. vidIQ is also a Chrome extension with a freemium version. It also displays a side tab in YouTube's user interface that includes the metrics about the keywords and the video. It provides information such as search volume, competition, tag suggestions from top videos, relevant queries, keyword score, the status of keywords, etc. 

After installing this extension, you get the competition score and the tags of a video whenever you click a video. Not just that, when you upload a new video, this extension provides the relevant tags that are used by other people for similar videos.

The main difference between the vidIQ and TubeBuddy is that when you check your competitor’s channel, you can find out the trending videos of them. 

This information helps in searching video content that is trending and you can use it to make your videos.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the free YouTube keyword research tools. As it is the property of Google, the results are quite accurate and reliable. It provides you a complete analysis of the keywords. You can check the YouTube keywords on Google Trends by simply changing the search settings to YouTube.

Google Trends let you find and analyze keywords based on filters such as demographics, data range, etc. It provides you with complete information about user behavior and interests. You can check the suggestion and add relevant keywords to your video content.

4. Morning Fame

Morning Fame is a premium tool that has its own interface and platform. It is not an extension or add-on. This tool package starts from USD 10 per month depending upon the pricing strategy. 

The pricing varies as per the duration (monthly or annually). You can perform keyword research in two ways

• Search by entering a general keyword or keyword idea
• Search by entering competitors’ video URL.

Before it, you have to choose a topic related to your business niche. It will extract the data and will show the relevant keywords. To get insights about a particular keyword, all you have to do is click on the keyword and it will show the information such as search volume, competition, etc. This tool offers a very unique feature that includes “good keyword choices for smaller channels” and “good keyword choices for larger channels”.

Similar to vidIQ, Morning Fame provides you tag suggestions whenever you upload a new video. These suggestions are based on the trending videos, relevancy, and competitors.

5. Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Ahrefs is known to many SEOs as it is an SEO analysis tool offering keyword research and auditing. You can explore and search YouTube keywords by setting the targeted platform to YouTube.

You can get detailed information such as the local and global search volume, clicks, etc. You can export the list of related keywords provided by Ahrefs, in .csv format. It allows you to add filters and categorize keywords such as 

• Phrase match keywords
• New keywords
• Queries
• Exact keywords
• All Keywords

If you have the list of keywords and want to check the SEO metrics, then you can discover SEO metrics of 10,000 keywords by uploading a file or simply pasting the keywords.

Final thoughts on YouTube keyword research

To rank well on YouTube, you need to target the keywords that are relevant, have decent search volume and optimize your video content with the keywords. Quality content always plays a crucial role but content becomes searchable if it is properly optimized.

I hope the tools optimization techniques and tools specified in this blog post can add value to your YouTube videos and you can increase your viewers and likes. If you are looking for more information related to digital marketing, you can explore Digital Keshav.