- Keyword research. It's one of those things every video creator on YouTube should have in their skillsets. While you may know what your content is about, you need to be able to understand how to tell YouTube what your content is about.
So in turn, YouTube can share that content with exactly the people (dinging) who want to watch what your content's all about. So in this video, we're going to tell you everything you need to know to get proven results, to help grow your channel. As always, let's do this.
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com. (rhythmic drumming) - Keyword, a word or concept of great significance. Or to put it into a YouTube context, an informative word used in a information retrieval system to indicate the content of a, (scratching) video.
Now that's the official definition of a keyword, but let's have a little bit of fun with this. (snapping) (upbeat music) All right, we're all Rob Carver here. We asked a hundred people on YouTube, what's the most popular video game right now?
Survey said. (bell dinging) (audience cheering) Name a super simple Italian dish that you can cook. Survey said.
(bell dinging) (audience cheering) What is the most popular sport in the UK? Survey said. (bell dinging) (audience cheering) (paper slapping on hand) What is the most important metric on YouTube?
Survey said. (bell dinging) (audience cheering) Who is the greatest WWE wrestler of all time? Survey said.
(bell dinging) (audience cheering) ♪ Watch this ♪ ♪ They watch ♪ ♪ They watch ♪ (beeping) - So when it comes to keyword, try and imagine it as the first word, or phrase, or conscious thought, that instinctively comes into your head, when you think of that particular topic. Hello everybody. Thank you for joining us today on this video.
And thanks to all of you in the vidIQ community, who supports us every single day. My name is Rob, and if this is your first time here, in these glorious YouTube surroundings, we are the YouTube tool and channel that aims to help you get more views, in less time, by educating you on your YouTube journey. Now on several occasions today, you are going to be seeing tools that you may not be familiar with.
Those come from vidIQ. There is a link in the description. And the best news is, it's a Chrome extension that is free to download.
All right, so you've had a very simple introduction to keywords there, but it obviously gets a lot more complicated. I'm sure you already know, that if you put in a single word into a YouTube search, you're not going to get exactly what you're looking for. Often, when people search on YouTube, or on Google, they're looking for keyword phrases.
Or you could call it long-tail keywords. And again, you have to have an instinctive mindset. If I have a flat tire on my car, my instinct is to search for something along the lines of, how to replace a flat tire.
If I have a sudden urge to play the piano, my instincts might be to search for beginners guide to playing the piano. If my toilet's blocked, (toilet flushing) well, you get the picture. And of course, if you want to grow your YouTube channel, your instinct might be to search (fingers snapping) for, how to get more YouTube views.
So before we dive into the details, there are three fundamentals of keywords. A keyword represents the first thing that usually comes into a person's head. A keyword, is often part of a key phrase.
A sentence of three or four words. And most crucially, think like a human, not a robot, when it comes to researching keywords, and then using them in your titles and descriptions. As a very simple example, let's take the title, how to get more YouTube views.
It's keyword rich, but does it have enough of a draw to really entice a viewer to click on it? What if we added a year to the title, to give it more currency? And maybe an adjective to give it more umph, such as how to get more YouTube views fast in 2018.
Simple changes like this, can have a really powerful impact on the way a title is perceived by a potential viewer. All right, let's go on an epic keyword journey, using your best friend, the YouTube search bar. Even if you type in a very simple keyword, such as, how to, almost an auxiliary keyword for many phrases, YouTube will start to make suggestions.
These are keywords that YouTube viewers are searching for today. That's why we get references to very trending topics, such as Fortnite, and the Galaxy Skin in Fortnite. But of course, how to, is a very broad keyword.
So how could we narrow this down? Let's add a verb, such as install. Now we are getting into a more technical landscape, which is all to do with construction, or building something.
We're very much in the instructional, or tutorial area of YouTube. But of course, your channel and topic of interest, is going to be very specific to one of these keywords. So let's look at how to install Windows 10.
Now we have a pretty good, broad keyword, for computer tutorials. But again, look at how YouTube is encouraging you to dive even deeper into this topic. Remember, these are the topics people are searching for on YouTube.
That's why YouTube is showing them to you. It thinks, you want to know how install Windows on a new PC, or on SSD, or with a USB. So to dip your feet into the YouTube keyword bathtub, so to speak, you should always start with the search bar, and see what auto-complete suggestions is pushing your way, for your topic of interest.
Another thing you can try, is the YouTube search keyword, alphabet game. Once you have a keyword you're comfortable with, simply add one character to it, and go through the alphabet. So how to make slime A, or how to make slime B.
And you'll get all sorts of interesting suggestions from YouTube, that people are searching for. It's amazing how many long-tail keywords you can find doing this process, to really help niche down, and find a very specific topic that you're passionate about. Now on to my favorite part of any video, and that's introducing you to some vidIQ tours.
So remember, if you want to see any of this on your YouTube pages, download the vidIQ Chrome extension. All right, we're gonna take a fairly general keyword here, which is how to make slime. And once you press enter, and it shows you the YouTube search page, you're going to start to see some of the YouTube tours that we have.
The first one we're going to look at is the subscriber count. Something I'm always interested in, is whether a small channel is having an impact on a search term. Right here, how to make slime, we have two channels.
We have less than 10,000 subscribers (popping) that have made an impact on this very broad, and popular, search term. If a channel with 1,000 subscribers, is getting a video with 100,000 views, that tells me at some point in the past, this keyword was right for making content about. Now, interestingly, the title of this video includes the word cheap.
So maybe we can include that in our keyword search term. How to make cheap slime. You can notice here, how the channel size, overall, changes from the top search ranking, but also the number of views, as well.
Now at this point, we can riff on the keyword a little bit. Instead of searching for, how to make cheap slime, how about searching for, how to make slime on a budget? It means the same thing.
It's just worded slightly differently. But who's searching for that search term? Now we have three, relatively small, channels making a huge impact in the world of how to make slime.
And all I did, was focus on a particular niche in the area, which was making slime on the cheap, or on a budget. However, what this search term also indicates, is that maybe the window of opportunity for this keyword, has passed, since all of these videos are over 12 months old, and are well-established in this topic. Because, you see, funnily enough, you're not the only one doing keyword research on YouTube.
There are thousands of video creators, just like you, trying to find those super-rich keywords, to help serve the billions of people who watch YouTube every single month. YouTube's been around for 13 years, so many a keyword, such as how to unblock a toilet, how to replace a spare tire, how to get more YouTube views. They've had the life (dinging) sucked out of them, over that period of time.
So what becomes super important, especially for smaller channels, are trending keywords. For example, Fortnite is one of the most popular video games on the planet, right now, and is heavily searched. So how might a video gamer refine the search?
Maybe if they look at they liked this version of Fortnite, or the opening version, season six. And what if they look at how to improve gaming performance on Fortnite in season six? Essentially raising their phrase per second, or FPS boost.
So now we have a very popular keyword, combined with a trending topic, combined with a sub-genre of the core keyword. Instead of finding just channels of eight-million subscribers, we're finding channels of all shapes and sizes competing for this very specific trending keyword. A telltale sign of a juicy keyword, is when small channels are wranging for this keyword, and they have far more views, than subscribers, on their channel.
That means the video's been shared out to a much wider audience, and it's only a view days old, as well. Now for something that is super important to remember. Most of us probably aren't interested in Fortnite, don't have a clue what season six means, and definitely don't understand the concept of frames-per-second boost.
But you have to remember, that you're not trying to appeal to the entirety of YouTube. You're looking to target (mouse clicking) a very specific audience, wanting very specific answers, to very specific things. And this is where keyword research is so important.
When you are passionate about a topic, you build-up an intimate relationship, knowledge, and interest in the topic. Just like your potential audience. And that's who you want to appeal to.
Whether it's for educational purposes, to tell a story, to draw an emotional response (popping) from your audience, that innate passion you have for the topic, will be seen in your videos. And you just need to transfer that into your knowledge of the keywords that surround that content, in your tags, titles, and descriptions. Because, what you're trying to find here are key words of opportunity.
Those are keywords, or key phrases, with the most search volume as possible, versus keywords with as little video competition as possible (popping), on YouTube. This is the vidIQ keyword score. It tries to simplify this task, as much as possible.
The higher the score, the juicier the keyword. But as you might (popping) expect, these things do not grow on trees. Which is why it's so important to spend some time doing some keyword research.
Anytime you see a number next to a video tag on YouTube, once you have vidIQ installed, that's your keyword score. As you might expect, the potential of keywords can change very rapidly. But as a general rule of thumb, you want to be looking at keywords of a score of 50, or above.
For a lot more detail to look into our keyword score, check out this case study in the video on screen now. Now let's return to this keyword. Over time, it is very fresh, very new.
Look at the top channel. 7,000 subscribers, 15,000 views. And the keyword score shows that there is still relatively low search volume, but very low competition.
So it was a very juicy keyword. Now let's have a look at this keyword two or three weeks later. Search volume has increased significantly, while the competition score has remained relatively flat.
And this is quite a rare occurrence in YouTube. Now the landscape of the search results has changed as well. We've got a much larger channel now, dominating the top of the search terms, but look at our second channel.
This one has managed to maintain its presence in the search terms (popping), and the view count has more than doubled, and subscriber count has increased significantly. So this channel has really benefited from this keyword. As for the other channel that appears in these search rankings here, we'll come back to him, later.
So these are the channels that are really having success with this (scratching) keyword. What else can vidIQ tell it? Well, if you enable inline keywords, you can see all of the keyword phrases they're using in their video tags (popping).
Now there is a healthy debate, about whether or not video tags are important on YouTube anymore. We'll come back to that discussion later on, so do stick around for that. But if we click on one of these tags, what this does, is it launched the vidIQ keyword inspector.
This will give you a mountain of information about the keyword selected, (popping) including the keyword score. This one seems even more juicier than the one that we were previously looking at. And importantly, interest over time.
So we can see when keywords are trending. All right, one more super powerful vidIQ tool to tell you about. And a lot of people miss this one, because it's found in (popping) the vidIQ Chrome extension button.
So click on there. You'll see a range of options, and you want to select SEO tags. This brings you into the vidIQ web app, and you will need keyword research tab.
Now when you do a keyword search here, not only does it bring up all of the information that we saw on the YouTube search page, such as the search score, competition score, overall keyword score, but all of the related keywords, as well. So, for a combination of all our tools, you can not only find single keyword phrases, all that are significant, but a whole bundle. The core, the template of keywords that you can use for your entire video series.
You see, the idea with keyword research, is not to spend five minutes finding that golden keyword that you can Ecount maybe one or two videos from, it's to spend (popping) a considerable amount of time getting a collection of keywords, that all work together for a video series. That's why we recommend maybe spending a morning, (popping) or an afternoon, using the vidIQ tools that we've shown you, to get maybe 10, 15, 20 keywords, that you can create 20, 50, maybe 100 videos from. When you have a focus, a particular niche, that's where you can hammer the YouTube algorithm, time and time again (hands slapping), with content that YouTube will start to see you, as an authority, in.
And that's when you can start to climb up the search rankings. Especially for search intent. Because when you find your niche, spectacular things can start to happen.
We're gonna look back at that channel we briefly saw in the search rankings before, for frames-per-second, on Fortnite in season six. And a couple of months ago, this channel didn't have any focus. They were doing random videos on pranks and whatnot.
But then, they had one breakthrough video, on the topic of boosting frames-per-second, on Fortnite, on season five, their previous incarnation. And this is what the channel did next. They threw all of their content into that one keyword phrase, boosting frames-per-second on Fornite, whatever season it was.
And these went from a few hundred a video, to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of views per video. In just a few short months, this channel has become one of the authorities on the subject, so that now, whenever they post a video on Fortnite, and boosting frames-per-second, they rank at the top of the search terms, instantly. If you want to know more about this particular keyword research story, then check out the video on the screen now.
I know we've used Fornite (popping) for many examples in this video. It's because we have a lot of data on the subject. But believe you me, when I can say, that this strategy can be applied to any video topic.
I did exactly the same thing a couple of years ago. It was all on a topic of how to record your iPhone screen, or your iPad screen, or iOS screen. And I was able to successfully leverage YouTube, into sharing these videos with hundreds of thousands of people.
And it grew my channel from tens of thousands of subscribers, to over a 100,000 subscribers. All you've gotta do, is take these tips, tricks, and strategies, and apply it to your video topic, by doing the keyword research. But don't leave those keywords in your notebook or in your computer, because those are going to form the basics of your metadata to help your content be more discoverable on YouTube.
Now fortunately for me, the work's already been done here by the awesome YouTube Creators Academy website. It literally tells us, in the assess discovery lesson, that the best optimized video titles, have important keywords at the front. It also tells us, that video terms that are in order of relevance, are important too.
And here's me thinking that video terms didn't matter anymore. Another Creator Academy page worth checking out, is the write smart descriptions lesson, which tells us to reinforce (popping) important keywords. The more you do (scratching) in your titles and descriptions, and presumably video tags, the increased likelihood of YouTube surfacing those videos in search results.
To put it simply, and as illustrated by Sean and Benji, our good friends over at Video Influencers (popping), (bell dinging) front-load your video titles with keywords (bell dinging), include those same keywords in the first two lines of your description, and we'll get back to why, in a second, and include them in your video tags and playlist, as well. Give YouTube every opportunity to understand specifically, what your content is about. And stick to it over a series of videos.
Another important reason for having keywords at the very beginning of your video descriptions, is because people can read this when they search for content. So try to think of the beginning of your description, (popping) as if it were a classic tweet of 140 characters. Reinforce your keywords, while still making it a readable sentence.
Give an enticing reason for the viewer to click on your video, and don't waste space with links and calls-to-actions, that will take the viewer away from your video. Just before we analyze the success of your keywords in your YouTube videos, I want to step outside of YouTube for a second, (bell dinging) and go into Google search, to look at something called LSI keywords. What on earth are they?
It stands for latent semantic indexing. And if you still don't understand what that means, it's a system search engines use to analyze other words people use surrounding a given topic. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, I'll show you in Google.
When you do a search on Google, if you scroll to the very bottom of the first search page, you'll see (popping) lots of related keywords to what you were searching for. And these are your LSI keywords. So this is another golden opportunity to beef up your keyword collection.
If you scroll to the top of this Google search page, you'll find something else of interest, as well. (bell dinging) If you produce (popping) good quality content, and have a strong keyword metadata in your YouTube videos, they'll start to be suggested in Google search. Imagine all of that extra free external traffic, being driven to not only your videos, but to YouTube, as well.
So you get bonuses for starting sessions in the YouTube platform. Collectively, we've done a super deep-dive into keyword research, and how to use those keywords in your video content. Now let's look at how you can analyze the success of your keywords.
We're back into some vidIQ tours here, so once you have the Chrome extension installed, you can take a look at our SEO scorecard. And this can be found either on the video upload/editor page, or on video watch pages. You want to pay close attention to the actionable aspects of this SEO scorecard.
When you use strong keywords in your tags, titles, and descriptions, and reinforce them throughout your metadata, your score will continue to increase. And you want to try and get to as close as 50 as possible. This gives your videos the best possible chance of fruition on YouTube, and that's reflected by the performance score.
If you want to learn more specifically, about the vidIQ SEO score, we've got a video link in the top, right-hand corner, of the screen now. When your keywords, in your video tags, start to rank highly and consistently, you will definitely see the rewards in your video views. And for all vidIQ Boost users, don't forget to scroll to the bottom of the video editor page, and take advantage of our recommended tags tour.
As you input (popping) keywords into your tags, titles, and descriptions, we will advise on further tags you might want to use. But be selective. Choose the ones that really define your video content.
And it seems like now might be the best time to tackle the question, do video tags matter anymore on YouTube? Let's look at it from this point-of-view. If you're still watching this video, more than 15 minutes in, I know you're serious about keyword research.
And by the time you've done all of the tasks suggested in this video, you'll have so many super-rich keywords at your disposal, that adding them to your metadata, whether it be the video tags, or in the description, or most importantly, in the title, it should be a relatively quick job. vidIQ tours, such as recommended tags, are just the cherry on top (rumbling) Allowing you to add more tags with a single click of a button. I have not even told you about auto-complete.
All you need to do, is start typing in keywords in the video (popping) tags box of your video editor upload page, and vidIQ will recommend more, just like the YouTube auto-complete search bar. You're going to be putting in the hard keyword research yargs before you even get close to the upload page. And any small channel, that's trying to find their way in YouTube, if you can have any marginal gain over your competitors, especially in video optimization, then why not take it?
All right, I hope that helps with the question of video tags. How else can you analyze the success of your keywords? One of our most powerful tools is the channel audit button, found on the left-hand side navigation bar, once you've installed the vidIQ Chrome extension.
And it'll give you a full report card on your channel, 24/7. What we wanna do here, is scroll down to this section that says, top search terms. This will show you all the traffic that's coming to your channel, from keyword search terms on YouTube.
And you can click on the, view more buttons, (popping) to see all of the traffic coming from keyword search terms, including views and watch time. Common sense will compel you to create more content on the keywords that are performing well for your channel. It's what we like to call the double-down strategy.
Whew! That's what you might call a thorough guide to keyword research. I'm always interested how far viewers get into videos.
So if you are still watching this one, give me a #madeit, in the comments below. Now as a postscript to all of this, as I was editing the final sections of this video, for the first time in years, YouTube went down for an hour. And it caused panic throughout social media.
And on Twitter, the keywords, or hashtags, that were being used were YouTube down, or YouTube is down. And that gave me a light bulb moment. As soon as YouTube came back online, I went to YouTube, with those keywords (bell dinging), into the livestream, and because we were one of the first to hit the topic, we benefited greatly from thousands of views.
And one more thing you can do in this video, is go back to the very beginning of it, and just flick through all the segments where I'm on camera, and you'll see, just how long this video took to make, as my hair started growing back. Now if you're still hungry for more content on keyword research, we're gonna play a list over here, which covers video tags, and there's a lot of crossover there. And if you want to see more awesome vidIQ tours, just like you saw in this video, we got a full playlist down there, and we'll see you on either of those videos.
Right now, enjoy the rest of your video making day.
