As of 2022, YouTube hosts over 800M videos with 37M channels. These numbers go to show how vast the platform is and how that makes it all the more difficult to gain recognition.
One technique YouTubers may be familiar with is search engine optimization. Keywords, that are responsible for SEO, refer to a one or more word summary of the entire content. They give you the basic sense of what the video may be about. For instance, if you have a gaming tutorial video, the keywords can be ‘gaming’ or ‘tutorial’.
When a user looks up a video on YouTube, they may look up the keyword. It is the platform’s way of categorising the videos to make them easily accessible. The keywords you use in your title and tags will directly affect the traffic your videos will attract. This categorisation can be easily observed. For example, if you look up ‘music videos’ on YouTube, it would only show trending music videos and not a cooking tutorial. The video with better keyword placement and SEO would rank higher.
Using relevant keywords in your videos helps YouTube understand the video content. Once it identifies your content, it ranks it appropriately.
YouTubers must know that apart from the title of the video being SEO friendly, they must also be catchy. Keywords that you cannot include in the title may be included in the tags which are added in the description of the video.
Here’s how you can create SEO friendly titles, descriptions and tags.
There are various tools you can use to find the right keywords. Your go to tool should be the YouTube new keyword research tool. People who are new to SEO can use this research tool as it is quite handy. It is both free and effective.
To use this tool:
- Sign in to YouTube Studio and click on Analytics.
- Under Analytics, click on the Research Tab.
- Here, you will see Searches across YouTube, Your viewers’ searches, and Saved keywords.
This tool will show you the searches of viewers across YouTube, your saved keywords, search volume and common keywords as per geographical location.
Another distinct feature is comparing all searches to content gap. All searches show you all the keywords at once. Content Gaps, on the other hand, shows you video topics that:
- Viewers can’t find the exact match for
- There are no results for
- Viewers are unable to find relevant videos for their searches (instead they find outdated or low-quality content)
If there is a content gap, you might want to look into videos that don’t already exist or could be made better.
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