Video Keyword Research

/ YTM / By

Finding Winning Video Topics

The first step to a successful video campaign begins with video keyword research.Similar to optimizing for Google search results, you need to optimize for YouTube results, but that’s where the similarity ends.

With normal SEO keyword research, you focus on a combination of competition and search volume, but that process does not work for YouTube…

Keyword Research Techniques

1 – Use Proven Topics From Competing YouTube Channels

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to shoot a new video –  there is a gold mine of data available for you to harvest ideas from.

A. Research Your Competing YouTube Channels

Start your research by studying your competitors YouTube channels. Search for their most popular videos – these topics have already proven themselves to be good performers.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to YouTube and search for keywords related to your topic or navigate to your competitors YouTube channel.
  2. Click on the “Videos” button in the navigation menu.
  3. Change the “Sort By” filter to “Most Popular” – the videos will now be sorted by those that received the most views. Scan over the topics and see if any of these are relevant to your niche.
  4. Save any relevant titles in a spreadsheet.
  5. Repeat this process a couple of times and you will find some great video topics.

B. Research Competing Blogs

YouTube isn’t the only place to do research. Your competitors are creating great content and their blog could provide excellent video topics.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to Google and search for keywords related to your topic and navigate to any website that contains a blog or navigate to your competitors website and find their blog.
  2. Look at the last 10+ posts and see which of them generated the most social engagement for comments and shares. You can do this process manually or use a tool like BuzzSumo.
  3. Save any relevant titles down in a spreadsheet.
  4. Repeat this process a couple of times to find more great video topics.

C. Research Your Own Blog

Research your own content and find which posts have generate a buzz with your audience.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to your own website and check your own blog posts.
  2. Look at the last 10 posts and see which of those generated the most social engagement (comments and shares).
  3. Save any relevant titles in a spreadsheet.

By completing these three steps, you should have at least a dozen potential video topics listed in your spreadsheet.

2 – Creating Video Keyword Lists

Now it’s time to turn your video topics into a video keyword list. Your goal should be to generate at least 20 keywords.

A. VidIQ

I recommend using a tools to help you through the process faster. Not only can they uncover keywords quickly, they often find date you will have a hard fining your self. VidIQ is a keyword research tool designed specifically for YouTube.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to VidIQ.com and create a free account.
  2. Confirm your account and navigate to the VidIQ dashboard.
  3. Click the magnifying glass icon in the main navigation and then the “Keyword Research” tab.
  4. Enter the terms you saved from the spreadsheet you created in the previous section. You do this by summarizing your list of topics and titles into 1-3 word search terms.Example: Your most engaged blog post title is: “How to lower your bounce rate (and increase your rankings)”. You would enter terms like “bounce rate” and “website ranking” into VidIQ.
  5. Save any relevant (new) keywords in a spreadsheet.
  6. Repeat this process using the remaining data on your spreadsheet – the goal is to generate 5-10 keywords from VidIQ.

B. Google Auto Suggest

YouTube (which is part of Google) has an excellent auto suggestion search feature that can be very helpful.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to YouTube.
  2. Type in your search terms similar to the VidIQ method above BUT do not press enter.
  3. Instead, look at the suggestions YouTube makes for you in the search bar. Write down any of these terms that seem like a good fit for your niche.
  4. You can also put an underscore “_” before your keyword and receive even more suggestions.
  5. Save any relevant keywords in a spreadsheet.

There are free keyword tools available to help you automate the process. One tool I like is Soovie.com which is a Google autocomplete keyword scraper tool on steroids.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to Soovie.com.
  2. Type in your search terms similar to the VidIQ method and click the search button.
  3. Soovie will return scraped auto suggest searches from Google, Amazon, Bing, answers.com, and YouTube (unfortunately, Soovie does not work with the underscore method).
  4. Save any relevant keywords in a spreadsheet.

You might try KeywordTool.io for even more keywords.

C. Tubular Labs

Tubular Labs is a paid service, however, it does a great job of finding videos that your current audience already watches. This process will only work if you have existing videos – skip this if your channel is brand-new and you do not have videos published.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to Tubularlabs.com create an account.
  2. Connect your TL account to your YouTube channel.
  3. Once your account is connect to your YouTube account, click on the “Insights” button in the upper left corner.
  4. Review the results and when you find a title that is relevant to your niche, navigate to that video on YouTube.
  5. Review that videos title and description and note the main keyword the videos appears to be optimized for.
  6. Save any relevant keywords in a spreadsheet.
  7. Repeat this process until you have 3-5 keywords.

3 – Check Competing Video Tags

Tags are not a major YouTube ranking factor, but they do help… Top YouTuber’s and marketing professionals use tags – that means for competition is openly showing you their primary keywords for every title they publish.

Step-by-step:

  1. Navigate to the YouTube videos that you found in Step 4 from the previous Tubular Labs method.
  2. Right-click on the page and choose “View page source” – a new window will open in your browser.
  3. Search this new window using “CTRL + F” and type “keywords” into the search box. There should be 3 results returned. As you scroll through each result section you’ll see the keywords that video was optimized for. I prefer the 3rd result which shows you the extended keyword list.If you install the VidIQ Chrome extension or TubeBuddy Chrome extension, you can view tags on the right side of the page – no need to search the page source.
  4. Repeat this process until you have 5-10 keywords that are relevant to your niche.

If you’ve completed the above steps, you should have developed a keyword list with 20+ ideas.

4 – SVO Keyword Selection

With normal SEO, you would select low competition keywords to try and easily rank your content in Google search results, but YouTube is almost the exact opposite. The reason is because of the way YouTube works…

100% of Google’s homepage is dedicated to personalized suggestions specifically to that viewer. This personalization seems to be directly related to the most recent content that viewer has watched.

10-20% of your audience will discover your videos through the YouTube search bar.

The bulk of your traffic will discover your videos through Google’s “Suggested Video” sidebar – the area on the right side of the window next to videos that are paying –  and that’s exactly why you’ll want to target those competitive terms.

Optimizing your videos for the “Suggested Video” panel increases your changes of your videos being seen by your audience. And, the more videos published with those keywords, the greater your chances for those videos to show up more often.

Step-by-step:

  1. Open your video keyword list spreadsheet from the previous steps.
  2. Evaluate the competition of each keyword on your list.
  3. Unfortunately, YouTube removed the statistics from their search bar, but a workaround is to use Google search. Navigate to Google and use a search query similar to: “YouTube: keyword” and note the number of results. The higher the number, the more competitive that keyword is. Each niche is different but I recommend keywords that bring up 100K results.
  4. Save your results next to each keyword on your spreadsheet.
  5. Once completed recording the results for each keyword, identify your 10 most competitive terms.
  6. Narrow down your list to 3 keywords to optimize your videos for. There is no right and wrong answer, but if you put in the keyword discovery work in the previous sections, any 3 keywords you choose should do well. A simple solution is to use the 3 most competitive terms.
  7. Save your remaining keywords for use in the future.

NEXT: Creating Effective Videos

Scroll to Top