In this blog, I’m going to show you how to do YouTube SEO to rank your videos #1 in YouTube search. We’ve used this exact process to rank #1 for all of the most coveted keywords in our niche like… “SEO,” “search engine optimization,” “keyword research,” “link building,” “technical SEO,” “content marketing,” “internet marketing,” “online marketing,” and the list goes on. Beyond warm and fuzzy feelings, our YouTube search rankings resulted in nearly 1.3 million views last year.
Now, you might be thinking, “why is YouTube SEO important when the most views come from suggested and browse features?”. Well, there are 3 absolutely critical reasons why professional assignment writing services think you should have a YouTube SEO strategy especially if you’re trying to get that initial traction to your videos.
- Suggested and browse views usually require you to have an existing subscriber base and an existing library of relevant videos.
- Search views are super consistent. And consistent views lead to consistent subscribers, assuming you’re delivering on the title of your video – more on this later.
- And search views have high average view durations – at least how-tos, tutorials, and tips videos. In fact, in 2021, we had over 101,000 hours of watch time to our tutorials from YouTube search.
Do YouTube keyword research
The first step is to do YouTube keyword research. To get started, you’ll need to generate a list of keyword ideas. And there are a few places you can look. The first is YouTube autosuggest. Just start typing in your keyword and you’ll see a list of queries that other YouTube users are searching for. Jot down some that interest you because at this stage, we’re just brainstorming.
Now, because YouTube doesn’t show you any search volume data, you can throw them into Google Trends, make sure you have the search mode set to YouTube search, and you’ll get a general idea of search popularity on YouTube.
Google Trends Doesn’t Show You Absolute Search Volumes
They show relative popularity instead. So in this case, over the past year or so, “makeup tutorial for beginners” was more popular than “makeup transformation,” and both of these keywords were more popular than “makeup routines.”
Another way you can find keyword ideas is to use a tool like TubeBuddy, vidIQ, or Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Here’s how they work starting with TubeBuddy. After you’ve installed their Chrome Extension, just click on this icon, and then go to Keyword Explorer.
Next, search for a seed keyword, which is just a broad keyword related to your niche, like “makeup.” And right away, they’ll give you some scoring metrics, the number of videos in the search results and the estimated monthly search volume.
See More Keyword Ideas
Hit the Video Topics tab to see more keyword ideas. Now, personally, I don’t trust their search volume estimations because I’ve compared a bunch of keywords that our channel’s videos have consistently ranked for, and TubeBuddy’s estimations were quite a bit off. More on this in a bit. Now, if you’re going to use this tool, then I’d focus just on the video topics tab to come up with some keyword ideas.
The second YouTube keyword research tool is vidIQ. To get started, login to your vidIQ account and hit Keywords in the menu. Then just like last time, type in a seed keyword and run the search. And you’ll see significantly more keyword ideas than the other two tools I mentioned.
I Don’t Trust Their Search Volume
Again, I don’t trust their search volume estimations for the same reason as TubeBuddy, but you should be able to find some interesting topics worth creating videos on, if topic generation is your goal. Finally, is Ahrefs Keywords Explorer? Just select YouTube as the search engine, enter your seed keyword, and run the search.
Right away, you’ll see the search volume for your target country, the estimated number of clicks to videos, and the global search volume broken down by country. And as far as I know, Ahrefs is the only tool that shows you country specific YouTube search data.
300,000 Unique Keyword Ideas
Now, to see keyword ideas, just go to the matching terms report and in this case, you’ll see well over 300,000 unique keyword ideas with plenty of filters to play around with seeing as this keyword list is exponentially. Larger than all other tools combined.
Alright, so we need to address the elephant in the room because I’ve made some pretty bold claims on these tool’s search volume estimations. I actually pulled our view data from YouTube studio for 14 random keywords we had consistently ranked #1 for in January. Then I pulled search volume estimations from each tool and compared them to actual views to calculate a rough CTR for each tool.
And here are the results. Now, conventional wisdom tells me that the true click through rate for a top-ranking video would generally be around 15-18%, so it’s clear right off the bat that TubeBuddy almost always drastically overestimates search volumes.
Average search volume:
In fact, their search volume figures suggest that on average, a top-ranking video only gets 0.2% of clicks with a median of 0.05% click through rate – and no, this is not a computing error. VidIQ was slightly better but still, their volumes are drastically overestimated too. On average, their search volumes suggest a 0.63% average CTR to top-ranking videos for our keywords.
And the median was at 0.53%. And it’s worth noting that the spread between their average and median CTRs was the closest of the 3 tools. As for Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, our search volumes suggest that the keywords had an average CTR of 37.09% and a median CTR of 12.42%.
And the reason for the huge spread is because of an outlier in a small dataset where we had an estimated CTR of 346% which is obviously not true. Bottom-line: no keyword research tool is perfect, so it’s important you use the search volumes for what they are – estimations. And I won’t go deeper into YouTube keyword research because we have a full tutorial on that which I’ll link up in the description.
Choose a topic you want to go after
Alright, next up, you need to choose a topic you want to go after. And you should have a brainstormed keyword list from the last step. Now, what you’ll want to do is search for the keyword in YouTube search while you’re in private browsing mode. Then look for two things in the top 3 videos.
- Try and identify the format of the video – in this case, we have 3 step-by-step tutorials, so you’ll want to create a video with the same format.
- Scope out your competitors. Now generally speaking, you’ll want to look at the size of the channel and their topical authority. So for the query, “makeup tutorial for beginners,” you’ll see that the top 3 channels all have over a million subscribers. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t compete, but if your channel has 100 subscribers, it’ll be a David and Goliath story if you can outrank them.
As for topical authority, just dig through their channels to see if most of their content is on the same topic. In this case, all 3 channels are mostly about makeup or a mix of makeup, beauty and fashion. So again, if you’re a small channel, I wouldn’t try and compete for this keyword at this point. Instead, I’d just rinse and repeat these steps until you find a topic that’s more realistic to rank for.
