YouTube SEO Keywords – 14 Techniques For Faster Keyword Research
We all want our YouTube
SEO to really work, right? And a major ingredient is
to choose the right keyword. But if you get started, you usually see, like here, a term that gives
you Fs all over the place, which basically means
that the tool says to you, this search term, this
keyword, is too competitive for your own channel, and thus
you don't have a good chance to rank there. So what you need to do is to
find alternative search terms that have less competition,
and to find those, I have 14 techniques for you today, which all help you to
discover those keywords, those search terms.
All right, the first one is to use the search bar suggestions. Let's assume I wanted to do a video about how to upload YouTube videos. Videos on YouTube. As you see here, this search
term is still too competitive for my own channel, so
I couldn't rank here, but the idea is that the
search bar suggestions gives you many different
options of search terms that people use in search, and that's the main point. The search bar suggestions
are all search terms that viewers search,
through YouTube Search, so if you target one
of those search terms, then you will be able
to catch those viewers when you rank your video for those terms. And what you see here suggested are usually long-tail variants of what you just entered
into the search bar. And oftentimes, the
more long-tail you go, this one is still too competitive, but going even more
long-tail, from iPhone, you can see that this search term is actually less competitive.
I get better grades, in
particular already a C grade here for subscribers. So that is the idea here. Use those techniques that I show you today to find alternative search
terms that are less competitive. But looking at this term, we
are certainly not done yet. I still have E grades here, so
I want to find a search term that is even less competitive. Let's go back to “upload videos on”. We see those regular search
bar suggestions here. Morningfame goes one step further and if you enter a plus here or you can achieve the
same, let's go back, and click the Suggestions+ button, then it expands on the regular suggestions and shows even more long-tail search terms as well as similar search terms. And I looked through them before, and found that this long-tail search term got even less competition. And for this one, I am actually done. I have D D D grades here,
and a B for relevance, which is equal to the
minimum recommended grades that you see in the footnote here.
So I can certainly do a video about “how to upload videos on YouTube mobile”. Here I have a good chance to rank, but let's move on. Technique number three
is the alphabet method. The idea here is to use the
search bar suggestions again, but in a very special way. For example, if wanted to
do a video about YouTube views, but certainly “YouTube views” itself is too competitive for my channel, as you can see by the bad grades here. I have to expand on that to see what related search terms are used. So I go through the alphabet. I type “a” and have a
lot of suggestions here which I can investigate. Then b, c, d, and so on, and that is actually the perfect technique to think outside the box.
So if you were thinking
about “YouTube views” first, and then let's look through
these results, for example, “YouTube views different in analytics”. It's not really about YouTube
views and how to gain them, but instead, the
realization that the views on the watch page and in the analytics are sometimes different. And the question is why is that? So this would inspire me to do a video about this situation, because people ask that. So use the alphabet method
to think outside the box. That said, technique number four is again, a technique which helps
you to mold a search term that you originally
intended to do a video about into something different
that is less competitive, but still is about the same topic.
Let's assume I wanted to do a video about “upload video on YouTube”. I want to explain how to do that. And as you see here, it is
certainly way too competitive, so an easy method is to look
through word variations. For example, “upload”,
you could as well write, “uploading video to YouTube”. And as you an see here, it
is much less competitive. I even get D grades here already. Sometimes simple as that.
And technique number
five is quite similar, which is the thesaurus method, which is about replacing words
which have the same meaning. So I still have an F, so I want to try alternative search terms,
which have the same meaning. So what I could do is replacing “uploading”, with instead, you could
also say, “to publish”. It has the same meaning. So “publish video on YouTube”. And here we go, the
grades are even better.
Here we have a C instead of a D, and the F became an E,
which is already quite good. I could take a chance here. All right, technique
number six is about using a prefix, and when we look
at “publish video on YouTube”, then there is the simple
prefix, obviously, “how to publish video on YouTube”, but unfortunately, in this case, it was that adding this prefix “how to” made the search term,
overall, more competitive. I have red grades here again, so sometimes it could actually be about removing a prefix to make the
search term less competitive, but let me show you a different example. For example, “diy slime”, a
huge topic in the kids' niche that is super competitive. I get bad grades here, obviously. So if I add a prefix, for example, “boy vs girl diy slime”.
So here we go. We have a search term which
is not too competitive for me anymore, even
though we are currently in a very competitive niche. And by the way, the way
I found this search term, is not just guessing, but instead, I combined it actually,
with the alphabet method. So I typed “a” and looked at
all the suggestions here. And then when I got to “b”,
I found this search term. By the way, never guess any search terms. Always look at the search bar suggestions, if those terms actually appear there. Because it's very important
that you only focus on terms, keywords, that
are actually used by viewers in search, because otherwise
no one would be searching that term, and you won't
get any views, right? So the search bar suggestions
with browsing through this, combining the alphabet method
with the prefix method, was a clever way to approach this.
And by the way, there
is a very easy method to come up with alternative search terms, by just switching the order of the words. That would be technique number seven. For example, when we go back here at “boy vs girl diy slime”,
and I just switch it. Here we go. We also see this term in
the search bar suggestions, so it is actually a search
term that people use in search, but, unfortunately in this case, changing the word order
here made the search term more competitive for me. So sometimes if you switch it, it gets better or it gets worse.
But you get the idea. All right, these were seven techniques that are all based on the
search bar suggestions, and how to use them. Now let's get to the next
section of techniques, which are about the video tags. I mean, where do we get
inspiration for search terms? Obviously other YouTubers
used search terms in their video tags already, so we can look at their
text to get inspiration.
So here I just entered
“how to grow on YouTube”, which could be a video I
wanted to do on my channel, and unfortunately, it's
way too competitive for my own channel to
rank the video there, so again, I need to find
alternative search terms. When we scroll down to the search results, then we have these “Show Tags” links. When we click on it, we see the tags, and here, a good a example of a video from Brian G. Johnson
who actually inspired me for many of those techniques, so thank you for all your teachings. And obviously, the idea is
to go through these tags, and choose one that sounds
interesting I could try.
So click search here,
and check the grades. Well, in this case, this search term is too competitive for my channel, but you get the idea to explore those tags in order to find some search terms that are less competitive that you could use. But of course, it is a little bit tedious to go through all the videos and see what tags they used. So I integrated a feature which would be technique number eight, which makes it a little
bit easier for you. If we look here, we can just click the “Used Tags” link, and what it shows here, are all the tags that are used by the
videos ranking below here, so it goes through all the tags from all the videos ranking here, right? And collects them in one handy list. So let's go up here again, used tags, and we see those tags that 10 or more of the top 20 videos used, and further down, we find those tags that are used by less of those videos, which are actually, oftentimes, search terms with less competition.
And by the way, important note, since we are working with tags from other creators here, we can't be sure that they actually used actual search terms, and not
just invented any term, yeah? We have to focus on terms that people actually use in search, right? So since we're working with tags here, I integrated into the
tool, these green checks and red crosses, that
automatically validate those tags whether they
are actual search terms that appear in the search bar suggestion. For example, “how to grow
your YouTube channel easy”, is obviously just an invented term that people do not use in search, even though it sounds like a
term that people could use. But if you would rank your video there, then no views would be coming your way, so it would make no sense to do that.
So keep an eye out for the green checks when you are using the tool, to check those tags from other creators. So these used tags here, this drop down, is a very handy feature to actually also think outside the box because you never know which tags other people use, and
this might inspire you to look for different variants that you didn't think of before. I find it really helpful in this regard. And to take the analysis of video tags even one step further, I created the #2 Keywords
tab in Morningfame, so if you are here in the search tab, #3 Search tab, then you can look at all those search
results, and for example, here from Video Influencers
is a great channel, you can choose this video
to go back to step #2. Let's do that. Now Morningfame does
a very thorough analysis of the video tags of the
video that we just selected, as well as related videos, and comes up with all
those search terms here.
Quite a lot of search terms to work with, and to choose from. Since I consider my channel
to be a small channel still, if you are wondering whether
you are a small channel or not, then look at the FAQ at the bottom. So I, as a small channel,
go through the tag list good for small channels,
Uncommon Keywords, and this term caught my attention, “how to grow an audience on YouTube”. So I click it and choose
it for step three. So here we go. We have a search term
that is still a little bit too competitive, so I
would need to go further, but we once again found a search term that has less competition.
These were just three techniques to look at the video tags
of other creators' videos. And now we get to the next section to use additional tools to discover alternative search terms. And one very important one, which would be technique number 11 is your own analytics. With Morningfame, you will be able to go
to the Algorithm tab, and then in the YouTube Search section, here to find the search terms that your already published
videos are ranking for. It's a good idea to look
at which search terms you get traffic from, views from, to get inspired to do similar videos for those search terms. Right now, in the Algorithm tab, you don't see those search terms yet, but if you watch this video in the future, then I might have already
done this feature, but for now, you can go to
the YouTube Creator Studio. What you do there, you
select a video here, go to analytics, and
then to the Reach tab, and here if you scroll down, you find a list of search terms for which this particular video ranks.
So, “click through rate”,
“click through rate YouTube”, “ctr YouTube”, and so on. So if I wanted to do a video
about click through rate, once again, which would be a good idea because my previous one really works well, so follow up would make sense, then I would optimize my video for one of those search terms here, so that is a great source for inspiration. Technique number 12 is to look
at YouTube’s search results. Back on Morningfame's
keyword research tool, you actually find a further
analysis button here, where you can directly
go to the search results on YouTube for the search term
you just entered here, right? So an easy button here. YouTube, we go over here, we
already see this search term typed in, and if we scroll
down in the search results, then further down we find a section, searches related to this search term, and this is a great source
for inspiration as well.
And similarly you can
do the same on Google if you are ranking your
videos on Google as well. So let's go back to Morningfame, and here in the same
further analysis button, you find a link to the
Google search results. By the way, if you don't
see this button yet, then that means you didn't turn
on the Google Search Support here in the menu at the top right yet, but if you do, then you find this button under “Further Analysis…”, and quickly can go over to
the Google search results.
And here, in the same way, you go down to the very bottom, and here Google shows you
many related search terms for your inspiration as well. All right, that is
three techniques to use, different tools to get
inspiration for alternative search terms as well, that are
hopefully less competitive, and overall, you will
narrow down the search terms until you find one that you can use for optimizing your video. But last and not least, the last technique, number
14, is a conceptual one. And it makes the biggest
bang for your buck, especially if you are a small channel because think about this: If you do keyword research, then you have all the
possible search terms that are potentially used by viewers in the niche your channel is in. So all the search terms you
could possibly do a video about, but usually you are fixed
on a video topic, right? You have an idea about
what your video should be, and that is a big issue, because all the search terms
that are possible out there, when you are fixed on one video topic, then you only have one slice
of possible search terms that would fit your video, right? So you are limiting your keyword research to that slice of possible search terms, and within this slice, especially if you are a small channel, only few, very few search terms in there, are of low enough competition.
So finding those very few search terms that first of all match your video topic, and second of all, are
of low enough competition so that you can actually rank there, well, that's like finding
a needle in a haystack. And the biggest difference you can make is to not set yourself up
for a particular video topic. So instead, you do your keyword research before you even think about which video you want to do, and just
explore the whole range of search terms that are potentially valid for a video that you could do, and then from this big range, it's much easier to find
those few search terms that have low enough
competition for your channel. And then once you find those, you decide, well, since people are using
those terms in search, they are interested to find a
video about that topic, right? So then, only in the
second step, you decide, now I do a video about
this particular topic.
So do your keyword research first, and you are not limited so much by the choices that you can
do about the search terms, and that will open up a
whole world of search terms that you can use for your future videos. All right, use all those techniques to your advantage to narrow down on the few search terms that you will use in your YouTube SEO, and this process of narrowing down those search terms is one that is best described
if you want to go long-tail, is best described in this video where I show you how to go long-tail, which is one particular
case how you do that, and then combine it
with all the techniques that I showed you today to make
your YouTube SEO successful.
Cheers my friends..
