YouTube is the world’s 2nd largest search engine, with over one billion hours of video watched daily on the Internet. But the question arises, is what are people searching for?

And what should you create videos about and what? Keyword research is the only way to answer that, but unfortunately, there is no official research tool for YouTube as there is with Google. Even worse, many of the popular third-party tools do nothing but kick back useless numbers from Google Keyword Planner the best YouTube keyword ranking tool.

1- TUBEBUDDY

TUBEBUDDY

Tube Buddy is a freemium browser extension for the Chrome. It adds a sidebar to the YouTube UI with an additional keyword data.

On the search results, you will see the “Search Explorer” overlay. This shows estimated global search volume, competition, and an overall keyword score out of 100. According to Tube Buddy, their keyword score tells you “how good a keyword is to target based on the search volume and competition.”

This is also useful for discovering the long-tail keywords to optimize your video for, or even to find other less competitive topics that you might not have considered. Unfortunately, both of these are limited to three results for the free users.

It also tells you if the uploaded has followed “best optimization practices,” and pulls the full list of the video tags. You can copy and save tags to a list with some couple of clicks.

This is also useful when trying to build up a list of tags for a video. Just look for common and relevant tags across the top-ranking videos, add them to a tags list, then the copy-paste the final list into the tags section of your video.

Tag lists get deduced automatically, so you won’t end up pasting a list of duplicate tags. It is also worth noting that Tube Buddy does suggest tags when you upload a video.

2- VIDIQ

VIDLQ

VidIQ is one of the freemium Chrome extensions that add additional data to the YouTube UI. Much of its functionality it is similar to Tube Buddy. In the search results, it shows up search volume, competition, overall keyword score, related queries, keyword stats, and the tags from the top-ranking videos.

VidIQ doesn’t tell us the precise formula they use for the “competition” score. However, they do state they look at the “total amount of engagements (across YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook), view velocity of that video, and views.” On the video results, the stats you see are almost identical to Tube Buddy.

This is useful for getting a sense of the main topics a channel covers, and whether it is worth analyzing more of their videos for the potential video ideas.

3- GOOGLE TRENDS

Google Trends

The Google Trends shows whether interest in a topic on YouTube is rising or declining over time. What we see is that interest in this topic, on YouTube, is slowly rising up.

It is also clear that there semi-regular spikes in the interest. If we analyze these spikes further, we see that they occur at roughly the same time each and every year. As the Google Trends also lets you compare the relative popularity of two or more keywords.

This is also useful exercise if you have a few video ideas and are unsure which one to prioritize. You can also use the Trends to find out new topics for videos. Just look at the related queries section.

4- KEYWORDTOOL.IO

KEYWORDTOOL.IOKeywordTool.io is one of a freemium tool that is essentially a bulk YouTube autosuggest scraper. What do we mean by the bulk? Well, it a scrapes the autosuggest results for the keyword you search for. But it also appends and prepends the query with the various letters and numbers, and scrapes the autosuggest results for those.

It then divides the keywords into four tabs like:

  • Keyword Suggestions: All the autosuggest keywords (excluding those formatted as questions).
  • Questions: Autosuggest keywords formatted as in the questions.
  • Prepositions: Autosuggest keywords containing the propositions (from, for, after, etc.). Note that you can also see these in the Keyword Suggestion tab.
  • Hashtags: Autosuggest keywords with Hashtags. (This is usually a rather pointless tab from what I can see).

Usually, you will end up with a list of a few hundred keyword ideas. You can also filter these results with ease, and also add “negative keywords” to filter out queries containing specific words or phrases.

None of these were optimized around the keywords with search volume. As such, they did not perform well from an organic search perspective. So, use these tools in this post to your advantage and find the best YouTube keywords ranking tool people are searching for, and then create videos around them.