Best YouTube Videos Optimization Tools To Rank #1 in 2019

What tools can you use to optimize your YouTube channels and videos to perform better, to identify which are the queries, which are the topics that YouTube audience are searching for, and how you can optimize your videos to rank well for them as you do with Google search? Results if you're already an SEO? Well, this was the question, the thoughts that I have when I started this YouTube channel at the beginning of the year. I could easily see that many of the SEO tools that I was already using for my ongoing SEO processes didn't offer any YouTube-related functionality. So in today's episode, I am going to share with you which are the tools that I am using to optimize this channel, and hopefully you will find them useful as well. Let's take a look. So as with any optimization process, you want to start by understanding how your audience searches and then I found out that although many of the keyword tools that I use already didn't provide support for YouTube, there was one that did. It's Ahrefs. So for example, if I am going to do or develop videos for SEO, I wanted to take a look at how people were searching for SEO-related topics over YouTube so you just go to the keywords Explorer functionality and select YouTube here, the country for which I was trying to understand the search behavior for over YouTube, and I obtain the metrics over here as if I was researching for Google. So those terms that have the same terms, the questions, newly discovered terms, the phrase match. So I want to take a look at all of the keyword ideas here to identify potential opportunities here so I can see I see a few of them that might not be necessarily as quite related, right? But then I see others that yes, they definitely are. Etsy SEO, for example here, or Yoast SEO tutorial 2018, for example. And we can see with all the type of terms that I had already added here, like keto recipes here, diet recipes, easy, dessert, Instant Pot keto recipes, keto dinner recipes, vegan keto recipes, vegetarian best keto recipes, and I see so many of them that will definitely, if I were making keto-friendly recipes for my channel, for example, if I had a recipes channel, this is the type of research that I will be doing. And we can see here the search volume. There is also another keyword tool that you may also be using already, which is KeywordTool.io that provides also keyword metrics, keyword ideas, not only for Google but also for YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay, the Play Store, Instagram, Twitter even. It allows you to segment between the keyword suggestions again, the questions, the propositions, and even the hashtags that you can use and will be highlighted above your title over YouTube, so this might be really a good idea. This is not the tool, as you can see here, that I am using at the moment because I use many other keyword tools already for my SEO process. Now I want to show you the keyword research functionality that 2 of the most popular video optimization for YouTube tools provide. These are video marketing tools focused on YouTube, vidIQ and TubeBuddy, that besides providing keyword research functionality for YouTube, they provide a wealth of other features that we are going to take a look at a little bit later on, but Their keyword research functionalities and features are great because they don't only show the suggestions for any queries that you include in their platform as VidIQ provides here, for example, for SEO or for digital nomads, it will provide me all the related terms, search volume, the competition score, but they will also, both of them as you can see here, the screenshot integrated within your own YouTube channel, you will need to use their extensions, their browser extensions actually. And so for example here, I have come to this video and you will see that I have all of these additional options and features and panels here. This is actually from TubeBuddy so I can go Keyword Explorer functionality and I will add here the term for which I want to rank for. With this video. So it tells me that the overall score to rank for this term is not necessarily so exciting, other ideas to rank for, for example, for these particular terms, the most used tags for these terms, other results which are the other videos that are already ranking well for these particular terms and how they are optimizing for this term within their titles and descriptions, etc. So it's great, I love it because it gives me so much idea what is the wording that I should use for my titles, etc. So there is no shortage of data to optimize my videos for, and in this other case, as you can see, we can see the integration of vidIQ with the recommended tags again, so more keyword data that I can integrate in different ways to optimize my YouTube channel. So as you can see, with your current tools and also with new complete YouTube tools. We have really good keyword data here. Another fundamental analysis to do besides understanding how your audience searches is to identify your industry top competitors, the top players. They might not necessarily be your current competitors because that's me, right? If you're just starting, you will be well behind, but it will be great to have them as a reference to understand which are the top videos, which are those that generate more engagement, more views, who have more subscriptions, right? At the end of the day, you want to understand what has worked well in the past and what might work for you in the future too, right? Like to identify opportunities, to identify trends, to identify gaps. Also, there are a couple of tools that actually are really, really useful for this. One of them is Snacks Influencer and the other one is Social Blade. Right, so for example here we can see the analysis that they provide for a few profiles that are very active and successful in YouTube about SEO-related topics, optimization. Brian Dean for example with their YouTube channel Backlinko and then also Neil Patel have tons of subscribers as we can see, the uploads, the video views, when they created their channel here and to better understand what has generated more views for them and take that as a reference for you too. For example, you can take a look here in Social Blade which are the most viewed videos for any of these channels, the highest rated ones, the most relevant ones, how many views they are generating. You can identify if these are potential topics that you can cover too. In a similar way, you can even compare them versus yours if you have already a little bit of activity, so, but in this particular case I'm comparing them with the SEMrush channel that also has tons of really good videos. They have a really strong game over YouTube, so I want to understand how do they compare based on video updated frequency, the subscriptions and channel growth over time, social abundance, interaction rate, video performance, so I can see which of these channels are uploading much more, what is expected in my industry because of course there are so many rule of thumbs out there but not necessarily might apply in your particular case for your particular topic, so it's really, really good to double-check to verify what has actually worked well for those top players in your industry and how they have evolved over time again. In fact, one of the functionalities that I love the most from NoxInfluencer is that you can copy-paste any YouTube video and it will provide you this analytics report. So for example, here I included this Brandon about video SEO, right? It's his hottest video there and it tells me the views, the views ratio, the engagement rate, estimated view value, the comments, the likes ratio, and the tags that he has used for this particular video, which again, whenever I am creating a video about this particular topic, these might be tags that I would like to take into consideration, keywords that I would like to take into consideration that I know that have worked pretty well for him, for example. You will tend to track these channels too versus yours, not only yours, over time. And Semrush, they have a social media tracker that includes that YouTube functionality. So besides these 2 tools, you're already likely doing SEO, you're also likely using Semrush, and if you are, they do have this Really useful functionality that is the YouTube within the Social Media Tracker tool that you can use to track and check over time rather easily without verifying manually as I showed before, the total engagement, the engagement rates, the likes, the dislikes, the comments, the views for the latest video post in this case from the channels that you include here. Now you have the topic that you want to do a video for. You know what your competition has done in the past or the leaders in your industry and you know exactly how you want to focus the video, which are the terms that you want to use within your different elements of your video, right? And you know that there are certain elements that are very important to optimize with these terms like the titles, descriptions, the tags, the usage of hashtags, etc. And there is actually a good practice to follow. And this is for what both vidIQ and in this case TubeBuddy are super useful for because they will integrate like this. So for whatever video that I upload, I have them both integrated like this when I am uploading the video. They will allow me to create a thumbnail from scratch instead of selecting an image of the video that might not look so well and they will tell me when the image is not good enough or big enough or the highest quality as it should be. They recommend me tags and I can see how popular is the tag, the term within the tag for example. Again, they integrate tools like this to translate the video information, if there are any suggested terms, recommended tags here that I can use. If I have already included for example, info cards to refer to more information, if I have included already a playlist or assigned a playlist to my video. So here it might be a little bit because I am not uploading this video at this time and you can see that I followed 7 or the 10 steps that are recommended here, but we can see if we switch to the standalone application of the web application here of TubeBuddy, not the the integration within my video channel there. What are the best practices that are validated when you are uploading your video, right? If the caption is missing, if the cards are missing, if they suggest that you pin a comment, also an initial comment to incentivize engagement, you heart one of those comments, right? You respond to a comment, if there are any broken links found in the description, if there are any end screens missing, and they It's easily connected and linked to create an end screen. They incentivize you to actually optimize your video not only by including relevant terms in your title and description and tags but by optimizing as much as possible and making your video attractive as much as possible by adding all of this and making the most out of all of the features that YouTube provides. This is why these tools are so strong because they not only suggest the terms at the beginning but also make sure that you don't miss any of the features and the opportunities provided by YouTube to optimize your video and make your video attractive and make the most out of your video. Once that you have uploaded your video by following all of the previously shared checklist and make sure that it's as optimized as possible, the next step is to understand how it performs, right? And the most straightforward way and the full way to do it is by following up with the YouTube Studio Analytics, which is actually pretty good and the official way and the direct straightforward way to understand the views, the watch time, the subscribers that you have earned over time, your top videos, real-time activity. So it's actually pretty good. I was actually very impressed when I took a look at it, which are the different traffic sources of traffic, if there are any external even, not only internal, if there are any of your videos being suggested and bringing traffic to your channel or to the playlist too, so this is all pretty, pretty good and nice to have, but I understand that you will have anyway this by default and you will be able to take a look at this in a very simple way once that you start with it, you better understand your audience also, a little bit of demographic data here, from where do they come, their age, their gender, etc., etc., right? So definitely take a look at it. However, I have to say that in order to better understand especially the keyword usage or how you are optimizing in terms to rank for certain terms, you definitely want to take a step further. And again, VidIQ and TubeBuddy, they both provide ranking reports. In this particular case, I have to say that the type of reports that they provide, in case TubeBuddy for example here, You need to run them manually. For example, here I have the keywords to track as you can see and then I have the reports and when I have run these reports, right? And you may generate a new report every 24 hours. And the thing is, I don't want to be generating these reports manually, but it's great in case that you don't want to be including the URL of the video that you want to rank for, to track. Again and again because they will tell you whatever of the videos that are actually ranking for this term and how do they rank not only in YouTube but also in Google. So it's quite nice in this particular case but of course I want something that is actually automatic and this is what I have with Rank Ranker. Rank Ranker is also an SEO rank tracker that you will also use usually in SEO to rank for your relevant terms, those money-making terms for you or your client, right? But they also have the YouTube rank tracking functionality that I find super useful because the con is that you need to include specifically each one of the YouTube videos that you want to track for each particular term, but then it will automatically track the rankings daily of these terms like this and it will tell you where you're ranking within the YouTube search for these videos and how it has evolved over time like this, so it's quite nice, it's actually very straightforward and what I'm used also to get in the SEO world. And then there are also some additional analytics information that you can obtain from vidIQ but I have to say that regarding rank tracking, the one that I have liked the most until now and I have found to to be more aligned to the type of functionality that I am more used to within the YouTube search results or even the Google search results. So you can track them both, both of them, so it's a win-win type of combination. And last but not least, one of the functionalities that I like the most related to monitoring is the brand alerts that you can get with TubeBuddy, for example. TubeBuddy sends me email alerts like this, for example, whenever my name is mentioned and I could have included whatever brand or term I wanted to monitor proactively like this whenever it is mentioned in whatever video or YouTube channel, right? So for example, I get here the history of my mentions and this is a great opportunity if you also want to engage and do a little bit of community management over YouTube, also referring to your own channel whenever it's relevant and useful for. So I hope that with all of this you have gotten more ideas of what tools are actually useful for you or how that you can start to use to optimize your YouTube channels and to make the most out of your YouTube presence, YouTube videos. I have to say that there's actually much more here that I haven't had a chance because of course there's limited time here, but take a look at also TubeBuddy A/B testing, they provide a wealth of metrics and information so let's definitely take a look at TubeBuddy and vidIQ because they are the platforms to use for video YouTube marketing and optimization in this particular case but I wanted also to show you a few additional options and opportunities and what you can expect from them whenever you are starting as I did a few months ago so hope that this is useful and as usual, if you have any question, if you have any doubts, if you want to recommend any other tools that you have also found useful for YouTube optimization, please leave it in the comments and I look forward to see you the next Monday. If you have any idea for any other video too that you would like me to do, just let me know. Have a good Monday. Bye-bye.