Everything You Need To Know About YouTube Tags (+ how I search for keywords for YouTube)

YouTube SEO, YouTube tags, YouTube keywords. You hear this a lot on YouTube and it can be a bit confusing. Plus, the YouTube algorithm has changed so much in the past five years that I've been on YouTube and keywords and tags don't really have the power that they used to have. So what do you need to know about keywords on YouTube? Let's break it all down now. Most of this video is going to be over on my computer walking you through these steps. But I do want to talk to you about something real quick. It is still very much important to do research and figure out some keywords that you want to target. Although I like to think of keywords as topics instead of keywords. Tags, YouTube SEO. So what YouTube has realized the past couple of years is you can lie with your tags and your description box content. So it has given less and less weight to tags in keywords. And it's actually listening to the words you are saying in your videos so that it knows that you can't lie with what you're saying in your videos. But you need to know what kind of keywords and what topics you are hitting to talk about it in your videos, right? And you also need to know if that keyword is being searched on YouTube. What I generally see happen is people decide on this topic and it may make sense to them and people within their niche, but nobody's actually searching for it. So if there's no search volume, nobody's going to be searching for that video. So it's going to be hard for you to get views. And the same thing with competition, you need to find the right keywords to break out. Because if you are a smaller channel and and there are other bigger channels doing similar topics, it's going to be hard for you to compete with that exact topic. For example, if I want to compete with how to grow on YouTube, there are a lot of other larger channels that are already crushing that particular keyword. So I need to find a different perspective or a different keyword that I can compete on. So how do you do this? Let's take it over to the computer. So I'm going to show you two examples of kind of finding the right YouTube keywords for your content. And I'm also going to show you my process now before we dive in here, I will tell you a tool that I use all the time for this that is worth the money is tubebuddy. It really helps me figure out is this keyword being searched, what is the competition? And it literally saves me so much Time. So if you want to try out TubeBuddy, I will link to it down below. You can try it out for free because I'm going to be using it here in this video. But I will tell you totally worth it. So you can go into YouTube search and it's totally free to search this way for your keywords. So let's say for example, the next series I'm doing on my channel is all about growing a YouTube channel. So I'm going to type in growing a YouTube channel and you can see these are topics or keywords that people are searching for. That would be great. Growing YouTube channel from nothing in a week, from zero to a thousand 2021. So I could go to let's try growing a YouTube channel from nothing and I can start to see what are the titles, what are the thumbnails that people are using, do they stand out? And then Since I have TubeBuddy, it's this Google Chrome extension you see, it will show up right up here. It's also going to tell me how well I can compet heat for that specific keyword. So you'll see right here, the search volume is in yellow, so it's okay. Obviously the closer to green the better, meaning more searches per month. And the competition is great. There's not a lot of competition for growing a YouTube channel from nothing. The more red it would be, the more competitive it would be. TubeBuddy also gives you these common video tags. I'm going to show you how I use their keyword explorer. But this just shows up right in search. So this is all free here on YouTube. But then this is part of TubeBuddy and this can help me kind of spawn off more keywords or more topics. Remember, I like to call these topic ideas instead of just keywords. So how to grow a YouTube channel. How to grow your YouTube channel. How to grow on YouTube. So grow your YouTube channel. If we click on that, it's going to pull up here and you're going to see the competition is probably going to be a little bit different. It's more competitive. You'll see it showing me how many searches per month where the last one didn't. There may not be enough searches for growing on YouTube channel from nothing. But grow your YouTube channel has over 5,000 searches per month. It's showing me right there. But the competition is a little bit higher because it's closer to red. Let me show you two examples of deciding which topic to actually go after. I'm going to use my channel as an example And a client's channel as an example too. So I'm going to go up here into tubebuddy and I'm going to go into their keyword explorer. This saves me a lot of time. It really helps me decide which topics to go after. So we're thinking about growing a YouTube channel. How to grow a YouTube channel. So starting a YouTube channel. Let's try how to start a YouTube channel. And I want this to be a big enough topic that I can talk about this in more than one video. I want to extend this out for a series. So what we're seeing right here, there's 350,000 searches a month, but there's over 67 million videos already showing up for this keyword. You'll see that the TubeBuddy overall score is poor. Although I don't always use this as yes or no. It's red, it's a no. If it's green, it's a yes. I don't necessarily use that. I'm looking at other things here. So search volume is huge. Competition is poor because there's a lot out there and optimization strength is good. You'll also see here are some other ideas as well. So these are related searches to help you niche it down a little bit so you can be competitive without jumping in with the big guns. Because if we go in here to results, the videos that are showing up have 2.2 million views, 300,000 views. There's Amy at 2.5 thousand views. But Annie has a channel of over a hundred thousand subscribers, again, 5 million. So it's going to be hard for me, a channel, 40,000 subscribers, to necessarily compete with that. So I want to pare it down. How can I create a video that's still being searched but not so competitive Again, I could also go over here and scroll through here. Could also click on video topics as well. And I can also look at common tags as well. So what I'm going to do. And again, this just takes a lot of practice and thinking about headlines. So maybe starting a YouTube channel so there are less videos in the search results. 85,000 searches per month. Still pretty competitive. So maybe I go over here, starting a YouTube channel for beginners. Okay, not as many searches per month or not enough searches to show up how many times this is search a month. But starting a YouTube channel, this mean keyword was searched, right? If we go to starting a YouTube channel, it was searched over 85,000 times a month. But I'm creating a long tail keyword to go after. So starting a YouTube channel for beginners could be the direction that I take this. So we go here into specifically results. You'll see the same people at the top, but they don't have necessarily the exact phrase that I'm using. So starting a YouTube channel for beginners, Katherine has something similar to that. How to start a YouTube channel beginner's guide. How to start a YouTube channel beginner's guide, but not starting a YouTube channel for beginners. Let's look at this in another case study. So a student of mine hope at under the median. She started her channel with money saving tips. So if we type in money saving tips, the results we're going to get is 350,000 searches per month, but over 9 million videos. Right? Pretty competitive. You see it's in poor. So what she did is she took some research, she tried to figure out what was the best angle her target audience wanted. And so what she did was she pared this down to Frugality tips. So there are over 10,000 searches per month. That's potentially 10,000 people and only 52,000 videos for that search. Then if you go into results, you're going to see her videos. Right? There is number two. This has 100,000 views and you'll see Frugality Tips to save money. So Frugality Tips to Save Money has over 1,000 searches per month in 1 million videos. But again, if we go to results, you'll see right there is their video with a hundred thousand views. So she really figured out her unique angle. And that's what using tubebuddy in this keyword explorer can really do to help you pick the best video topics moving forward. So when you're diving into your research, you want to make sure one, that there are people actually searching that term. So 1.4 thousand searches per month and that it's not too competitive. So the search volume was kind of small. The optimization strength and the competition were pretty good. So she took this and tacked it on to this larger keyword. Right. So frugality tips. And then she made a series of videos around this topic. So if we go to her channel and you look at her top performing videos, she literally grew to, you see 20,000 subscribers since December. So December, January, February, March, April, we're in May in just five months from 200 subscribers to 20,000 with this research tactic. So you will see extreme frugality tips, Daily frugal habits, Extreme frugality tips. Extreme frugality tips, Setting frugal financial goals. Okay, when she doubled down on this keyword that she knew there was search for. Not too much competition. You see how quickly her channel grew, right? 100,000 views, 60,000 views, 51,000 views. So that's what you really want to do when you are searching for your YouTube keywords. Now let's talk about where are you going to use these keywords. So it's really important to have your primary keyword in your title. So for this particular video, my keyword was video ideas. My channel does really well for that topic. And so that is in there. And then we have a secondary keyword as well. Grow your YouTube channel. So we have two keywords, but the primary one was video ideas. So we are using that here. Video ideas. Video Ideas for YouTube. Ideas for YouTube videos. We're using those keywords over and over in the description box. I'm also saying them in that particular video as well. So when I'm writing my script, I'm making sure I'm kind of using those words as well. Because YouTube will pick up on what you're actually saying in the videos. That's why it's important to do this research before you even film your video. Then we will also use these keywords down here in the tags. Tags aren't as important as they used to be on YouTube because YouTube realized people can lie about them. But they're still important to add because you're giving YouTube more information about your content. And you'll see using TubeBuddy, we can see what keywords we are ranking for. So when people search YouTube video ideas, I'm the third result. When people search video ideas for YouTube, I'm the third result. Video ideas for. Grow your YouTube channel for. And so that's how this is all tying together. Your YouTube SEO, your YouTube tags, your YouTube keywords, it's all a part of this optimization piece that gives YouTube more information about your content. Again, I'm talking a lot about TubeBuddy, but honestly, this is where TubeBuddy saves me so much time here in my channel and with our clients channels, they have recommended tags here. So when you install TubeBuddy as a Google Chrome extension, you would have this as well. And you could see potentially other keywords that you could add that you would do well for. So they give it a score. How to start a YouTube channel. Obviously not what that video is about. It's scoring a 10. So the higher the number, the more chance you have for showing up for that keyword. So I don't think there's anything specifically here how to grow your YouTube channel 2021. Or I could maybe do video ideas to grow your YouTube channel in 2021. I could just hit that plus and it'll automatically add it to my tags. But I also want to make sure I have it in my description box and I should probably be talking about that specific topic in the video to use that. So how many tags should you actually have? There's no steadfast number you can see here. It allows up characters for this particular video. We have 392, but we use anywhere from five to 15 tags. It's not going to make or break your channel how many tags you have here. Just make sure you're adding them to give YouTube more context about your video. And the last piece that I wanted to share with you too, if you're having a hard time coming to that part where Hope came to frugality tips and how she came to that, you can research other people's videos. If we go to this keyword, growing a YouTube channel, I may think, okay, this was four months ago. This is brand new. He just released this. So this is a great example. We can use TubeBuddy to see which tags she's using to help us spark new ideas. So right here you can see we can hit show search ranking and you can see Annie kills it all the time with these. But this could help me come up with new video ideas as well. YouTube algorithm how to grow on YouTube 2021 how to start a YouTube channel Right, because TubeBuddy is providing this information if you have a subscription. So if you want to try out TubeBuddy, go to trina little.com forward/tubebuddy. You actually get a discount if want to try a monthly subscription or do the full year. But I'm telling you, TubeBuddy is the one tool that I spend most of my time in and then I'm probably in every single day. Does specifically help me with tags, keywords, YouTube optimization, SEO, whatever you want to call it. This video is part of an entire series about ways to level up your YouTube channel and grow it faster. I'm going to link to that playlist on your screen right now. Go grab some popcorn, get a drink and binge. Watch this playlist. Because if you're trying to grow your YouTube channel and you can't figure out why not, growing these videos will definitely help you do that.