We all know that Google is the most visited website on the internet… but did you know that the second biggest search engine is actually YouTube?
You may be thinking, “If Google exists, why do we need YouTube? If people can look things up on Google, why would they go to YouTube instead?”
Well, because people search for things differently in those two places.
If I’m interested in buying an espresso machine, I’m probably going to head to Google to research the different brands of espresso machines and look at reviews of certain products. But if I just got a new espresso machine and the steamer isn’t turning on to froth the milk, I’m gonna go to YouTube, look up the exact brand and model of my espresso machine, and watch the video that tells me how to fix this steamer problem.
And the same is true across many different industries (not just espresso machine tutorials); The way that people search across these different platforms is different.
So if you’re a content creator, how do you know what you should create for Google (your blog posts and written content) and what you should create for YouTube (your video content)?
Well, I’m going to share with you one of my favorite tools I use to figure out what content I should create and where it should go: Google Trends.
youtube for content creators
If you’re creating content for YouTube, it can be really time-consuming. You’re not only taking the time to record, edit, upload, and optimize, but you also want to make sure that the topic you’re talking about is something that people are looking for on YouTube.
I’ve already talked about how much I love Google Trends as a way to see how people behave differently – whether that’s over a specific time period or geographic region, and how different keywords can compare to each other. But Google Trends can also be an incredibly powerful tool to look not just at what people are searching for on Google, but what they’re searching for on YouTube.
(Google owns YouTube, so it can get that data and share it with us through Google Trends).
what is google trends?
Google Trends helps you find the right keywords and show you related searches worldwide.
You can get super specific with it – down to subregions, cities, and metros. Looking at these queries can help us optimize our content. And in this case, I’m going to show you how to do that specifically with YouTube.
Understanding people’s behavior based on location & platform
First let’s take a look at how Google Trends can compare different keywords and search terms. I’m going to compare the search terms Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube:
So I’m choosing to look at these searches worldwide, so we can see the interest for each search term over time over the past 5 years. In this case, we can see that Facebook (blue) searches have declined the most drastically, YouTube (green) has declined a bit, Instagram (red) has pretty much stayed at a solid level, and Tik Tok (yellow) just started to increase over the past couple years (because Tik Tok didn’t even exist 5 years ago!)
You can also take a look at how people behave differently based on their locations, which can be fascinating if you’re trying to search for behavior in a specific location.
Learning YouTube search using Google Trends
Now, we’re still looking at Google search here…
But I want to show you how you have the option to change one of your filters to from “Web Search” to “YouTube Search.”
And when I click to YouTube Search, you’ll see very different trends happening here.
Now we can see the Tik Tok (yellow) search SKYROCKET over the past couple years on YouTube compared to when we looked at it on Google.
So if you’re creating different content for YouTube versus Google, you might want to think about talking on video platforms about video, and talk on written platforms about written content. Being aware that people are searching for different things in different locations is one of the most valuable things you can glean from this lesson.
Comparing different searches over time & relevant search queries
So we took a look at these searches over the past 5 years… but what if we take a look at the past 30 days? This is one of the coolest things about looking at Google Trends for YouTube search results – you can see the trends that are happening right now.
This is super helpful in thinking about what content to create around these trending topics. It’s also a great way get ahead of the trends, in a way.
So if you can find some of these queries, you should be able create a video revolving around these trends that’ll get instant feedback (because you’re utilizing the YouTube algorithm to your advantage).
Top related searches across social media platforms
Another thing that you may want to check out (which is a little bit less time-sensitive) is the top related searches over a specific period of time.
So when we see the “Rising” version, that means over the five-year time period, more people are looking for things like Facebook dark mode or Facebook marketplace. These are things that are coming up now that weren’t being searched for five years ago.
If you want to see the most popular search term over the past five years, you can switch the “Rising” button to “Top” and it will show you the top 25 queries over that time period.
So if you’re stuck trying to figure out how you can create content that’s going to get the views and response that you’re looking for from your audience, you can use Google Trends to find really popular, timely, relevant keywords for your YouTube channel.
But then once you have the keywords, what do you do with them?
Make sure to download my free SEO checklist that’ll show you how to optimize your YouTube videos for SEO.