Over the past year, I’ve talked a lot about how blog posts and podcasts can be a really great way for your audience to find you and for you to position yourself as an expert in your industry. But one of the things that I haven’t really talked about that much is YouTube.
We all know how important of a role Google plays in helping your content get found, but what about YouTube? YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world (and it’s actually owned by Google). So posting on YouTube is a great way to show up both in the video searches and on Google.
One of my favorite tools that I’ve been using for over a year to make sure that every video that I put onto YouTube is doing the best job it can to get me more search traffic is Tubebuddy.
TubeBuddy is a Chrome extension that’ll give you a bunch of information about YouTube videos right in your YouTube interface.
What kind of information, you may ask? Well, whether you’re updating your own videos or you’re looking at your competitors to see what’s working well for them, TubeBuddy will give you detailed information about the keywords they’re ranking for and what terms they’re showing up for when people search.
What’s the difference between Keywords Everywhere, Google Trends, and TubeBuddy?
Keywords Everywhere and Google Trends are two other keyword research tools that you can use to get ideas for YouTube and see what people are searching for.
Google Trends is cool because it’ll show you over time how different people have searched for YouTube videos, but it doesn’t go into a ton of detail about whether or not you can rank for certain keywords.
And the same is true for Keywords Everywhere. It can give you a basic idea of what a video might rank for, but it doesn’t tap into the algorithm nearly as much and it doesn’t give you an idea of how you can optimize your videos for YouTube.
These tools are pretty good for coming up with new ideas, but when it comes down to which keywords your channel might have the capacity to rank for and how to put those keywords into the right places on your videos, TubeBuddy is the best solution.
how do I get tubebuddy?
There is a free version of TubeBuddy that’s great if you want to explore the tool. With the free version, you can look at up three keywords for up to 25 searches a day.
For my business, I’ve upgraded to the “Pro” plan which is only $9/month, BUT if you have less than 1000 subscribers, it’s half of that. So it’s less than $5/month to get all of this information about what people are looking for on YouTube and how to show up in those search results.
Once you’re at tubebuddy.com, you can download the extension and connect it to your YouTube account. It’ll automatically pull in all the info about how your YouTube channel is performing and what keywords you’re ranking for.
looking at youtube search insights
Let’s take a look. I’m gonna go over to YouTube and type in a term that I already rank for, which is “Yoast vs.Rank Math.”
I rank number 7 for this search term – woohoo!
When we take a look at the search results, we can see that there’s an extra sidebar on the right side of our screen called Search Explorer which will tell you how many people are looking for the search term. In this case, we can see that not a lot of people are looking for it, but it’s also not that competitive.
One thing I really love about TubeBuddy is that it’ll not only tell me what the search volume and the competition is for a specific keyword, but it’ll tell me how I’m stacking up against my competitors. If you click “click here for weighted,” TubeBuddy will show you on average what other videos are ranking for, for that same search term.
We can also see what some of the related searches are (but I’m not going to re-record this in Hindi, sorry!)
You can also see the common video tags for this keyword. I’ve already optimized this for video tags, but after taking a look at these results, I can say I didn’t think about the fact that people would be looking for an SEO plugin and whether it works with the Elementor page builder. So maybe I would want to do a spin-off video now that I know this term is also showing up frequently in the content that my competitors are creating.
analyzing your video insights
If you want to take a look at how you can optimize your videos for YouTube, you can click on your video and TubeBuddy will bring up another sidebar called Videolytics.
Videolytics is TubeBuddy’s way of telling you exactly what has happened with this video.
You can see that I’ve had 331 views, six comments, and 26 likes. You can also see your SEO score out of 100 for the video – mine is 85. Now that I’m looking at this, I should have used tags in my title and description. So you can use this information to go back and edit your video to include these things to bring that SEO score up a bit.
You can see whether it’s been shared on social media, if it’s been mentioned on Twitter, how many views you have for your entire channel, how many subscribers you have…
And if you’re doing competitive research, you can get an idea of who you’re up against, what kinds of metrics they have, how many subscribers they have, how
many videos they’ve created, the best practices people did and didn’t follow… and it’ll give you an idea of every tag that they included in their description.
Optimizing YouTube tags in TubeBuddy
All of the tags I used in this video I got directly from TubeBuddy – so let me show you how this looks.
When I click “edit video”, you’ll see the page now has even more information. It’ll let you create a thumbnail right in your editor, it’ll tell you what your upload defaults are and what the best practices are that you haven’t completed – it’ll even tell you if there’s something in your video that will take away your settings if your videos are being monetized on YouTube.
Down in the tags section, it’ll even give you tag suggestions, and after you’ve recorded your video and uploaded it, it’ll tell you where you rank for some of those specific terms.
So it’s telling me I rank number four for “yoast vs. rank math,” and number 13 for “yoast plugin.”
Notice how I only used 486 characters? That means I still have another about 14 characters that I could fit in there. So if I wanted to, I could take a look at the recommended tags that TubeBuddy is suggesting and pop in another search term.
Meeting TubeBuddy’s other “best practices”
TubeBuddy will let you create templates for various things that you do fairly frequently. So there are tons of templates that you can create that’ll help you speed up your optimization process by meeting all of these best practices.
TubeBuddy also shows you not just what people are looking for on YouTube, but what they’re looking for on Google – and when they were looking for them, and what other video topics those same people looking for, and what some common tags are that show up.
So as you can see, TubeBuddy is a super powerful resource that you can use to make sure that the time you’re spending creating your YouTube videos gets you new clients and new leads.
Full disclosure – I am an affiliate for TubeBuddy, so if you’d like you can grab my affiliate link here. It won’t change your price at all, but I’ll get a small kickback if you decide to become a paying member of TubeBuddy.