How to Do YouTube Keyword Research Easy Steps

Want to grow your YouTube channel and get more views? The “trick” is to target topics with search demand.This approach helped us grow our YouTube channel from around 10,000 to over 200,000 views per month in about a year.

Youtube is watching growth.We also gained over 50,000 new subscribers in the same period.In this post, I'll walk you through our three-step process to find the best keywords to target on YouTube.

 Map Out Your Topic Hierarchy :

Imagine selling phone cases online and creating a new channel where you unbox new smartphones to attract an audience of potential customers.The first thought might be to go for broad topics with high search volume.

The problem is that if you create videos on topics that are too broad, you will attract an irrelevant audience. Likewise, if you make videos on super niche topics, then you won't attract enough people.Solve this by first mapping out a hierarchy of topics to cover.

If we were doing this for our unboxing channel, then "unboxing" could be at the top of the hierarchy. From here you can list your favorite brands.Then you can add specific models under each of them.Feel free to go as deep as necessary with your hierarchy.

PRO TIP

If you can't do this process manually, one trick is to use the wildcard (*) with YouTube's auto-suggest. For example, we could search for something like Samsung Galaxy S* to find phone models.

Create keyword suggestions and find out search volumes

Next, use keyword research tools to find what people are searching for in relation to your list of topics.

There are many keyword research tools out there, but most of them only show Google search volumes, not YouTube. These are almost completely useless because people search on YouTube very differently than they do on Google.For example, Google Trends tells us that searches for “pizza dough recipe” have been slowly declining on Google in recent years…

Now you might be thinking that the solution is to look at the number of views of the videos on YouTube. But it can also be quite misleading.

For example, we've been ranked in the "SEO audit" category on YouTube and our video has garnered an impressive 640,000 views over the past three years.That's an average of about 18,000 views per month. But one quick look at our YouTube analytics will tell you that our views come from paid YouTube ads, not organic search.

With that in mind, here are three tools for finding YouTube keyword suggestions and search volumes that actually work.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Go to the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, select YouTube as your search engine, and enter your initial keyword. Let's get to the "unboxing".You can see that this keyword is getting 40,000 monthly searches in the US.The problem is that this topic is too broad, which is probably why only 32% of searches lead to clicks.

Think about it. If someone searches for "unboxing" on YouTube, what do they want to see you unbox? Chances are you have no idea and they probably don't either.

Instead, go to the "Phrase Match" report, which displays keyword suggestions containing your default keywords.In this case we get ~120,000 suggestions.

But there's a problem: some ideas are not related to smartphones - which is the topic of our channel. We wouldn't want to make a Nintendo Switch unboxing video despite its high search demand.

To solve this, look back at your hierarchy from step one and then put some topics in the "Include" filter separated by commas. Toggle the switch to "Any word" to show keywords that contain any words in your list - plus your seed.You should end up with a much more manageable list of super relevant keywords.

To narrow down the list even further, filter keywords with at least 500 searches per month.

PRO TIP

Most keyword research tools, such as Keyword Explorer, use rounded annual averages for search volume estimates. For this reason, it's worth checking for downward or seasonal trends before jumping into a keyword.

YouTube Ads

With YouTube Ads, you can pay to show your video in YouTube searches for any keyword. For example, if you had an iPhone X unboxing video, you could run YouTube ads for the keyword "iPhone X unboxing."Let your ad run for 30 days and then check your Google Ads search queries report to see the number of times your ad was seen for each keyword.

The number of impressions a keyword gets should be an underestimate of search volume, because your ad won't show up for every search. But it should still be enough for a rough estimate.

YouTube Autosuggest + Google Trends

Start typing your initial keyword into the YouTube search box and a list of related queries will appear. These are the results of "auto suggestions" and are a great source of keyword ideas.

For example, if you type in "iPhone * unboxing," you'll see suggestions like "iPhone XS Max unboxing" and "iPhone 7 unboxing." If you see any interesting suggestions, drop them into Google Trends, then change the dropdown to "YouTube Search" to see their relative popularity.

Here you can see that more people are searching for "iPhone XS unboxing" than "iPhone 5S unboxing".

PRO TIP

Unfortunately, combining auto-suggest results with Google Trends won't show you absolute search volumes. If you happen to know the rough search volume of only one keyword, you can "estimate" the volume of the others by comparing their relative popularity in Google Trends.