The Ultimate Guide to YouTube Keyword Planning 2023

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YouTube needs no introduction and saying it is a popular social media channel would be an understatement. Before we give you a step-by-step guide to using a YouTube keyword planner, it is important to know why YouTube should be a channel your brand leverages for marketing.

Did you know?

A report by Statista states that as of 2018, 27% of all internet users worldwide accessed YouTube at least once per day. That is 27% of over 4 billion people! That’s nearly a billion daily users for the platform, more than most other social media platforms today.

These numbers make it clear that YouTube is one of the best marketing and brand outreach platforms.

Not only is YouTube a heavily populated platform (making it a rich source for a live target audience), but videos are also the most preferred mode of media by a majority of internet users.

A report by students from the University of Sydney, Australia showed that the human brain is more captivated by movement, which is why people have an affinity to videos over images and text.

This fact is further elucidated by a report by Brightcove that states that video content on social media received 1200% more shares than image and text content combined, in 2015.

Performing Keyword Analysis and Video Optimization Before Publishing a Video

Not only is YouTube a media channel, but it is also the world’s second-largest search engine after Google. This is why, along with creating useful and engaging content, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a significant role in increasing organic impressions and viewership for your videos.

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Here are the steps you need to follow in order to ensure you get the best out of YouTube:

1. YouTube Keyword Research

Just like SEO for web pages, a critical factor for ranking on YouTube is to have textual content (the video title, description, tags, etc.) that is optimized with relevant keywords.

The first step is to use a YouTube keyword planner (there are many free YouTube keyword planner tools that we cover later on in this article) to find relevant keywords that people are actively searching for.

To get started, you need to have a general sense of keyword ideas, which you can then insert on a keyword tool for YouTube and get relevant keywords with their search volumes.

This is pretty easy and can be done on YouTube itself.

Start typing ideas related to your video on YouTube and look for the autocomplete text:

youtube keyword planner 2. Aim for High Retention and Engagement

YouTube prefers to rank videos that have a high video retention rate higher than those that don’t. If a great title and description cause your video to rank higher, but the retention rate is low, your video will drop in rankings.

In fact, this is what YouTube said:

3. Use a Catchy Title and Thumbnail

Another important factor that affects rankings in the Click Through Rate (CTR). Similar to engagement, CTR can demote your video rankings even though SEO got it to rank high. The concept is simple – if YouTube ranked your video for a keyword, but a massive number of people are not clicking on it (resulting in a low CTR), it probably means your video is not relevant for the keyword. Thus, YouTube will demote it.

Getting users to click on your video is a matter of creating an eye-catching thumbnail and an interesting title.

Always remember to add your target keyword in the title as well, and using text in the thumbnail to make a bold statement often helps increase CTR:

5. Promote Your Videos

Since a lot of ranking factors depend on viewers, your video needs to be viewed for it to rank! There are a lot of great ways and channels (free and paid) to promote your video. Share it on all popular social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. Follow this guide to learn what’s relevant for social media promotion in 2020: . Make sure to create a very relevant audience for these paid promotions to get positive engagement.

Create playlists of similar videos in order to encourage cross viewership:

1. TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is an easy to use YouTube keyword planner with a free and premium package. The Chrome extension adds a sidebar to the YouTube window and displays keyword insights:

The information gives you an idea about search volume (globally), keyword competition and a keyword score out of 100. The information looks like:

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is a great free YouTube keyword planner. Since it is created and managed by Google, its results are fairly accurate. Google Trends gives you an analysis of the search trends for an entered keyword:

4. Morning Fame

Morning Fame is a handy keyword tool for YouTube, and provides its own platform and interface:

Optimize Your YouTube Videos With Keywords for Maximum Views

Publishing quality content should always be the number one priority for video creators. However, what use is a great video that isn’t being found on YouTube search? That’s where keyword optimization comes in. With the 5 best practices we listed above for video publishing and a keyword planner tool for YouTube, you will be able to drive maximum viewership for your YouTube videos.

If you’re a digital marketer, you will benefit from this article we recently published:  and pave the path to numerous lucrative opportunities.