3 Best YouTube Keyword Research Tools

I’m going to explain three YouTube keyword research tools that will help you to quickly find the best keywords for your YouTube channel. Additionally, toward the end, you'll get a pro tip on how to use these keyword research tools.

YouTube Search Bar

The reason why I’m mentioning the YouTube search bar is the autofill feature. This is the same feature you’ll see whenever you search for something in the Google search engine.

Basically, whenever you type a key phrase that is adequately broad, youtube will automatically recommend long-tail key phrases that are more specific. These key phrases are typically easier to rank for than the original broad term you entered.

For example, if you type “fitness plans” in YouTube’s search bar, you’ll see specific phrases like:

• Fitness plans to lose weight and tone up
• Fitness plans for women
• Fitness plans for men
• Fitness plans for beginners

What if you want to see words that appear before the “fitness plans” phrase? To do that, type an underscore before “fitness plans.”

Then you’ll see phrases like:

• Planet fitness plans
• Get planet fitness
• Best fitness plans

What if I told you [Lawrence Fishburne meme) that there’s a way take this approach to the next level? That’s where Keywords everywhere comes in.

Keywords Everywhere

With keywords everywhere, whenever you type a key phrase in youtube, you’ll get four metrics for every single key phrase that displays in the YouTube search bar:

• Search volume – the average total searches that people have performed for a key phrase in the last 12 months
• Cost per click – the amount that advertisers pay for a single click related to a keyword
• Competition – a gauge of the numbers of advertisers running ads on Google AdWords for a specific keyword
• Trend Data – the historical monthly trend data from the last 12 months

Not only that, Keywords Everywhere displays metrics in the right sidebar of your searches such as

• Ranking difficulty
• the top channel for a key phrase
• maximum views
• average video ages
• most used tags
• and more

When you click on a video, you’ll get information about the video and channel to the right such as:

• The like/dislike ratio
• Engagement score
• Total channel videos
• Tags used in the video
• And more

VidIQ

From my experience, VidIQ is the best overall key phrase research tool to:

• Analyze key phrases
• Get key phrase suggestions
• Find trending videos in your niche

VidIQ is so impressive and the advantages that VidIQ provide are so numerous, I can’t name them all, but here are the advantages that stand out to me:

• If you go login to its website, and go to the keywords section to conduct a search, you’ll get countless keyword suggestions. This is a great way to discover untapped key phrases that would be a good fit for your channel. This feature is available with the pro plan.
• If you go to a YouTube channel in your niche, you’ll see a button provided by VidIQ called “trending.” If you click that button, you’ll see the videos with the highest views per hour on that channel. This is a great way to get video ideas for your own channel. Of course, I recommend that you don’t copy their videos. Add your own spin to those video ideas based on your unique perspective and strengths.
• And if you conduct a search for a key phrase in YouTube and look to the right, you’ll see both the volume and competition level for that key phrase. This is essential information to know for determining whether you should target a key phrase. Typically, the key phrases with high volumes and low or very low competition are the ones you’ll want to target.

Pro Tip: Use Google Trends

I think it’s important to also mention Google Trends. Sometimes, key phrase analysis tools give you search volumes for key phrases that are misleading because those search volumes may be on a sharp downward trend. Google Trends will give you additional confirmation that search volumes for a key phrase are actually accurate and ideally on an upward trend.