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Why is YouTube keyword research is the secret sauce to cracking the YouTube algorithm, and how to do it properly.

For the full show notes, head over to https://vidiq.com/blog/post/how-to-master-youtube-algorithm-tubetalk-159


The Three C’s of YouTube Success

Tom confirms that there are a number of factors that could be affecting a channel's growth or lack of growth - he calls them the three Cs of YouTube:

• Consistency of uploads
• Consistency of topic
• Consistency of metadata

While being consistent with upload schedules and content topics is YouTube 101, being consistent with metadata, or how you optimize your content is key. Titles, tags, and descriptions need to work for you on a channel level, as well as on an individual video level. Having a system for works to create an ecosystem of all of your videos and it’s something Tom has been working on for years. Because of his extraordinary access to a billion views' worth of data, he’s been able to refine this system down as close to scientific process as possible. Tom states that it’s the job of any channel manager, whether you're doing it for yourself or for somebody else, to engineer relationships between your own videos so that you dominate that sidebar. That’s the path to crazy, crazy suggested views.

People totally forget that YouTube is, at the end of the day, a search engine. Good old SEO practices that work in the blogging world and on Google Search are going to have to be applied on YouTube too. It’s not about the relationship between you and your video content, it’s the relationship between your videos as a whole, and it’s a system that Tom unpacks on the podcast.

Keyword Research: The Basis of YouTube Success

Tom’s system is based on a process called keyword research. It’s a tool that is widely underused, probably the most underused weapon that any channel manager or YouTube creator could use. Most people are NOT using it, or certainly not using it to its full power.

Keyword research is often misunderstood because it's easy to do a quick search and say, "Okay, I'm going to put this in the tags of this single video and hope for the best." That's how it used to work in 2012 but that's not the same anymore, because YouTube and Google are a lot smarter now, and they understand content a lot better. Also, there's a lot more competition, and so there's a lot more other videos with similar metadata to cut through. Tom engineer’s relationships between his videos using keyword research, to go a level beyond just trying to rank an individual video. His aim to be the authority in his space, and he has used vidIQ’s Keyword Tool for the last seven years to identify exact search volume, an incredibly important metric for YouTube creators.

Tom looks for keywords that are getting high search volume (meaning lots of people searching for it that month), but low competition. That combination means that either there's not enough videos being made around that subject to cover that search demand, or the videos are being made, but the competition are not optimizing their videos for the right keywords. vidIQ’s Keyword Tool helps Tom find opportunities in the market around his main channel keywords (or ‘seed’ keywords).

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Catch you on the next TubeTalk!