In this post, we are going to explore how to find best tags for YouTube videos to increase your YouTube channel traffic and views. Analyse the changes in the traffic and views after optimized YouTube tags.
Before dive in on how to find best tags for YouTube videos, let’s see what is YouTube tags and why you should use YouTube tags.
Table of Contents
What are YouTube tags?
YouTube tags are a collection of words or phrases which give context about your video to the YouTube search engine.
YouTube tags are specially meant for YouTube search engine and that’s why YouTube purposely hide the YouTube tags.
YouTube separates each tag with a comma and allow up to 500 characters.
How I increased my YouTube traffic by 165% with YouTube tags SEO technique
YouTube tags are not so crucial factors in SEO but there is no doubt that adding best tags help in bringing more views to YouTube with my personal case study.
In one of my videos, I haven’t got any views for 90 days after I published it. After I published it, I got a few views and I’m sure that was because of subscribers’ notification feature.
After that, my video was completely lost on YouTube. In fact, I picked a low competition keyword as my focus keyword.
I was not able to find that video in the search results for my focus keyword.
I was not able to see that video on any of the recommendation feed for that focus keyword.
The only place where I could see that video is inside my channel.
I don’t have any clue why my videos are not shown up in the YouTube search and YouTube recommendation feed.
I checked the YouTube title, description, thumbnail and all looks good.
Then finally I understood that YouTube tags are the reason behind 0 views.
I completely removed all old YouTube tags and replaced them with optimized YouTube tags(I’ll explain the technique shortly).
Here’s what happened after that
It does not do the magic immediately but I could see the video views are gradually increasing day by day after I made changes to YouTube tags which in turn increase my video traffic by 165%
How to find best tags for YouTube videos
Step 1 Identify the target keyword
Before finding the best tags for YouTube videos, you need to identify the video target keyword. It’s a pre-requisite for the YouTube tags SEO technique.
Often video target keyword should be the subset of the YouTube video title and you should’ve decided that before making a video.
Just note it down your target keyword. Your target keywords could be 3-4 letter words like how to lose weight, find long tail keywords, etc.
Let’s assume “find long tail keywords” as our target keyword.
Step 2 Break YouTube tags into 3 parts
YouTube allow YouTubers to add tags up to 500 characters. Break those 500 characters into 4 divisions. So, each division contains ~125 characters.
Related tags
Competitor tags
Category tags
Miscellaneous tags
Step 3 Find the related YouTube tags
In this step, you need to find the related YouTube tags or related keywords for the target keyword or focus keyword.
Install the TubeBuddy on your chrome browser and go to the YouTube homepage.
Enter the target keyword(find long tail keywords) on the YouTube search textbox and click the search button.
On the right-hand side, you can see the list related searches for the given keywords as shown below.
Pick 3-5 tags relevant to your video content.
Step 4 Find competitor YouTube tags
Adding competitor YouTube tags is the best way to list your video in the recommendation feed while your competitor video is playing.
Finding the competitor YouTube tags are easy with TubeBuddy. You no need to go inside each video to find the tags.
You can easily find competitor tags for the target keyword and let me show you how.
It’s same as step 3. Enter the target keyword(find long tail keywords) on the YouTube search textbox and click the search button. You can find the competitor tags next to related search textbox as shown below.
You can select all those tags and export to CSV for further analysis.
Step 5 Find Category Tags
Use this section to define 2-3 categories your video belongs to. Our target keyword is “long tail keywords” so the best categories are “Keyword research”, “on-page SEO”, “content marketing”.
Step 6 Miscellaneous tags
In this step, we are going to add some misc type tags.
Add your target keyword as the first tag. Include your channel name as one of the YouTube tags. If your target keyword is commonly misspelled include that as one of the tags. Omit the stop words such as ‘a’, ‘else’.
Make sure that your YouTube tags are relevant and never abused by stuffing.
Step 7 Monitor YouTube tags rank
Kudos! You finally find best tags for YouTube videos. But you are not done yet. You’ve to consistently monitor the YouTube video tag ranks. TubeBuddy will help you on this. Just hit publish and come back after a week and check the YouTube tags rank.
YouTube tag ranking look like below if you installed TubeBuddy on your browser.
The green color indicate the tag rank for your video. It represents your video search result rank if somebody put that tag on the YouTube search.
Step 8 Optimize YouTube Tags further
Till step #7, you’ve learnt how to find best tags for YouTube videos. In this step, we are going to optimize video tags further to increase the traffic and views. SEO is not just one-time stuff you have to be consistent with optimization to see better results.
From step #7, you clearly know the list of related and competitor tags not ranked on the YouTube search. There is no use of keeping those tags. So, just remove that and replace it with fresh tags by rinse and repeat step # 3 and 4.
Now you learned strategy behind how to find best tags for YouTube videos. Please let me know if you have any questions.