Understanding the competitive landscape of your content will help you to identify keyword opportunity gaps and find new content topic niches. Not only will it make a big difference in your SEO strategy but also give valuable information for your SEM and PPC campaigns.

Your brand or topic might be in an unsaturated niche industry, which makes it easier for your keywords to rank. But for most businesses out there, there is a lot of stiff competition among pages to rank well on Google.

Competitor keyword analysis, especially using the right keyword tools, will help you understand what your competitors are doing in SEO that’s working for them. You can then adopt relevant strategies, improve them, and gain a competitive advantage.

And most importantly, you’ll be able to stay ahead of your competition, both as a business and on Google search.

Study your competitors, before analyzing keywords

Before you begin keyword research on your competitor’s ranking keywords, you should first start by analyzing your competition. Take a step back and dive deeper into your industry. Ask yourself:

• Who are the main players?
• Who are my direct and indirect competitors?
• What is their digital presence like?
• Which pages of their website appear on Google’s page 1?

Then, perform a simple SWOT analysis and evaluate your competitors. It will give you a better idea of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here are some questions to get you started on the SWOT analysis:

• Strengths – Which areas they do the best in? What are their hero products? What are they known best for?
• Weaknesses – What are the main weaknesses of their brand or product? Which parts of the market your competitor hasn’t covered or cornered yet?
• Opportunities – What are the advantages that your brand has over your competitor? Are there any opportunities in the market that your competitor hasn’t identified yet?
• Threats – In what areas do your competitor win that you don’t? Are they the go-to brand or thought leader in the space instead of yours?

By performing this competitor analysis, you’ll be able to compare your strengths and weaknesses with your competitors. It will allow you to better position your brand or product by uncovering areas of improvements that you might not have thought about before.

The benefits of competitor keyword analysis

Competitor keyword analysis is part of the broader practice of keyword research. It’s the method of analyzing search terms that help to bring visitors to your website through organic or paid search.

Researching keywords itself is not nearly enough to gain an edge. You’ll also need to understand your competitive landscape better. By doing so, you’ll be able to:

1. Find out the competitiveness of different keywords (that will be useful for both SEO and PPC campaigns)
2. Calculate the ROI of the keywords you plan to use (particularly for Google Ads campaigns)

More importantly, with a thorough competitor keyword analysis, you’ll find keyword opportunity gaps. It’s the first step toward creating a more cost-efficient SEO campaign for your brand or product.

Not only will it help to improve conversions, but also allow you to find new markets and optimize your marketing budget.

How to do keyword analysis for competitors

Your competitor analysis will be an essential part of your marketing campaign as a whole and will provide the necessary data needed to craft an efficient SEO strategy.

At the start of your competitor analysis, you will need to ask yourself:

• How do I categorize my business?
• What type of keywords are related to my brand?
• How do I make sure the keywords rank well?
• How do I get the highest ROI?

Once you have the list of answers to the questions above, you will have a clear enough guideline to start your competitor keyword analysis.

What can a good competitor keyword analysis give you?

Marketing is not just about branding and well-designed landing pages. There’s a lot of analysis that goes behind it, and it’s no different than with search engine marketing (SEM).

Since keywords will set the direction of your SEM strategy, it’ll be a good idea to start with thorough keyword analysis. It’s tedious and time-consuming, so what can you get out of it? A lot, actually:

• Improve conversion rates by finding relevant, low-competition but high-converting keywords.
• Optimize ad spend by distributing and prioritizing budgets toward better performing keywords and reduce spending on low-converting keywords.
• Identify trends from keyword research by learning about consumer and market behaviours, which can be applied to other parts of your business.
• Find new markets by targeting and expanding semantic keywords and long tail keywords to discover more specific queries which may provide better clicks, leads, and conversions
• Improve campaign efficiency through optimizing and prioritizing time and effort on high-performing keywords that give a visible impact on your bottom line

As you can see, keyword analysis can be incredibly useful. It helps with fine tuning your marketing plans, ad budget management, and most importantly, create more effective SEM and SEO strategies.

Using a good keyword tool makes a huge difference

You can do it manually, which will take a lot of time and effort, or you can use a good keyword tool to do the competitor keyword analysis. The paid version of Keyword Tool Pro has a specific function that helps you to research keywords used by a competitor.

Let’s say you’re operating an online store in the US that sells yoga-related apparel. And your biggest competitor that is dominating the industry is Lululemon.

All you need to do is key in the URL of your competitor’s website in the Analyze Competitors section. The results will show you a list of all the keywords used on the page:

The results show 2000 related keywords to your competitor’s website. It also includes a list of keywords that rank for Lululemon’s website.

From the list of keywords pulled from Keyword Tool Pro‘s Analyze Competitors function, not only will you see high-volume search terms that are relevant to your brand’s copy and content but also the industry’s customer search behaviour.

You may have started the online yoga store by primarily focusing on women’s yoga apparel, but according to the data pulled from your biggest competitor, there seems to be a lot of searches for “lululemon men.” It clearly shows that there are also a lot of men who are either interested in or practicing yoga.

Finding trends and new keyword opportunities

Another illuminating find is the high search volume for “lululemon bag.” Although it’s a fraction the amount of searches for “lululemon leggings,” it still indicates that there is a market for other types of yoga accessories.

Based on these two keywords alone you can see that:

1. The different types of keywords that you can use to potentially “steal” organic traffic away from Lululemon by using these relevant keywords in your home page, landing pages, product descriptions, and blog section.
2. The search behaviour (and possibly demographic) of your potential customer
3. New brand or product niches or content topic ideas

Diving deeper into this competitor analysis, you can also see search volume trends from the results. Do keep in mind that an increasing or declining trend shown on Keyword Tool Pro does not necessarily mean the keyword (or brand or product) is less popular. Depending on the nature of the keyword, it actually shows seasonal fluctuation.

But your brand or product has nothing to do with yoga or Lululemon, you say? It doesn’t matter. Competitor keyword analysis works the same across all types of brands, businesses, and industries.

As you can see even from this one small example, you can extract a wealth of data and learnings to apply to your business and marketing strategies.

Never underestimate the power of competitor analysis, especially for SEO. You’d be surprised at how big of a difference it will make for your marketing campaigns.

The post Keyword Analysis: Beat Competitors by Using a Good Keyword Tool appeared first on Keyword Tool Blog: How to Find Great Keywords.

Before you start writing content for your website, you will need to identify suitable high-volume search terms.

The SEO keywords will inform the direction of your content, ensuring that the content produced will be relevant and easily searchable on Google. And that is, in summary, what keyword research is all about.

It’s usually a pretty time-consuming task and involves a lot of effort to pour through details, numbers, and comparing long lists of keywords. But it’s incredibly important to do it well. A thorough keyword research will be the foundation of your SEO strategy and content development.

What is keyword research?

Keyword research is defined as the activity of analyzing and finding a list of valuable keywords for the purpose of SEO copywriting. The keywords, or search terms, often become a guide for the direction of your content and marketing strategy.

A keyword can consist of a single word but more often than not it’s made out of several words. For example, “search terms” is a keyword, as is “best keyword search tool“.

Why is keyword research important?

Finding high-volume search terms itself is not enough. You need to ensure that the SEO keywords used in your content matches with your brand, product, or service to the keywords that your customer use. And this is where keyword research happens.

Once you have performed adequate and thorough research, only then will you be able to craft a viable SEO strategy. With a good strategy, you can then create a detailed plan of action to achieve your goals.

For example, if you are in the business of leasing out vacation homes, you may choose your focus keyword as “vacation house.” However, by doing a quick keyword research, we find out that the keyword ‘vacation home’ is much better to use in terms of search volume data.

Both terms might mean the same thing, but your target audience is searching for something different, as you can see above. Search volume for ‘vacation home’ is 33,100, whereas search volume for ‘vacation house’ is 6,600.

You would have never guessed the difference if not for keyword research.

Keywords that you choose to use should be those that your target audience is searching. Only then will it make the effort of optimizing your page worthwhile.

But more importantly, two similar keywords often have different search volumes, trends, and competition levels. Choosing a more relevant, higher volume keyword could give you better results compared to its other semantic or related keywords.

How to do keyword research

There are many ways to do it, either manually or using a keyword research tool like Keyword Tool. But whichever way you choose, there are a number of important steps that you need to take.

From outlining your goals to executing your keyword plan, follow these detailed step-by-step guide to performing a proper and thorough keyword research:

Step 1: Study your niche

Before you figure out what are the best keywords to optimize your page, it’s best that you start by diving deep to learn more about your topic or niche. It can give you out-of-the-box ideas and help discover angles to your marketing and SEO strategy that you might not have thought about before.

Here are a few ideas on how to study your niche:

• Talk with your existing customers and get to know them better. Find out the terms that they use when describing your brand, company, product or service.
• Try to think from the perspective of your potential customers. If you were to share the brand’s offering to a friend, how will you talk about it?
• Get involved in your topic or niche’s online communities, like forums and social media networks. Read the discussions and find out any pain points that are mentioned regarding your niche.

Step 2: Define your goals

A plan needs to always begin by defining the end goal. But before that, you should ask important and introspective questions like:

• Who are you?
• What is your brand about?
• What makes you special?
• What is your website about?
• What promises do you make on your website?

Once you have effectively answered these questions, then you need to specify what is your brand’s mission. Do you want to increase the number of subscribers? Or do you have a sales target by a certain date?

It’s important to define your goal because it will provide a direction for your SEO strategy and plan. The search terms that you will eventually use should be aligned to your goals, ideally segmented into different content marketing funnels. Your goals will also inform the purpose of your SEO copywriting and content.

Write down your goals. Draw charts. Document them. These will provide the framework and direction needed for your top-level content and online marketing strategy.

Step 3: Make a list of relevant topics

Based on your the main category of your brand and the goals you aim to achieve, break it down to smaller topic buckets. Make a list of all the topics related to your brand that you want to rank on Google.

For example, if you’re an FMCG brand specializing in men’s personal care products, some topics that are related to your brand can be:

• men’s facial wash
• antiperspirant deodorant
• male pattern baldness

They need to be topics that are important to your business and related to your buyer personas. Think about what type of topics will your target audience search for on Google? These topic buckets can then later be broken down to keywords that are related to those topics.

Step 4: Create a list of seed keywords

Now that you’ve broken down your main category to different buckets of sub-topics, you can start creating a list of seed keywords. These keywords need to be related to your various topics, and more importantly, are terms that your target audience might be searching on Google.

Seed keywords, or focus keywords, are important as they will become the foundation of your keyword research. They define your niche and identify your competitors.

If you’re wondering how to find the seed or focus keywords of your brand or product, it’s actually a lot easier than you think. All you need to do is describe your offering as simple as possible and brainstorm how other people might search for it on Google.

Step 5: Use good keyword research tools

You might assume, “shouldn’t keyword research begin with using a keyword tool?” There’s no right or wrong answer there, to be honest. But there is an obvious advantage to researching search terms from your brand or business perspective first and foremost.

It avoids you from getting too bogged down with keywords and helps you gain a wider perspective for your content and SEO strategy.

Once you have identified your goals, topics, and a list of seed keywords, it’s time to use keyword research tools to further refine your search terms.

One option is to use Google Keyword Planner. Unfortunately, Google only gives approximated search volumes. Instead, you can use a tool like Keyword Tool. It will give you a lot more details and help you narrow down on the right direction for your search terms. On top of that, it can also give additional ideas on related keywords.

All you need to do is type in the topic (or seed keyword) into the search box and it will give you a list of alternative keywords, including those that contain prepositions and questions:

Step 6: Study the search intent

Plugging in high-volume keywords to bump up rankings for a page used to work pretty easily. But it’s not so simple anymore these days. Today, Google’s machine learning search algorithms compare search terms with user queries to learn about search intent.

Search intent is defined as the intent or reason behind why people search for a specific term. There are many driving factors behind people’s search habits, such as:

• Why are they searching?
• Are they searching because they have a question and want an answer to that question?
• Are they searching for a specific website?
• Are they searching because they want to buy something?

Try to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes. Why would they search for your topic? How will they key in the terms? Are they looking to buy something? Or are they looking for a service to solve a specific problem?

Once you have a good idea of the search intent behind potential readers or customers, you will be able to use it to fine-tune your keyword research. Getting a list of high-volume keywords related to your brand or topic is great. But finding keywords that directly match your target audience’s search intent is even better.

Step 7: Identify long tail keywords

Seed keywords are often shorter search terms that are closely related to your brand’s main topic or category. Long tail keywords, on the other hand, are more descriptive and often related to your brand’s smaller buckets of sub-topics. Matching your target audience’s search intent to long tail keywords is far easier compared to seed keywords.

For example, if your website published content about golf equipment reviews, using long tail keywords like “what is the best 9 iron golf club” will attract a more relevant audience compared to the seed keyword “golf club.”

Long tail keywords usually get fewer clicks, but since they are focused on a specific topic or product, they often get a higher conversion rate.

Step 8: Find out about your competitors

Doing keyword research on Google about your brand alone is not nearly enough. You also need to be aware of what your competitors are doing. The better you understand the content landscape of your industry, the better it will be for your SEO.

Understanding the competitiveness of different keywords will also allow you to identify search terms that might be too difficult to rank. But most importantly, you will be able to find keyword opportunity gaps. These opportunities occur when you find related keywords that are related to your brand or industry with low to medium competition level.

To find these keyword opportunities, you can perform a keyword search on your competitors. The paid version of Keyword Tool Pro has a competitor analysis function that does exactly that. Key in the URL of your competitor into the search box and the results will show all the keywords that the page ranks for.

Once you’ve gone through these steps, you should have enough insights to craft a good content and SEO strategy. You would also have gotten adequate data for SEO copywriting for your content.

Whether you’re running a content-focused blog, a small business, or a brand marketer, you will need keyword research to kick-start your content and marketing activities.

Doing keyword research can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But more often than not, it pays off handsomely in the long run.

Frequently Asked Questions

The post Keyword Research: The Complete Guide to Find the Best Keywords appeared first on Keyword Tool Blog: How to Find Great Keywords.

Well, you are not alone. Countless marketers, small business owners, amateur vloggers, and others are continually figuring out new methods to get noticed on the second largest search engine on the web.

Competition has proven to be stiff. There is an over-abundance of content produced by a fast-growing number of creators. Increasing YouTube views and monetizing through ads have proven to be more difficult than ever before, but alas, not impossible.

As the second largest search engine on the web, the opportunities are still plenty. YouTube has over 1 billion users, more than 22 billion visits monthly, and an average watch time of 40 minutes. Whether you are a marketer or a content creator looking to monetize, the platform has the potential to reach millions of people.

There is no doubt that YouTube has changed a great deal over the years. And so has its ranking factors.

1) Understanding how algorithms influence YouTube views

In order to make the most out of the platform, it is best to understand how YouTube’s algorithm sorts out content to match them with user queries.

According to YouTube, its search and discovery system are intended to:

• Match viewer queries with the content they are looking for
• Create a satisfying viewer experience and engagement

The second part is important to take note if you are aiming to increase your YouTube views. The platform has shifted towards prioritizing user engagement rather than view counts, stating that:

Each video uploaded, as well as every channel on YouTube, is ranked by watch time.

When more people spend time watching your videos, the algorithm will rank your content higher than others. Channels will also earn “watch time credits” for referring viewers to watch videos on other channels.

Due to this new ranking factor, it is no longer enough to only focus on getting more YouTube views. You should also aim to increase your channel’s cumulative watch time.

2) Get creative, be remarkable and create engaging content

While it can be useful to understand how a platform like YouTube works, you should avoid getting too caught up on technical matters while neglecting your creative output.

Videos that get millions of views did not get there by focusing on optimizing content to align with YouTube’s algorithm. Instead, popular videos earn a lot of watch time because they were interesting and engaging.

Seth Godin, one of the most celebrated marketers of our time, talks about the idea of the “purple cow” and how to get your ideas to spread in this famous TED Talk back in 2007:

The summary of his talk is simple: be remarkable. Don’t focus too much on marketing or getting more YouTube views. Instead, pour your energy and resources to produce great content that provides real value to your viewers.

If you have great content, viewers will engage with your videos. The cumulative watch time of your channel will then increase and so will your content ranking on YouTube.

How to create great YouTube content?

• Create a content strategy
• Find a niche to target (or area of focus)
• Get down to the storyboard (frame by frame breakdown of the video)
• Write a script or content flow (what to say, story sequence, subtitles)
• Plan the production (whether it’s with a Sony A7SII or an iPhone)
• Focus on the first 15 seconds of the video and make it great

3) Craft catchy titles (and optimize it)

Optimizing for YouTube’s ranking factors is essential, but you also need to offer compelling reasons why people should watch your content. Inserting the right, high-volume keywords in a descriptive and interesting title for your video will let the algorithm sort the content based on relevancy. But more importantly, it will inform viewers what your video is about.

Before creating the title for your video, you will need to do some keyword research. Keyword Tool can help you get thousands of trending, high-volume keywords that are pulled from YouTube’s autocomplete feature.

The SEO tool can give insight into the various ways you can write your titles, either with prepositions or those that end with a question mark.

Not only will you find trending and related keywords, but you may also find new content ideas through the tool’s Google Related Keywords function.

Once you have a list of high-volume keywords that are related to your content, use them as a base to craft catchy and engaging titles. It is important to ensure they accurately represent what your content is about and does not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

How to write good YouTube titles?

• Keep your titles short and sweet (60 characters or less)
• Prioritize the more critical information at the front of your title
• Place branding and episode numbers towards the end
• Exclude keywords that are not relevant to your video (to avoid being penalized by YouTube)

4) Create search-friendly descriptions that are keyword rich

An accurate and well-written description will help users find your video organically and boost your YouTube views.

Be as honest as possible when writing descriptions. You should not insert popular words that are irrelevant to your content, as it may violate YouTube’s policies. Instead, use high-volume keywords that are related to the video to maximize traffic from search.

It is also a good idea to provide the context of the video in the description (and in the video itself, either in a voice-over or captions). Not only will it give users a clearer understanding of your content, but it will help YouTube review the video if it gets flagged or removed.

How to optimize for YouTube SEO?

• Write as how you would speak while giving an overview of your content.
• Place the target keywords in the first sentence or paragraph of your description.
• Include semantic or related keywords, or use long-tail keywords.
• Use Keyword Tool for YouTube to identify high-volume keywords and their synonyms.

5) Use popular terms for YouTube tags and hashtags

Beyond optimizing your video title and description, accurate and proper use of tags and hashtags will help you get discovered easier on YouTube. They will distinguish what your content is about and allow the algorithm to categorize it accordingly.

What is the difference between YouTube tags and hashtags?

• Tags – Single words or phrases meant to categorize your video. For example, if your video is about a recipe, the tags might be Food, Recipe, How to Cook, and more.
• Hashtags – Popular or trending phrases that can be included in the description section of your video. For example, your recipe video’s description hashtags can be #food, #recipe, #delicious, #recipeoftheday, #homecookedfood, and more.

How to optimize YouTube tags?

• Be specific and only use a few tags
• Place the video’s target keyword as the first tag
• Use 1-2 related keywords as your next tags
• Add a broad term or two that is related to your video
• For example, if your video is about how to lose weight with a keto diet, your tags might be:
  • 1st Tag – How to Lose Weight
  • 2nd Tag – Weigh Loss
  • 3rd Tag – Keto Diet
  • 4th Tag – Healthy Lifestyle

Dos and don’ts of tags and hashtags

• Use high-volume, short-tail keywords for tags
• Insert competitor brand names to pull their audience to your page
• Avoid adding tags in descriptions (or YouTube may remove your video for tag-stuffing)
• Only insert a maximum of 15 hashtags in the description
• Follow YouTube’s guidelines on hashtags to avoid your video being flagged or removed

Tags play a significant role in assisting the platform’s algorithms to sort your video for ranking and relevancy (in its related videos segments), but YouTube recommends content creators to focus more on optimizing thumbnails, titles and descriptions.

The more your content appears to relevant viewers, the higher the chances that you will get more YouTube views from organic searches and click-throughs from related videos.

6) Create visually interesting thumbnails

Most people, me and you included, often prefer to browse pages rather than read them. And that is why a good thumbnail makes a big difference to a video’s YouTube views and overall click-through-rate, be it on the home page, your channel page or related videos feed.

Thumbnails are like a window to your content, giving viewers a sneak peek at what to expect in your video. They function like hero images, often being the deciding factor behind a browsing viewer’s decision to click on your video. So, make it a thumb-stopping one.

When you have uploaded your video, be sure to choose a thumbnail before hitting the publish button. Pick the most visually compelling screencap, especially one that relates well to your title and descriptions.

The other option is to create a custom thumbnail, which is used by more than 90% of the best performing videos on YouTube. Their Creator Academy has also advised that:

Thumbnails require an art director’s eye for branding, and shouldn’t be an afterthought.

Use high-quality images with engaging, easy-to-read fonts, and facial-closeups, if they’re related to your content.

How to create the best YouTube thumbnails?

• Choose colors that contrast from YouTube colors (avoid red, white and black)
• Use people, especially close-up of faces
• Keep text overlays under 30 characters
• Subtle branding (like a small logo or watermark)

What is the correct format for YouTube thumbnails?

• Apply an aspect ratio of 16:9
• Format to a resolution of 1280×720
• Limit the file size to less than 2MB
• Be formatted as a .jpg, .png, .gif, or .bmp

7) Take time to optimize your channel

YouTube is not just a search engine, but it is also a community.

Optimizing your videos to make them more search-friendly will go a long way. At the same time, it’s also a good idea to optimize the channel as it will help to create long-term loyalty and excellent user experience.

It also plays a significant role in boosting your YouTube views and strengthening your brand. Here are some tips on how to optimize your YouTube channel:

Create a memorable channel icon

The profile picture for your channel should be easily identifiable, visually compelling, and accurately express your brand personality. Ideally, you should create an 800 x 800 image that also looks great at 98 x 98 pixels.

Create a strong, consistent brand aesthetic

Add an eye-catching channel banner art that reflects your brand personality. For example, if you are selling video games, the channel logo and banner colors can be bright and feel energetic. If you are a brick-and-mortar corporation, you might want to use more neutral and muted colors instead.

The branding for your YouTube channel should be consistent with your website and social media platforms. It is advisable to use the same logo, images, and colors schemes.

Here are some additional tips:

• Avoid using small elements, shapes, and fonts in your logo and keep it at 800 x 800 pixels
• Use large banners, with a banner art size that is at least 2,560 x 1,440 pixels

Optimize your YouTube channel description

A channel’s description can be seen in the ‘About’ tab. You can keep it short or be more elaborate, but keep it under YouTube’s limit of 1,000 characters.

Your description should let viewers know what your channel is all about, what you have to offer, and how often will you be updating the channel with new content.

Put yourself in the viewers’ shoes, and ask yourself: “If I was a viewer, why should I watch this content? What’s in it for me?” The best kind of content is one that gives value to the viewer, be it to educate, entertain, or both.

Just like your video titles, make sure that you include your target keywords in your YouTube channel description.

Make your channel search-friendly by adding keywords

Keywords on YouTube can be optimized in a video’s title, description, and also the channel itself. It helps the platform’s crawlers to sort and rank your content appropriately, ensuring maximum visibility to viewers who are searching for your type of content.

When performing keyword research, you can use Keyword Tool for YouTube to find highly searched terms related to your content.

Once you’ve found a list of keywords you want your channel to rank for in the search results:

• Go to your Creator Studio
• Click on Settings then Channel
• Finally, input your keywords into the box titled Keywords

Showcase your channel by featuring its best content

Whether it is a video that has accumulated the most views or one that accurately summarizes what your channel or brand is about, your Featured Video should act like you channel’s trailer.

Just like how trailers are to films, it should highlight the best parts of your channel’s content and give viewers a sneak preview of what they can expect from your content.

Don’t forget to enable related channels

Every channel’s homepage has a list of related channels on its right column. The feed will pull a list of other channels that have similar content with similar viewerships to your channel. And vice versa. It will help to maximize your channel’s exposure and YouTube views by gaining visibility on other parts of the platform.

To enable this feature, follow this guide:

1. Go to your channel’s Creator Studio
2. Select Channel in the left menu, then click Advanced
3. Under Channel recommendations, choose “Allow my channel to appear in other channels’ recommendations”

8) Use playlists and sections

Once a video ends, another video will automatically play, which helps to increase your video’s view count. It keeps viewers within your channel and introduces them to other related videos that they might enjoy as well.

Another great function of playlists is that they are listed separately on YouTube’s search engine. There is a function in the “Filter” section for search where viewers can search only for playlists. If your channel has playlists, YouTube will list both your videos and playlists for their search and discovery system.

The playlists can also be shared on social media platforms and embedded into websites or blogs.

Organize each of your playlists into its category or type of content. For example, if you are running a channel on food, you can separate the playlists into categories such as “Best Places to Eat,” “How to Cook,” “Types of Cuisine,” and others.

The more related the videos are in the playlist, the more likely viewers will browse through the playlist. And in turn, the more YouTube views the videos on the playlist will get.

Since videos autoplay in playlists, viewers who watch playlists will typically watch more of your videos. It is an effective yet easy way to increase your YouTube views. Playlists also attract the type of viewers who prefer watching streams of related videos rather than manually searching for similar videos or surfing other channels.

How to create a YouTube playlist

1. Choose which video or series of videos you would like to create a playlist out of.
2. Go to the video, and click Add to.
3. Create a new playlist, or select an existing playlist.
4. To maximize views, make sure that you select your privacy settings to Public.
5. Finally, click Create.

9) Use subtitles, cards and end screens

Subtitles on videos are becoming more common today. It has proven to help increase not just video view counts but also watch time. By having subtitles, your video will be appealing to people who do not speak English (or the language your video is in) as a first language and also disabled people with hearing problems.

For more technical or data-heavy content, subtitles are able to highlight vital information for easy consumption, which creates a much smoother video watching experience.

Place your YouTube cards strategically

Cards function like pop-ups that appear during pre-designated intervals of a video. It usually comes with a call-to-action that promotes other content within your video or channel, which encourages viewers to watch more of your content.

YouTube cards allow viewers to interact with your videos and give you the opportunity to lead them towards a desired action or landing page. The cards can show CTAs, customized images, titles, and many more.

What are the different uses of YouTube cards?

• Promote other video content
• Get more channel subscribers
• Donate to a non-profit
• Send traffic to your website
• Encourage users to participate in a poll

A quick tutorial on how to create YouTube cards:

A good tip to follow is to study your video’s YouTube analytics and find at which point does it experience the most substantial amount of viewer drop off.

You can use those intervals to encourage users to visit other related content or to take a certain call-to-action. Another way is to find ranges where there is the highest amount of viewers and promote your lesser watched videos during those time slots. It is a quick and easy way to boost the YouTube views of your less popular content.

Create end screens that have a specific call-to-action

End screens, like cards, encourage viewers to watch more of your videos. It serves as a final opportunity for you to connect and engage with your viewers, be it to communicate additional information, a reminder to subscribe to your channel or to add a comment to the video.

End screens could also become a valuable resource for the viewers who enjoyed your video and are curious to know more or take a specific action. For example, if your video was about the unboxing of a new gadget and if viewers liked the review, it might prompt them to go to the gadget’s official website to learn more or purchase the item outright.

You can also add a link to your playlist in one of your end screen cards. Adding another funnel to draw your viewers to other related videos can also help to boost your YouTube views.

How to add a YouTube end screen?

1. Go to the Creator Studio link under your YouTube account icon
2. Click Video Manager, then select Videos
3. Choose the video that you want to add an end screen to
4. Click Edit on that video, then click End screen
5. Choose whether to create an end screen using the Add element option, create using a YouTube template, or copy an existing end screen.
6. Once you have decided on an end screen option, click Save.

Getting more YouTube views and growing your channel may not be an easy task, but there are many ways to do it. The tips and tricks laid out in this article can both used by first time YouTubers and seasoned creators.

Keep in mind that you must always begin with creating high-quality content that resonates with viewers. Optimize it well, perform keyword research, and avoid any black hat techniques to keep your channel safe and grow it for the long term.

The post How to Get More Views on YouTube and Grow Your Channel appeared first on Keyword Tool Blog: How to Find Great Keywords.

My question to you is – How often do you do keyword research?

The best keyword data-crunchers know that effective keyword research is like a marathon, not a sprint.

Did you know that in an interview with Bloomberg, a senior Google research scientist admitted that 15% of keywords that people enter into Google’s search box every day have never been seen by Google before?

In fact, another reputable source, Search Engine Land reported that Google processes about 5,500,000,000 (yes, it’s 5.5 billion) searches per day. It means that there are around 825 million brand new keywords appearing on Google every single day!

The Benefits Of Regular Keyword Research

We brush our teeth regularly to maintain proper dental hygiene. The same goes for our websites. If you wish to drive targeted, consistent traffic to your pages, you have to research new keywords on a regular basis and create fresh content targeting these keywords.

There’s literally no cap on the amount of traffic you can earn from Google or other search engines. By exploring new keywords every day, you can grow your website’s traffic, leads and sales.

We have built Keyword Tool Pro with one purpose in mind: to help you uncover hidden traffic opportunities. Lets look at some real-life examples of how you can use Keyword Tool Pro to find new keywords.

Trend Spotting With Keyword Tool Pro

Let’s say you’re doing keyword research for Football related articles.

From November 20th to December 18th, Fifa World Cup was held in Qatar, an event that attracts the attention of millions of people from all over the world. 

You can see this yourself with the help of Keyword Tool data. 

Keyword suggestions related to Fifa World Cup got almost 75 million searches, and that was in the span of 2 months since it’s a seasonal keyword. 

Fast forward to January 2023 – you can see how sharply the search volume dropped.

It just shows how fast the search popularity can change even in one month.

Keyword Tool Pro can help you spot these sudden changes in search popularity, but only if you make an effort to do keyword research regularly.

Google Autocomplete Reveals Popular And Trending Terms

As mentioned earlier in this article, every day 15% of search terms are completely new to Google. Google Autocomplete (Keyword Tool Pro’s source of keyword data) updates itself with these new and trending terms on a daily basis.

How Google Autocomplete Works, According To Google:

Predictions are made based on factors, such as the popularity and freshness of search terms. According to Google, the search predictions that you see in Google autocomplete come from:

1. The terms that you’re typing.
2. Relevant searches you have done in the past (if you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web & App Activity turned on).
3. What other people are searching for, including Trending stories. Trending stories are popular topics e.g. in your area that change throughout the day. Trending stories aren’t related to your search history.

As you can see, just by searching on Keyword Tool Pro, you can tap into this invaluable vault of fresh keyword data. For trend-spotting, we recommend sorting your search results by “Keyword Ascending” instead of “Search Volume – High to low”. Very often, keywords starting to trend might not have the highest search volume.

How To Get Even More Trending Keywords For Your Next Keyword List

Earlier, we talked about how “Fifa World Cup”  was a breakout search term in November and December 2022. If you want to find keywords like this, Google Trends is an amazing tool for spotting breakout or rising keywords.

According to Google Trends, a rising keyword means that popularity of the search term has grown tremendously in that given period. A breakout keyword means that its search volume has increased by over 5000%.

For example, let’s say you are in the arts and entertainment niche and operate in the United Kingdom.

Head over to Google Trends Explorer and customize your Google Trends settings based on your search requirements.

• Country: United Kingdom
• Time Range: Past 90 Days
• Category: Arts and entertainment

Google Trends will get you the latest trending search queries. From your search request, you can see that the search volume for the term “Paul O’Grady” grew by 4000%. To ride on this trend, you can put this keyword inside Keyword Tool to generate keyword suggestions for you.

Also, from Keyword Tool Pro (Plus and Basic plans) you can see the exact search volume for each month. As you can see, in March, there was a spike in searches.

This is consistent with the results in Google Trends for rising and breakout keywords.

You can use the long-tail (pun intended) keyword suggestions for “rusty spotted cat” to create targeted content for your subscribers, which are easier to rank for on Google.

Synonyms, A Great Way To Expand Your Keyword List Further

Running out of keyword ideas? You can use synonyms of your seed keyword as a great way to expand your keyword list and uncover new opportunities.

You’ll find synonyms and other semantic keywords in the ‘Related keywords’ section of Keyword Tool.

You can use synonym checker websites like thesaurus.com to find close variants of your existing keywords for targeting. For example, “vacation”, “holiday” and “getaway” are closely related terms. By targeted synonym keywords, you can potentially double or even triple your traffic!

Summary

In summary, it’s without a doubt that there are so many keyword opportunities waiting to be discovered every single day. We recommend doing keyword research at least once a week, so you don’t miss out on new lucrative keywords within your niche.

The post Regular Keyword Research is the Key to Discovering Hidden Traffic Opportunities. Here’s How. appeared first on Keyword Tool Blog: How to Find Great Keywords.