How To Find Low-Competition Keywords For YouTube

Video marketing is on the up and up. YouTube has always been the primary go-to source for online videos, which is unlikely to change. Taking the platform’s immense popularity into account, you would be crazy not to optimize your YouTube videos as soon as possible.

For this, you’ll need to find low-competition keywords for YouTube that will help you rank on the SERPs and grow your online presence.

Let’s look at how to find low-competition keywords for your YouTube videos.

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Long-Tail Keywords Are Better

Long-tail keywords are three to five words forming a ‘keyword phrase’ that people use in searches. Adding long-tail keywords to your YouTube videos will target your audience more effectively and means your videos will rank better because of lower competition.

I’ve already mentioned that YouTube is incredibly popular; it is the second-largest search engine behind Google, with an average of 30 million visitors daily. Competition is enormous, and you must pull out all the stops to get ahead. Long-tail, low-competition keywords will undoubtedly help you.

Create an engaging, HD-quality YouTube video longer than five minutes. YouTube prefers HD videos, so creating HD-quality content will automatically improve your ranking.

Now that you’ve created a video for your YouTube channel, here are some of the most successful methods to find low-competition keywords for SEO for YouTube videos:

vidIQ

vidIQ is the top tool for YouTube keyword research and offers two packages: a free plan and a Boost plan. The Boost plan lets you optimize 40 videos monthly using its keyword engine and gives you 50 ideas per day. You can also set five trend alerts, track 20 competitors, and receive support via chat or email.

vidIQ’s Boost plan also gives you an academy entry, a video scorecard, SEO recommendations for your descriptions and titles, video and SEO analytics features, inline tag suggestions, keyword research and bulk SEO optimizing tools, channel tags, thumbnail previews, and feedback on most-viewed and trending videos, view comparisons, top video tweets, and more.

The keywords research section is the best way to find low-competition keywords on YouTube using vidIQ. This section provides a more comprehensive list of keywords and search terms to use for your channel than what you’ll find in the dashboard, but there’s also an included keyword search bar you can use.

If you’re looking for keywords to add to a video on a particular topic, search for the subject itself and check the feedback you get. vidIQ’s Keyword Analysis tool provides a related overall score for all long-tail keywords listed, incorporating their monthly search volume, competition search figures and word counts.

As a YouTube video creator, this overall score assists you in identifying how appealing and valuable a specific keyword is. When you do YouTube keyword research, try to rank related keywords from the best to the worst overall score. To improve your YouTube SEO, use the low-competition keywords in your video title, tag, and description.

vidIQ’s keywords section also displays trending videos for the search term in question. The tool gives you the video’s title, age, channel name, views per hour and total views. This information is valuable: all in one place for convenience and showing exactly what your top competition is doing and whether they’re succeeding or not.

Google Keyword Planner

With Keyword Planner, set your “Avg. monthly searches” search volume to “500-5000” and your competition settings to “low” or “medium.” These limits provide a range of keywords that’ll rank well on YouTube.

The YouTube Search Bar

The YouTube search bar autocompletes every time you start typing something. Try typing a few words and watch how YouTube completes your query with related search suggestions that may interest you. Observe these suggestions: YouTube recommends them, meaning visitors often use them.

The above is a simple and easy way to find keywords, but it doesn’t mean that they are always the best, as they’re popular and may not be low-competition. However, it does give you a starting point from where you can get more targeted with long-tail keyword searches where the search volume is likely lower.

The Alphabet Game

The what? Related to the point above, you “play” the alphabet game by typing a long-tail keyword into the YouTube search box and adding one letter to encourage autocomplete-search phrases that start the word after your keyword with that specific letter only. Start with ‘A’ and move through the alphabet to see what YouTube comes up with. You can find many long-tail keywords this way.

LSI Keyword Research

Google uses Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords to help get your channel discovered, so you certainly shouldn’t ignore them. After a Google search, you will see LSI keywords at the bottom of the first results page.

If you can post YouTube videos with good HD quality and strong low-competition keywords, Google might recommend them above their SERPs’ standard page-one search results. Keep tabs on these LSI keywords and include them in your descriptions, as they can direct more Google traffic to your video title.

Trending Keyword Research

When thousands of video creators research keywords, some become too popular and competitive, which is an excellent reason to find trending ones. Finding trending topics helps you discover keywords that can improve your video marketing endeavors.

You can locate trending topics with Google Trends, which reveals what’s trending in your region. Double-check these topics on YouTube to see if they’re trending there too.

Track some identified long-tail keywords related to your YouTube channel’s niche using a trend tool to inform you if they begin to trend. Again, look no further than vidIQ for a decent trend tool.

VidIQ Trend Alerts

If you’re keen to know how a specific YouTube keyword is doing or the hourly views trending topics receive, program an email alert on your chosen topic using the vidIQ trend tool. You can set this alert to notify you every day, every two days, once weekly or once a month. You can also program a competitor watch list highlighting trending videos on their channels.

vidIQ Trend Alerts also allows you to view YouTube’s trending topics across the platform if you like. In your vidIQ extension, go to “Trend Alerts” to set up tracking for competition, categories and keywords you want to follow, and hourly view parameters and email notification frequencies.

Google Video Results

Most YouTube views come from YouTube’s platform itself, but ranking your video on Google could get you two to five times as many views, and there’s an easy way to do it. If you optimize your videos in line with keywords from top video search results in Google, you’ll enjoy the best of both worlds.

Google only features videos with specific keywords, sometimes keeping space on search page one for video results. The search engine generally only uses video results for the following types, though:-

videos connected to sports
videos linked to health and fitness
review videos
humorous videos
video tutorials
“how-to” videos

If you don’t optimize your keywords to include one of the above, the chances are that Google will bypass your video, and you’ll only get your traffic from YouTube searches. If you can optimize for one of Google’s recognized video keywords, you may end up with traffic coming directly from the first page of Google and through YouTube.

So what’s the easiest way to find these kinds of keywords?

Search for your keyword in Google, and include “YouTube” in the search.
Look at the “About results” figure.
Focus on keywords with comparatively low “About results” figures. Every niche differs, so look to choose keywords with low-competition values compared with other videos in your industry.

After you’ve listed your keywords, see if any of them have featured YouTube videos on Google. When you find one, check (via Keyword Planner) if there’s any decent search volume attached to that keyword because, if not, it’s pointless ranking for it. 100 to 1000 Google searches per month will make persevering with it justified.

Think about it. If you can get a video to rank in Google, many of those 100-plus users will click on your video.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this has given you more insight into the importance of using low-competition keywords in YouTube video search engine optimization and how to find the best keywords to boost your rankings significantly.

Remember that your YouTube video’s title, video description, and video tags go hand-in-hand with your YouTube keyword research. It’s a challenging task, but one I will do for you if you want to check out my Fiverr Gig below!

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