The right YouTube keywords in your video title and tags optimize the searchability of your videos in an industry that underuses keywords.
What’s the best way to make your YouTube content searchable? Many experts weigh in with countless tips on how to use YouTube keywords to optimize your videos’ searchability. One of the most important aspects of optimizing your YouTube’s SEO is including keywords for each video you post.
Keyword Tool Blog says, “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.” And as HubSpot writes, the video title must be concise and relevant to what viewers are searching for. Finally, high-volume keyword tags (different from the keywords in the title) also make your video more searchable.
To summarize, inserting high-volume YouTube keywords into your titles and tags boosts your videos’ searchability in the Search Engine.
This analysis begs the question, how are current publishers using keywords in their YouTube videos?
I picked the most recently published videos (38 videos total) from four major publishing companies’ YouTube channels: Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, and Hachette Book Group. I compared their tagged YouTube keywords against their titles to see how many of their tagged keywords were in their video titles, and vice versa.
To find the tagged keywords, right-click on a YouTube video’s page and scroll down to “Inspect Page.” You can search for the term “keyword” and all the words that follow that term are the YouTube keywords the video publishers used to tag their videos.
I found that publishing companies do not tend to use YouTube keywords in their video titles. Most keywords were the words “book” or “author,” which are both generalized enough that they match the video’s title naturally because of the industry, but keywords that were more specific tended not to match the title.
- Simon and Schuster matched their title and keywords most directly, averaging 42% of keywords. This means that 42% of their keywords related to their videos’ titles.
- Penguin Random House matched their keywords most strongly by video genre, averaging 58.09%. Their keywords related to the genre of video they published, such as author interviews, book promotional, etc.
- Hatchette Book Group had the weakest title-to-keyword match, averaging 0%. All Hatchette’s videos had the exact same keywords, as if Hatchette copies and pastes each of their tags from video to video.
- Harper Collins used the greatest number of keywords out of all the companies, but statistically did not have any advantage over any of the other companies in their ratio of tagged keywords to title keywords. Similar to Hatchette, Harper Collins used many repeated keywords that they seemed to copy from post to post.
Even though these publishing companies have appealing content on their YouTube channels, their videos don’t have many views. There are multiple reasons for the lack of views, but relevant YouTube keywords in their titles and tags would make their videos more searchable and could result in more views.