How to Do YouTube Keyword Research Quickly and Cheaply (tutorial)

Learn how to do keyword research for YouTube, come up with video ideas based on user searches and parse keyword phrases with tools similar to Ubersuggest for YouTube.

Only a few years ago the majority of marketers laughed when I told them that there's a thing called SEO for YouTube. Some of them are still laughing actually, while others had jumped on the bandwagon and joined the YouTube SEO party which is getting more traction every day.

You can always tell whether things are going mainstream by the amount of tools on the market that deal with a particular problem. Three-four years ago there were only few custom written scripts that parsed YouTube's search results, nowadays, however, we have quite a few professional toolsets that help us getting relevant keywords for our channels and vids, and I'll name some of them so you can give them a quick scan later: KeywordKeg, Kparser, and, of course, KeywordTool.io caught my attention in particular.

Given the exclusiveness of these keyword tools for YouTube, they are being priced accordingly. But if you've read any of my blog posts before you know that I'm no fan of recurring payments. That makes sense, because if you're producing one video per month or even less, why would you want to spend $50 monthly for everyday access to a tool which you won't even use that often? This is, again, the core philosophy behind my pay-as-you-go toolkits. Power to the people!

So as you probably understood by now, I couldn't resist the hype and wrote a simple bot to help people occasionally find YouTube keywords for tiny fees. Let me tell you more about it.

You can watch my comprehensive video tutorial explaining and showing how this bot works here:

Getting YouTube search suggestions

When we talk about marketing your videos on YouTube, the main source of keywords would be their search suggestions, and getting our hands on those hints would be our main goal. This is exactly what my online YouTube keyword tool does. Basically, this is an Ubersuggest for YouTube. Only with more options. Let's dive into the process.

Fill in the basic info

First, we need to fill in the name of our Job Request and assign it to a project. You can create a new project, or leave the field blank:

Configure the options

There are a few options you can select additionally:

Region – if you are targeting your videos to particular countries, it is a good idea to select an appropriate region to get the most relevant search suggestions.

Our choice - "Region independent".

Language – you can specify which language your target audience speaks. This will narrow and individualize search suggestions.

Our choice – "English".

Search methods – search suggestions are created by automatically inserting signs after each seed keyword and copying the results. By default, the YouTube autocomplete keyword scraper simply copies the suggestions that pop up after inserting a blank space after each of your seed keywords. Search methods are additional levels of complexity to the process - the algorithm will insert numbers or letters, depending on your choice, vastly increasing the amount of the results you will get.

Our choice – "Append whitespace and letters from a-z".

Search depth - the larger the number you pick, the more suggestions the keyword tool for YouTube will give you.

Our choice - "2".

Seed keywords

Finally, you'll need to come up with some initial keywords to get the suggestions. Let's say you own a digital marketing company and are looking for YouTube video ideas. Your seed keywords could be something like:

• Marketing your website
• Marketing strategies
• Site promotion
• ...and so on.

For the sake of this tutorial, I will only use one seed keyword ("Marketing strategies").

When you're done, our setup should look like this:

Notifications

I will leave the notifications on to get an email the moment my Job request is completed. I encourage you to do the same.

We are ready to go!

We can now launch our job request by pressing the "Start this bot" button (see the screenshot above).

If everything went OK, we should see our YouTube keyword search tool hard at work:

After a few minutes, the job will be completed, and you will be able to download the results (JSON, Excel or CSV) or view them online:

As you can see, we now have quite a few keywords to work with (504):

In fact, this should be more than enough to cover us with content for the next year 😂.

And the best part? The total cost of our research is $0.45. Fourty five. Cents. Would you rather spend ~$50 per month on a powerful tool that you won't use or a dollar for an occasional keyword investigation? Your choice, but in my marketing, I'm sticking with the second option.

YouTube scraping lifehack

You must have noticed that there are quite a number of different bots in the YouTube section on our website, including some YouTube keyword tools. The good news is that in addition to using each bot separately you can also combine them with each other, thus reducing the time spent on routine tasks to a minimum!

In particular, you can combine the YouTube Keyword Scraper with the YouTube Search Scraper. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to do this:

1. Find relevant keywords using the YouTube Keyword Scraper as described above.

2. Open the YouTube Search Scraper.

3. Head to the bot’s start page.

4. Name your job and select a folder to save the results.

5. Paste the YouTube suggestions that you’ve found using the YouTube Keyword Scraper into a special field.

Each query must go on a new line.

6. Specify how many videos you would like to scrape (up to 10, 50 or 100).

Our choice – "Up to 50 videos".

7. Set up notifications.

8. Launch the bot.

As a result, the bot will return a well-structured table with the following information:

• Search position
• Video URL
• Video title
• Video duration
• Thumbnail URL
• Thumbnail resolution
• Highres thumbnail (true / false)
• Channel title
• Upload date
• Closed captions (true / false)
• Licensed content (true / false)
• Projection (e.g. rectangular)

Here are some ideas on how you can use this valuable information extracted with the help of my online YouTube grabber software to achieve your business-related or personal goals (yet this is not the ultimate list):

• Column ‘Video URL’: Watch and analyze the competing videos that rank first. Use your competitors’ findings to improve your video content.
• Column ‘Video Title’: Read your competitors’ video titles, analyze the keywords and the sentence structure they use, and write effective titles for your video content.
• Column ‘Channel Title’: Find the channels that rank first on YouTube, examine their content, get to know the preferences of your target audience, and adapt your own video content to what people like.
• Complement your YouTube keyword research with a keen YT competitor analysis.
• ...and many more!

YouTube keyword targeting: FAQ

Below I’m answering your most common questions concerning finding and using YouTube search suggestions in real life. You’re welcome!

How to get suggested on YouTube?

Publish excellent video content that meets the preferences of your target audience. Don't forget to include relevant keywords in your video title and description to help people find your videos. Using my smart YouTube keyword extractor will help you create a relevant keywords list.

How to do keyword research for YouTube?

To find keywords for YouTube, paste several short keywords (e.g. bar, restaurant, cafe) into a special field on this page and launch the bot. As a result, you will get a long list of keywords relevant to your video titles and descriptions.

How to check YouTube keyword ranking?

Find the keywords using my YouTube autocomplete keyword scraper and then check their ranking on UberSuggest or on Ahrefs.

How to find low competition keywords for YouTube?

Find the keywords using the YouTube keyword extractor, check their ranking on UberSuggest or on Ahrefs, and select the words with the highest volume and with the lowest keyword difficulty/SEO difficulty. The latter shouldn’t exceed 30.

How to find long tail keywords for YouTube?

A long tail keyword is a keyword consisting of 3 or more words. To get as many long tail keywords for YouTube as possible, select the options “Append whitespace and letters from a-z”, “Append whitespace and numbers 0-9”, and “Depth 3 (first, second and third word)” when customizing the YouTube Keyword Scraper. These options will make the bot extract long tail keyword list for YouTube.

How to use keywords on YouTube?

Include the keywords extracted by my YouTube autocomplete keyword scraper into your video title and description. This simple measure will enhance your video visibility for the YouTube search engine immensely. As a result, your videos will rank higher in the YouTube search results list. Read my updated YouTube SEO tips and make your video channel stand out!