When you think of search engines, it’s usually Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo. And yet, as one of the largest search engines in the world, with more than 2 billion monthly active users, is YouTube.
Most people consider YouTube as a social media platform, which it is, but it also behaves a lot like a traditional search engine. Visitors enter their query and get a list of videos ranked by relevance.
That’s why optimizing #video content is critical to #ranking and accessing the audience on YouTube. Fortunately, a lot of the traditional SEO rules apply here as well. Find the right keywords to communicate relevance, design a good user experience to drive engagement, and use #analytics to find and fix whatever is not working.
With that said, here’s a rundown of tools to help you manage your YouTube SEO. Some are your general, run-of-the-mill SEO tools. Others are designed specifically for YouTube. But every single one is useful for growing your YouTube presence.
Look up topics in Google Trends
Turn to Google Trends to see whether interest in your chosen topic is up or down. While you may be familiar with the overall Google Trends feature, click on “YouTube Search” to explore the video-related opportunities. Given that the data is coming from Google (which owns YouTube), it’s as trustworthy as it gets.
Identify the best #keywords
To get your video content found, use the right #keywords in your title, description, and tags.
The first place to look for the right #keywords is YouTube’s autocomplete feature – start typing your seed keyword into the search bar and see how YouTube interprets it by showing autocomplete suggestions
If you have a bunch of keywords, you can automate the process with the help of a specialized keyword research tool. You can turn to the Keyword Planner section of your Google Ads account and enter your seed keywords to get a bunch of closely related keywords. One downside with a free account is that you do not get the exact search volumes for your keywords, just approximations.
Research the most profitable tags
Tags are added to YouTube videos by creators, and they help YouTube place the videos into proper categories. The problem is tags are not displayed on tvideo’s page, so researching them is a hassle. You can either open the source code of the page and look for tags there or install a browser extension that will do the job for you.
Manage and audit your channel
Always keeping an eye on your successes and failures is a natural necessity. Knowing which videos are working for your brand – and which ones aren’t – can help you understand the effect of your keywords and inform future opportunities.
YouTube #Analytics (YouTube’s native tool) provides an overview of your channel. It’s accessible through your channel’s dashboard. It tells you who your audience is and what other stuff they enjoy watching. You can see the timeline of views/engagement with your audience as well. It’s made for people who already have a number of videos and want to survey their success.
Moderate your comment section
Though you may not think of the comments section as an SEO factor, it can have an indirect effect on your #rankings. Comments can make or break your YouTube channel. Sometimes the comments under the most innocuous, helpful videos could be so bad, that it’ll harm a brand in a very real way.

The YouTube comment moderation feature is probably the best tool for this task. You can add filters to automatically deal with inappropriate commenters and create a list of forbidden words to quarantine comments incorporating them.


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