How Can I Use TubeBuddy Effectively?

[DoStuffJosh]

I've had a look around the Tube Buddy tool for YouTube and think it's a really great tool and can see how it helps a lot of people.

But, I don't think I'm using it effectively - Or maybe I just don't know what I'm doing?

Without TubeBuddy- My video tags look like this, I mean the little green symbol, I rarely get in the top 20 of search results. Heres a picture.

As you can see only two tags have gotten me anywhere decent with this video.

Moving on to my most popular video, I have a lot more search results through my tags. I think this is mostly due to luck - Also without using TubeBuddy at the time

As you can see, a lot of happy green squares!

My Question-
How can I use TubeBuddy's tag explorer, or any other feature to get me these little green squares, higher up in the search results?

I played around with TubeBuddy on one of my videos, changing tags, doing the whole, 'high search volume' + 'low competition', but, it didn't seem to help with the search results all that much. None of those happy looking green squares that I like hahaha.
Am I missing something?

 

[MichaelNoker]

A lot of it depends on your viewer retention - are these two videos wildly disparate in your audience retention rate?

 

[DoStuffJosh]

A lot of it depends on your viewer retention - are these two videos wildly disparate in your audience retention rate?

The videos are different, but they both fit my channel well. And looking at the Analytics viewer rentition/watch time is pretty much, almost watched the whole way through for both of them ☺

 

[subversiveasset]

So, one thing I will note is that the video that seems to be doing a lot "worse" in search is much newer. My understanding is that Youtube only starts taking into consideration watch time and audience retention rate after around the first week -- it wouldn't just use one day's data (especially since youtube hasn't even vetted these views -- you know how your analytics are 2 or 3 days delayed, right?)

For the first week, all Youtube has to go by are the things it can crawl...this includes not just tags, but also title, description, and closed captions (if submitted). Youtube is not going to reward you for just putting anything in, so you have to reinforce the signals that you are using. For example, it makes sense that your new video is ranking well for "amazing fun facts you need to know", because that is in *both* your title and your tags -- that's two data points, vs one. (Since you don't really have an effective description, you aren't really "reinforcing" anything via that channel. Additionally, you haven't submitted subtitles/closed captions.)

That being said, the way I use TubeBuddy's tag explorer is to find good long-tail keywords. It looks like you already have a good grasp of this (e.g., in addition to having "how to fake being sick" you have "how to fake being sick for school guide"...which is a more specific, and therefore longer-tail keyword), but sometimes tubebuddy can be good at suggestion variants that I did not expect (I don't do let's plays, but an easy-to-understand example would be whether people search for "[insert game here] let's play" or "[insert game here] gameplay" or "[insert game here] playthrough"...catching all those variants is an easy way to get some traffic bumps)

(That being said, I will say...you are never going to rank for keywords like "do" and "stuff" and "josh"...remember, keywords aren't additive. A keyword for "do stuff josh" with spaces is NOT the same as three keywords, one for "do", one for "stuff', and one for "josh")

Anyway, i think the good news is that as long as retention is as good as you say it is, after a week or so, you should get boosts from that, regardless of your tags.