TubeBuddy and High-Volume, Low-Competition Tags

[Idec Sdawkminn]

So I got TubeBuddy and was excited to find great tags that would get my videos found a lot more. Fill those niches that need filling and all that. I read the guides, watched the videos, and did some experiments with it.

Wow, everyone is using this search phrase, but there are hardly any videos supplying this high demand! All those poor people searching for something that doesn't exist. I will meet a lot of needs if I supply this.

Spoiler: Search phrase

What the? Who are all these people who are searching for this!?

So now I don't think I can even trust this tool.

 

[Redford1900]

Thanks for the "heads up." I'll go check them out.

 

[subversiveasset]

Haha, that's so funny.

What appears to be happening (based on the results tab) is that youtube reroutes searches for that term to include results just for the Avengers Theme (without respect to who's singing it). TubeBuddy reports that accordingly when it's talking about search traffic.

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

Haha, that's so funny.

What appears to be happening (based on the results tab) is that youtube reroutes searches for that term to include results just for the Avengers Theme (without respect to who's singing it). TubeBuddy reports that accordingly when it's talking about search traffic.

Yeah, that's what I was fearing was happening. Which is a shame, because the tool is a lot less useful this way than what it makes out to be. I'm sure the "competition" rating is spot on, but it would be way more useful if it actually queried the frequency of searches that included all the words in the tag. As it is, it is kind of misleading.

 

[subversiveasset]

but in a way, this is also a youtube thing? If you run the same search in youtube, you get the same results as are shown on TubeBuddy's results page.

 

[TheKirkyLife]

One thing you have got to take into account with TubeBuddy is that it is there to SUGGEST and not to definitively say "THIS IS A GREAT TAG". Part of the process is doing the research yourself and seeing if you actually have a market there. A big indicator is if people are watching a lot of similar videos but not specifically the videos you will be making.

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

but in a way, this is also a youtube thing? If you run the same search in youtube, you get the same results as are shown on TubeBuddy's results page.

Agreed. But that is because YouTube just searches for videos that have at least some of those words in them, but not necessarily all of them. I've tried different methods, such as avengers +theme +grinch and it still found videos that had only Avengers or Grinch, but not both. The only way I was able to make YouTube search for only videos that include all the words, was to put them in quotes with asterisks between the words, such as "avengers * song" or "grinch * avengers". The first one shows videos that have the word Avengers and also the word Song somewhere in the title or description, but that second one returns no results. But TubeBuddy doesn't seem to be able to find the search frequency of that. I thought the point was to find tags that were highly searched but with little competition. And long-tail tags were the best way to do that. But if it can't differentiate the effectiveness of those long-tail tags from the short one-word tags that make them up (besides the competitiveness), you're just going to end up with a bunch of noncompetitive tags that are rarely searched.

One thing you have got to take into account with TubeBuddy is that it is there to SUGGEST and not to definitively say "THIS IS A GREAT TAG". Part of the process is doing the research yourself and seeing if you actually have a market there. A big indicator is if people are watching a lot of similar videos but not specifically the videos you will be making.

I agree with this, too, but it would make that process a whole lot easier if it queried the list of search term frequency using all included words in your tag rather than just how many videos show up with that search and comparing it to the number of them that have that tag.

 

[subversiveasset]

Agreed. But that is because YouTube just searches for videos that have at least some of those words in them, but not necessarily all of them. I've tried different methods, such as avengers +theme +grinch and it still found videos that had only Avengers or Grinch, but not both. The only way I was able to make YouTube search for only videos that include all the words, was to put them in quotes with asterisks between the words, such as "avengers * song" or "grinch * avengers". The first one shows videos that have the word Avengers and also the word Song somewhere in the title or description, but that second one returns no results. But TubeBuddy doesn't seem to be able to find the search frequency of that. I thought the point was to find tags that were highly searched but with little competition. And long-tail tags were the best way to go on that. But if it can't differentiate the effectiveness of those long-tail tags from the short one-word tags that make them up (besides the competitiveness), you're just going to end up with a bunch of noncompetitive tags that are rarely searched.

I agree with this, too, but it would make that process a whole lot easier if it queried the list of search term frequency using all included words in your tag rather than just how many videos show up with that search and comparing it to the number of them that have that tag.

But if you recognize that Youtube give search results for "avengers theme sung by the grinch" then from TubeBuddy's perspective, it does look like a gold mine -- no one's using that exact tag in their videos, yet that results in a lot of video results. It would be different if searching this on youtube gave 0 results, but then tubebuddy reported 26k...but that's not what is happening.

TubeBuddy does indeed seem to have a problem parsing out quotation marks (hence it can't do "grinch * avengers"), but other than that, it seems to just be "relying" off youtube's own search patterns.

 

[Idec Sdawkminn]

But if you recognize that Youtube give search results for "avengers theme sung by the grinch" then from TubeBuddy's perspective, it does look like a gold mine -- no one's using that exact tag in their videos, yet that results in a lot of video results. It would be different if searching this on youtube gave 0 results, but then tubebuddy reported 26k...but that's not what is happening.

TubeBuddy does indeed seem to have a problem parsing out quotation marks (hence it can't do "grinch * avengers"), but other than that, it seems to just be "relying" off youtube's own search patterns.

But when I search for that in YouTube using quotes, it returns no results. It only returns results when I don't include the quotes. But the main problem is that TubeBuddy is making the "search volume" rating based on the number of results that YouTube returns when you search for that. All that means is that there are a lot of videos that contain those terms, not that a lot of people are searching for them. If it instead queried the list of the most frequently searched phrases, it would give what it is claiming. "Search Volume" sounds like what volume people are searching using these words, not how many videos YouTube returns when you search using these words. As it is, both ratings are supply types, and neither are demand.

 

[subversiveasset]

I get you now, and I agree. So you have to find out the demand-side information from elsewhere. Which certainly does seem like something TubeBuddy SHOULD tackle.