How to Track YouTube Video Keyword Rankings

In this new guide, you will not only find two Youtube video rank trackers but also learn how to check video ranking of your own and others.

What if I told you that you cancheck YouTube video ranks very easily, just like you can research competitor websites’ keywords and their ranking positions in SERPs?

Yes, you can track your YouTube video keyword rankings within a few steps. Unlike tracking keyword rankings with Google Search Console, it is harder to keep track of daily ranking fluctuations of Youtube videos in Creator Studio.

How to Track YouTube Video Rankings

YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine, right? You should check their rankings daily if you have a YouTube channel and a few videos published.

The advantages of tracking YouTube video rankings are invaluable. One of those is you can identify your competition and take the necessary steps.

This tutorial will show you how to track YouTube video rankings by keyword position, not in average SERP position. Therefore, you can correctly check YouTube video ranks daily in the right way.

At the end of this post, you’ll learn,

1. How to Track Own YouTube video rankings [jump to]
2. How to Track competitor YouTube Video Rankings [jump to]

Track Own YouTube Video Rankings

If you have a website or blog, you can easily find the average ranking positions in SERPs for keyword phrases by using webmaster tools such as Google Search Console (for Google), Bing webmaster tools (for Yahoo and Bing), and Baidu webmaster tools (for Baidu), etc. However, although YouTube is the second largest search engine, according to Semrush rankings, there is no definite way to check YouTube video rankings.

Here’s how to check YouTube video ranks.

Step #1: Get YouTube Video Keywords

As I mentioned earlier, we track videos by keyword positions. So you must get YouTube video keywords first. To get YouTube video keywords,

Sign in to your YouTube Creator Studio and go to the Analytics page.

Select the YouTube video you want to track. In this example, I choose the first YouTube video: How to Create a VKontakte Page for Your Website

You can see the Top Traffic Sources panel at the bottom of the YouTube video overview stats. Click on it.

Here you can find top traffic sources for YouTube videos. Click the “YouTube search” link.

Now you can see the top YouTube video search keywords that people used. The screenshot below shows the keywords people used to find my YouTube video.

Click on the “Download Report” button.

You’ll get a spreadsheet that contains YouTube video search keywords. Open it and copy all keywords. You need it for the next step.

Step #2: Add Keywords to YouTube rank checker tool

Now in this step, you will add video keywords to the YouTube keyword tracker program. If you are wondering what the YouTube rank tracker program is, TubeBuddy is the YouTube video rank tracking software.

TubeBuddy is a complete solution for YouTube marketing, and it provides a variety of products for different cases, such as YouTube video analysis, video keyword research, and channel analysis. YouTube video keyword rank tracking is one of the awesome features of TubeBuddy.

After you create your TubeBuddy account, follow the below instructions. (You can sign up for a TubeBuddy by using this link)

Watch this video to learn how to track YouTube keyword rankings with TubeBuddy.

If you are a YouTube marketer wanting to step up your game and dominate your niche, you should definitely try TubeBuddy.

It’s not only a fantastic toolkit for analyzing YouTube video keyword rankings, traffic, and other statistics, you can get a big picture of what works in your niche and what interests your audience!

Track competitor YouTube Video Rankings

If you want to stand out from the competition, you must analyze your competitors. You can learn many things by researching your competitors’ SEO strategies. Just like competitor keyword analysis for websites, you can find YouTube keywords that your competitor’s videos are currently using.

But, you can’t find other videos’ search keywords that simply bring them tons of video views every day. You have to use a competitor analysis tool for that. Here’s the step-by-step guide to spy on competitor YouTube videos and find their top YouTube video search keywords.

Step #1: Find Video Keywords

We can’t get competitors’ YouTube video keywords through the YouTube analytics page, right? Therefore, we have to use a specific tool such as Semrush to get YouTube video ranking keywords.

Semrush is a powerful search engine marketing tool that provides valuable tools for Keyword Research (Keyword Magic, Topic Research, Domain vs Domain, etc.), Site Audit, and Content Optimization. I have been using Semrush for a few years and got great results. Learn more.

Semrush has a few pricing options. As a bonus, you can create a Semrush GURU account for free using this link. If you have a Semrush free account, you can upgrade to Semrush free trial GURU account for free following the instructions in this post.

After creating your Semrush GURU account (or a PRO Account), follow the instructions below.

First, you must get the permalink of the competitor’s YouTube Video. Go to YouTube.com and enter your target keyword or keyword phrase. I entered “Dog Training” as the keyword because it’s one of the most searched YouTube video keyword phrases.

I will use the third YouTube video to track their keyword ranking positions in SERPs. The video is “Train Your Dog – 6 Important Dog Training Tips For Obedience Training“

After getting the video permalink, go to Semrush and log in to your Semrush account. If you use a Semrush free account, you’ll get fewer results. So upgrade to a paid account for free by following the instructions in this blog post.

Enter the YouTube Video permalink and choose Google.com (US country domain). Then hit the search button.

At the bottom of the overview page, search for the “Top Organic Keywords” section. This is where you can find the top search keywords that people use on Google.com before watching a particular video. In my example, I found 56 organic keywords. Click on “View Full Report” to find more information about keywords and ranking videos.

You can find more information about each keyword and the video ranking on this page on Google.com SERP.

Click on the “Export” button at the top of the keywords table. Download keyword reports in CSV format. So you can open it in Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheet easily.

Copy all the keywords the video ranks for and save it on a Text document.

Step #2: Add Keywords to YouTube rank checker tool

After you get keywords, the next step is adding keywords to the rank tracker program. We use the RankTrackr YouTube rank checker tool to track keyword positions. Here’s how to track competitor video keyword rankings.

Go to RankTrackr and sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account, sign up for a free trial account over here.)

Select on YouTube static group (or you can create a new one) and click on Add URLs button.

Choose YouTube as the search engine from the drop-down menu and copy & paste the competitor’s YouTube video URL. Click on the “Add URLs” button.

Then click on the “+Add Keyword” button.

Now copy & paste the Organic keywords which you received from Semrush. You can also start tracking keyword rank positions in locations such as San Francisco, United States. But, for this example, I will use default settings.

After you add keywords, RankTrackr will immediately add them to the rank tracker system. You should see keyword rank positions and other information, such as search results, very shortly.

Note: The results could be different because we used Semrush to get video ranking keywords. They are organic keywords, not YouTube video keywords. Anyway, most top-ranking videos on YouTube tend to rank on Google SERPs for most video keywords. However, you could lose many search terms that people use on the YouTube website alone.

Conclusion on Tracking YouTube Video Rankings

You should check YouTube video rankings for each keyword daily or at least monthly because one position drop in search results could result in losing thousands of views and thousands of earnings. It’s not an easy task to check YouTube video ranks for each keyword. It will take hundreds of minutes to check video rankings if your video has hundreds of ranking keywords.

But, with TubeBuddy and Semrush tools, you can find video keywords and start tracking rankings of each keyword from the first second you add keywords. As RankTrackr updates its database daily and RankTrackr has perfect tools to track local video rankings, you can get most of these search engine marketing tools.

I have been using RankTrackr and Semrush for a long time because they have helped me grow my business. After I utilized them to track YouTube video ranks, I found many ways to increase my YouTube video rankings. Some of them are,

• Use an attractive custom thumbnail: YouTube generates and suggests a few thumbnails. However, custom video thumbnails are the best option for attracting people in the first span. Use a tool like Canva, PixTeller, or Vista Create to create beautiful, attention-grabbing YouTube Thumbnails.
• Use attractive words in video titles: Titles with numbers get more clicks than regular titles.
• Short YouTube videos get more views: Test using short vs long videos to see which videos get more views.
• Video description is so important: Write mini blog posts (about 300+ words). Your video will rank for more long-tail search terms with more words you include. Make sure you sprinkle keywords a few times in the description panel.
• Interlink YouTube videos: Add links to related videos on your channel in the video description.
• Use competitors’ channel names as tags. (I learned this YouTube trick from this video by Brian Dean)
• And so much more…

This is all because I started tracking YouTube video rankings. If you want to know the keyword rankings of your videos, you should use an online YouTube rank checker tool and start tracking video rankings.

So how can you track YouTube video rankings? Share your ideas in the comment form below.