YouTube’s Testing a New ‘Search Insights’ Tool to Help Guide Your Content Efforts

YouTube’s working on a new insights feature for YouTube Studio which will provide information on what people are searching for in the app, both in relation to your channel and content specifically, and for more general search queries.

Each element could be highly valuable for your content planning. Called ‘Search Insights’, the new feature, currently in testing, will eventually be available in your Analytics/Research tab, and will come with two separate tabs for query research.

The first tab will provide a listing of what your channel viewers are searching for – i.e. insights into what people who regularly view your content are also looking for on YouTube.

As you can see here, the tab will provide insights into the key topics of interest among your viewers, along with the overall search volume of each, and the amount of traffic that your channel has gleaned based on each query.

You’ll also note the ‘Content Gap’ marker – YouTube’s also adding the capacity to filter these listings based on search queries that don’t return a high volume of matches. The idea here is that by highlighting these queries, creators will then be able to focus on creating content that aligns with searches that are not currently being served by the videos available in the app, which could present new opportunities for your efforts.

On the second tab, ‘Searches Across YouTube’, you’ll be able to glean insight into the most common search queries based on any keyword – so if you wanted to know what the most common ‘how to’ searches are on the platform, you could enter ‘how to’ as a search term.

Narrow the listing to ‘Content Gaps only’, and the tool will then provide you with a list of some of the most searched ‘how to’ terms that are not currently being served by directly aligned videos.

In this query, using ‘chromebook’ as the keyword query, these are the most common Chromebook-related searches that don’t have a directly correlating YouTube video, which could highlight new opportunities for your approach.

It could be a very valuable tool, along similar lines to Google’s Search Console and Google Trends, providing more insight into what’s driving your YouTube channel traffic, ad how you can optimize your content efforts to align with these trends.

But it’s not live just yet. YouTube says that the new module is still in testing, with an expanded roll-out coming shortly.

Definitely one to look forward to for YouTube marketers.