YouTube Launches New 'Search Insights' for All Creators - Social Media Today

YouTube has announced that it's rolling out its new Search Insights feature to all creators, which will provide a range of new data points to help refine your YouTube strategy, based on what people are looking for in the app.

YouTube initially provided an overview of Search Insights in November last year, which will include 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.

As you can see here, Search Insights, which will be accessible in the 'Analytics'>'Research' element of YouTube Studio on desktop, will provide info on 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.

YouTube will also display a marker for 'Content Gap' queries, which are search terms 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.

There's also a 'Searches Across YouTube' element, which will provide 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.

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

YouTube notes that in the initial rollout, the data that fuels its search trends info will only incorporate search activity from users in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India. YouTube's working to incorporate more regions shortly, but even if you're not in these markets, the insights could still be indicative of broader interest in the app.

It's definitely worth a look – you can check out Search Insights in the desktop version of the YouTube Studio app, rolling out to all users from today (YouTube says that the full roll out will be complete by the end of April).