Doing YouTube competitor research with vidIQ.

Free YouTube Monetization Course – Lesson 14

If you run a YouTube channel, you will definitely have competitors. However, one thing needs to be understood well. The channel that is your competitor is the channel that has the same potential as you. So if you have just started YouTube, you cannot be a competitor with a channel that has been doing this for 3 years. YouTube channels that were opened before you are not your competitors, they are channels that can be examples for you. You become competitors with those channels when you have at least as many subscribers, shared content, and activity as they do. Although the name of our lesson is YouTube competitor research, for beginners, this is not exactly considered competitor research. However, we will still research other YouTube channels that have the same concept as your concept. You may say, if that channel is not my competitor, why am I researching it? Today, those channels may not be your competitors, but in order for you to become a big channel, you will need to watch and research those channels.

What should be paid attention to when doing competitor research on YouTube?

Doing competitor research is not as difficult as you think. However, being able to use the information you will obtain from the research is based on your skills. When doing competitor research on YouTube, you should first keep the segments below in mind.

• Choosing competitors ( the channels you will research ) correctly
• Knowing which other social networks competitor channels are active on
• Analyzing the keywords and hashtags used by competitors
• Paying attention to the SEO evaluation scores in competitors’ videos
• Analyzing competitors’ content strategy

Let’s learn together what these segments are researched for and what we need to pay attention to when researching them

Choosing competitors ( the channels you will research ) correctly

You can choose other channels that have the same concept as your concept as competitors for yourself. Let’s assume that your YouTube channel is a channel that shares travel vlogs. Type travel vlog in the YouTube search section and search. You can choose the channels that shared the videos that appear in the search results and the three channels recommended in the VidIQ panel on the right side of the screen as competitors for yourself.

Knowing which other social networks competitor channels are active on

In order to increase the views of your YouTube videos and increase your audience ( your subscribers ), you will definitely have to use other social media as well. Competitor channels on YouTube will also be your competitors on other social networks. Therefore, it will be necessary to analyze the social media accounts of those channels and look at their content strategies. For this, enter the competitor channel. Click once on the detailed text in the section about the channel

Then, in the window that opens, you will be able to see the social network accounts of that channel owner.

Analyzing the keywords and hashtags used by competitors

In order to learn which keywords and which hashtags competitors use in which video, it is necessary to open a video of the competitor channel that is similar to yours. After opening the video, you will see the VidIQ panel on the right side of the screen. In the VidIQ panel, click on the “overview” section

Then, if you go down a little, you can see both the channel’s and the video’s tags.

You can copy the video and channel tags by clicking the copy sign ( ❐ ) and write them in the tags section of your video. The #1 sign among the tags is not a hashtag. It shows which rank it appears in YouTube searches when searched with that keyword. To see the hashtags, you need to look at the description part of the video.

Paying attention to the SEO evaluation scores in competitors’ videos

By examining the SEO evaluation scores given by VidIQ on competitors’ videos, you can estimate how interesting that video is for viewers. The higher the SEO score of a video, the more it attracts the attention of viewers. You can see with how many points out of 100 that video is evaluated in the VidIQ panel on the left side of the video.

VidIQ SEO Score

VidIQ SEO Score shows with how many points out of 100 the SEO value of a YouTube video is evaluated. Having a high SEO value has a serious effect on increasing video views.

Actionable

This section shows the evaluation of the activity carried out in SEO studies for the video. That is, how many keywords are used in the title, how many keywords are used in the description, the search volume of the written keywords, and the general evaluation of such activities are reflected in the “Actionable” section.

Performance

In the Performance section, we can see the general performance evaluation of the video. As views increase, the performance value also increases. At the same time, in this section, we can also see the number of ranked tags ( # ) used by the competitor and the evaluation of the used tags according to their search volume.

Based on this information, you can increase the SEO of the video you will share and increase your views. You can take your competitors as an example in a way.

Analyzing competitors’ content strategy

Competitor research is not only reading keywords or analytics. Competitor research is more than analyzing numbers. If you have determined a competitor for yourself, you should also learn their content strategy. For this, you should watch both the content on your competitors’ YouTube channels and the content on their social network accounts. By doing this, you will obtain new content ideas. You can learn which topics your competitors make videos about, which nuances they consider in those videos, the speaking style used in the videos, and the video shooting and editing technique. You can also learn through which content they direct traffic from social network accounts to the YouTube channel. By learning these, instead of repeating the same, you can prepare different but better content. In general, you can use the table below to make your job easier in competitor analysis. You can download the table by clicking the download button below.