YouTube has matured over the last few years and has transformed itself into an excellent platform that allows creators to engage and connect with their audience. But building a successful youtube channel is not an easy task, especially in 2022 when competition is fierce. You need to create quality content and find ways to outperform your competition. Several tools can help you optimize and manage your YouTube channels, providing you with valuable insights.
VidIQ Chrome extension is one such tool that has been gaining much attraction from the youtube community. It has many useful features that can elevate your marketing efforts and help you create a successful youtube channel. Let’s take the time to learn what it can do for you.
What is VidIQ?
VidIQ is a SaaS platform and chrome extension that comes with a comprehensive YouTube SEO feature set that assists you in creating SEO-friendly titles, descriptions, and tags. As a YouTuber, you will constantly need new ideas for videos and optimize them with keywords for the youtube search algorithm. VidIQ helps in simplifying this process so your video can outperform the competition.
VidIQ Feature set
VidIQ offers an array of useful features, including
- YouTube keyword research
- Advanced analytics
- Best time to post
- Playlist performance
- Subscriber analysis
- Competitors analysis
Keyword research: You may be interested in a certain topic, but it makes no sense to create a youtube video if no one is searching for it. This is why keyword research plays an essential role in the overall success of your channel. Ideally, you would want to find a topic that people are interested in and have a high search volume, but not many people are creating a video on the subject, so there is less competition to get ranked. Finding the right balance is crucial, and VidIQ offers tools to help you find that.
You do not need any prior SEO knowledge to get started with VidIQ; simply search your keyword in the search bar, and the tool will present all the information that you will need. It will also give you a particular keyword variation that may perform better in the search algorithm. For example, “where best to buy apple watch” and “where is the best place to buy an apple watch” mean the same thing but significantly differ in search volume.
Some standard terms you may face in keyword research are:
- Keyword Difficulty/ Search Competition: How difficult it is to rank on this keyword; the lower the KD, the better.
- Search Volume: Number of people searching the keyword on a monthly basis; the higher the better (but higher search volumes are always hard to rank)
- Overall score: The combined score of the search volume and the competition score is the total score. So, a keyword with high volume and low difficulty will get a high overall score.
Advanced Analytics: Similar to youtube studio, the advanced analytics feature in VidIQ gives you helpful insight on the performance of your video with details like the number of views, likes, and subscribers your YouTube channel has received. It also shows where your traffic came from and which keywords you are currently ranking for.
Best time to post: Another interesting feature that VidIQ offers is to give you a predicted time on when most of your subscribers are usually active. This gives you the best odds to get more views on your video as soon as it is published.
Playlist performance: Creating a playlist on your YouTube channel is a great way to engage with the audience and get more views. But how will you know if the videos in a playlist are performing well?VidIQ provides you with all of the information you need to know about your video’s performance in the playlist. This data will assist you in determining what your target audience is interested in and as a result, you can create more content according to that. Currently, youtube studios do not offer such a feature.
Subscriber analysis: Your subscriber is your biggest asset, and the more you create content that they like watching, the faster you engage with them and create a vibrant community. Subscriber analysis enables you to see what consent your subscribers are watching, which you can analyze later to create similar content.
Competitors analysis: You also have features to compare your channel with that of your competitors and see how they are performing in your niche. You can get useful insights on what sort of content you should create to outperform your competitors.
Things VidIQ can improve.
VidIQ is an excellent tool, but there is always room for improvement. Some things They can improve are:
User Interface: The user interface is dated and can benefit from a revamp. The UI looks too bloated with so many features, and it gets hard to navigate through the UI at times.
No CPC: Cost per click (CPC) gives you an idea about the revenue you can get when people watch your video. Some content has significantly higher CPC than others; for example, if your content is on kids, you get low CPC, but the CPC is usually higher if your content is on business. It would be great if you could get the exact CPC using VidIQ.
Only available on chrome: VidIQ is a chrome extension, therefore not available on other platforms.
Pricing
As of March 2022, VidIQ offers both a free and paid plan ( with a free trial). You can do almost everything at the free package, but with limitations on how keywords you can search or competitor data you can access. But even with the pro package starting at $7.50/month, we think VidIQ offers great value at an affordable price.
Verdict
VidIQ is an excellent tool that offers a ton of features to grow a youtube channel. Some of the SEO features may take some time to master, but VidIQ makes it easy and intuitive for anyone to get started. We recommend trying the free packages to get a feel of what VidIQ has to offer before moving in with the paid packages.
