As YouTube educators, what matters most to us is what matters to viewers. For videos, that's usually the thumbnail, the title, and perhaps the description. But do video tags matter anymore? Should you spend extra time tagging your content on YouTube?
Video tags are keywords that help viewers find your content. They're most helpful when a video's topic is commonly misspelled. Think of words like "entrepreneur," "Nicaragua," or "handkerchief" – terms you might butcher at a spelling bee. For each video, YouTube gives you 500 characters of space to create tags. They can be single words or small phrases.
Are Keyword Tags Important for YouTube Rankings?
While there are lots of theories around tags and how to use them, they're actually quite simple. Just use words and phrases that describe your video. YouTube will use the tags, alongside your description and title, to suggest your video to viewers.
Today, YouTube says tags help the algorithm understand what content is about. But it also says "tags play a minimal role in your video's discovery."
[screenshot of tags support page]
So for now, it looks like tags aren't as many creators thought.
And there's more evidence that tags don't impact rankings. In Q&A session on the Google support forum [find link], a member of the YouTube search and discovery team said to focus on other things. He encouraged creators to make good thumbnails and write good titles and descriptions. But video tags? Not so much.
Testing the YouTube Algorithm With Keyword Tags
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, but if you type enough gibberish, it's not going to give you any results. Put in a highly searched term, though, and you'll find what you need. Searching ‘vidIQ’ shows our channel, its videos, and content from creators who've mentioned us.
So here's an idea. Let's create a unique digital tracker and see if YouTube can find it. We'll use ‘qidiv54321’ as the search term, which is just vidIQ spelled backward, plus a few numbers.
This phrase will go in all sorts of metadata, including the title, descriptions, translated titles, comments, and channel tags. Wherever YouTube might index a search term, we want to insert ‘qidiv54321’ there and see if it appears on YouTube search.
To give YouTube a fair chance of finding qidiv54321, we added it into our channel and its videos for one month. After analyzing the results, using qidiv54321 as a tag didn't make us more discoverable. A keyword needs to be in your title to make the video appear on YouTube search pages. We added qidiv54321 to a video title and were able to search for it within 10 minutes. Using qidiv54321 in a video description produced a similar but less impactful result.
To learn more about video tags, YouTube metadata, and how our experiment went, watch the video below:
What Does This YouTube Keyword Tag Test Prove?
First, we'll admit this isn't a highly scientific way to test video tags in the algorithm. We tested this in a very binary way. There was only one search term tested, and it appears on one channel and maybe a couple of videos. YouTube deals with common words and phrases. They can be matched across millions, if not billions, of videos. But in isolation, this test does reveal some interesting results:
- YouTube is always checking the titles and descriptions of videos. Whenever you change them, they appear in search results almost instantly.
- Video tags don't affect search results.
Tags have been important to many creators for a long time. After all, we at vidIQ have tools that help you add tags to videos. Now YouTube is making tags less relevant. As a creator, that's something you need to know.
But remember that tags are under the wider umbrella of keyword research – and that is still critical. Use these keyword tips to rank number one on YouTube.
