Find Untapped YouTube Keywords
Discover high-volume, low-competition keywords to skyrocket your YouTube growth.
Your keyword breakdown will appear here
Find low-competition, high-volume keywords for your niche.
- 1. Enter a seed keywordType a topic or phrase in your niche. 'AI tools for YouTubers', 'fitness for beginners', etc.
- 2. Review volume + difficultyThe tool shows search volume, competition score, and related long-tail keywords you can actually rank for.
- 3. Build a content planExport the winners, pair with the Idea Generator, and schedule a week of content.
Ranking is mostly a decision you make before you film
Whether a video ranks is decided in large part by the phrase you chose to target, and that decision happens before the camera is on. A brilliantly made video aimed at a term owned by channels a hundred times your size will sit on page four. A merely competent video aimed at a specific, under-served phrase can hold the top result for years and quietly compound.
The job of this tool is to help you make that choice with something better than instinct. It gives you a volume signal, a competition signal, and a set of related phrases pulled from what people are actually typing into YouTube — enough to tell a term worth targeting from one that will simply absorb your effort.
Where the volume and competition numbers actually come from
YouTube does not publish search volume. Nobody has an official figure, including tools that display one to two decimal places. What this tool does instead is build a defensible proxy out of data that is public, and it is worth understanding the construction so you know how much weight to put on it.
Two separate demand scores, because two kinds of demand exist
A trend score is built from the median views-per-hour across the top-ranking results, and an evergreen score from the median views-per-day of the older, established videos. A topic can score high on one and low on the other. Something spiking this week has a high trend score; something that quietly pulls views every day for years has a high evergreen score. Both are worth targeting, for very different content strategies.
Related phrases come from YouTube's own autocomplete
The suggestion list is fetched from Google's public suggest endpoint scoped specifically to YouTube, so what comes back is genuine YouTube search behaviour rather than web search behaviour. The count of suggestions and how many of them are long-tail phrases both feed into the demand estimate — a keyword that generates a rich autocomplete tree is one people are demonstrably searching in many variations.
Competition blends how big the incumbents are with how crowded the field is
The competition score is a weighted blend of two things: the median view count of the videos currently ranking, which measures how strong the incumbents are, and the total number of results, which measures how crowded the field is. Incumbent strength is weighted more heavily, because ten thousand weak competitors are far easier to displace than five very strong ones. Both are log-scaled so that the difference between a thousand and ten thousand results matters more than the difference between one and two million.
Read these scores as estimates, because that is what they are
This section exists because keyword tools across the industry present modelled numbers with a confidence the underlying data does not justify. Ours are modelled too. Here is the honest framing:
- The volume score is a proxy assembled from view velocity, autocomplete breadth, and intent — not a count of searches. No third-party tool has YouTube's real search volume, because YouTube has never published it.
- Difficulty is a relative signal, not a promise. A low score means the incumbents look beatable on public metrics; it cannot account for channel authority, your existing audience, or how good the actual video is.
- The analysis reads the top slice of ranking videos rather than the entire result set, so very broad head terms are assessed from a sample.
- Autocomplete data is strongest in English and in high-traffic niches. A narrow or non-English term may return few suggestions, which will drag the demand signal down for reasons that have nothing to do with real demand.
- Scores are computed live from current rankings, so the same keyword can score differently a month later. That is the data being honest, not the tool being unstable.
Working a seed keyword into a shortlist
- 1
Enter a seed keyword
Type a topic or phrase in your niche. 'AI tools for YouTubers', 'fitness for beginners', etc.
- 2
Review volume + difficulty
The tool shows search volume, competition score, and related long-tail keywords you can actually rank for.
- 3
Build a content plan
Export the winners, pair with the Idea Generator, and schedule a week of content.
How to act on what comes back
The scores are only useful if they change what you make. A few reliable readings:
- Low competition with any meaningful demand is the sweet spot for a small channel — take it, even if the volume looks unexciting.
- High trend score with a low evergreen score means move fast; that topic has a window and it will close.
- High evergreen score is a signal to invest in production quality, because that video will keep earning views for years.
- A rich long-tail suggestion list is a content cluster in disguise — build several videos around it rather than one.
- When the intent classification disagrees with the format you planned, believe the intent and change the format.
- Take your shortlist into the Idea Generator for title angles, then into the SEO Optimizer once the video exists. If tags are what brought you here, the tags versus hashtags breakdown and the free tag generator are both worth a read.
Keyword research, answered
Where does the YouTube search volume data come from?
Volume and competition are modeled from YouTube's own autocomplete, related-keyword APIs, and public search trend data.
What's a 'good' keyword difficulty score?
Under 30 is low competition and easy to rank for a new channel; 30–60 is moderate; above 60 requires strong channel authority.
Should I target volume or difficulty?
For a new channel, prioritize difficulty under 30 with any positive volume. Big volume means nothing if you can't rank.
Does this work for any niche?
Yes — the tool adapts to any YouTube-able topic. Narrower niches get more actionable long-tail suggestions.
How is this different from Google keyword tools?
Google tools model web search intent. This tool models YouTube-specific search behaviour — autocomplete, related videos, and watch-time patterns — which frequently surface different terms than a web-search keyword tool would.
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