What is TubeBuddy’s Search Rank Tracking

TubeBuddy’s Search Rank Tracking tools allow you to track the results of your SEO strategy on YouTube. Optimizing your videos for YouTube search is one of the most powerful growth strategies for YouTube channels with less than 1000 subscribers.

Popular YouTube videos that have been optimized for YouTube SEO not only rank on YouTube but also often on Google itself.

TubeBuddy’s Keyword Explorer tool allows you to identify keywords that have both a high search volume and a low number of competing videos.

Once you have identified a list of promising keywords, you want to include it in the video tags section of relevant videos, as well as creating new, similar videos around these topics to establish your channel as the number one authority on this topic.

Search Rank Tracking allows you to monitor this list of keywords that you want to dominate with your channel.

Table of Contents

• What is TubeBuddy’s Search Rank Tracking
• How to use the TubeBuddy Search Rank Tracking tool
• Keywords to track
• Ranking Reports
• Scheduling reports
• Next steps

How to use the TubeBuddy Search Rank Tracking tool

If you want to know how you rank in comparison with your competitors for targeted keywords both on YouTube and Google searches, visit the TubeBuddy dashboard under My Account.

You will see the Search Rank Tracking icon on your dashboard.

Click on it.

This will open up the Keywords to Track page.

Keywords to track

If you have never used the Search Rank Tracking feature before, you will see an empty page first.

Let’s change that by adding a keyword to track, by clicking on the green Add Keywords button at the top right.

Keywords can be individual words or longer phrases and sentences.

If you want to track more than one keyword, you can hit the TAB key once you have typed out your target keywords.

The total number of trackable keywords is limited by your TubeBuddy plan. You can see the exact number based on your plan on the right sidebar.

Once you added all of your targeted keywords click on Save.

Your keyword is now automatically tracked by TubeBuddy and you can review the results on the Ranking Reports page.

Ranking Reports

Switch over to the Ranking Reports tab to generate a ranking report for your target keywords.

Click on the Generate Ranking Report to get started.

It might take between a few seconds up to a few minutes to generate your report.

Once it has been created open it.

You will see a new section for each of your tracked keywords.

Each section has seven columns.

The first column with the flag icon tells you if a video belongs to your channel (star) or to your competitor (bull’s eye).

The Type Type column shows if the ranking result is a video, YouTube channel, or playlist.

The Result column shows you the specific video, playlist, or YouTube channel that ranked. You can click on the URL to open it in a new window.

The YouTube rank column shows you the position of each video while searching for your keywords. The up/down column on the right shows you how your position has changed over time. The second column will be empty for new keywords. YouTube rankings are pulled from the YouTube Data API.

The Google columns work similarly to the YouTube columns but show you if your video ranks on Google for the identical search term. Google rankings are pulled from the Google Custom Search API.

If you press on the external link icon, you will open a YouTube or Google search for the target keyword to verify the results.

Keep in mind that a search for the keyword on YouTube or Google often gives you slightly different positions. This is due to the fact that both YouTube and Google personalizing search ranking based on location, browsing habits, time of day, and if someone is logged in or visiting in incognito mode.

Scheduling reports

Now, if you’re lazy like me, you always want to automate as much as possible. TubeBuddy makes the creation of new Ranking Reports super convenient by allowing you to schedule them.

You can schedule the generation of new reports either once per week and once per month. You will receive an email reminder when your new report is ready.

If you want to unscheduled reports, click on the Never button.

If you need a new report now, just head back to the Ranking Reports and re-generate a new report. You can do this every 24 hours.

Next steps

Keeping track of your YouTube SEO progress is a piece of cake with the TubeBuddy Search Rank Tracking feature. It’s a great companion to TubeBuddy’s Keyword Explorer and SEO Suite.

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to amp up their YouTube watch time by optimizing videos for YouTube search.

To learn how TubeBuddy helped me to grow my channel from 0 to 3000 subs, check out my full TubeBuddy review here.