Are YouTube tags still relevant? Do they help your video get more views or just a waste of time?
If you’re uploading videos on YouTube you know that it takes time to come up with meaningful and SEO friendly metadata for your new videos.
So, if the tags do not help to get more views, can we just skip them and save a couple of minutes? Let’s see!
Hi, I’m Mik and in this post I will try to find out (based on data research) whether adding good video tags can still help you get more views on YouTube.
Key takeaways
- YouTube tags still play a role in video SEO, but are not as important as titles and descriptions.
- Tags can help correct misspellings and variations in search terms.
- Tags may assist search engines outside of YouTube in finding and categorizing videos.
- Top Youtubers still use video tags. Most trending videos use tags.
Shortcut: Skip the reading and just generate the tags automatically.
Do YouTube tags work or can be ignored?
That’s a good question!
Only YouTube can say definitively what role the tags play in video SEO.
I searched YouTube’s official questions and answers and found that, according to YouTube support while tags do play certain small role, the title and the description have much bigger impact on the ranking.
According to YouTube, tags are mostly needed to correct spelling mistakes.
So.. does this mean the tags are now irrelevant?
I’d say No! Even if the tags only play a small role you shouldn’t ignore them.
YouTube is a very competitive environment, you agree? So I’d say, use every little thing that may help to get your video discovered by more people!
Do tags help YouTube videos?
Overall, my conclusion about the importance of tags today:
Tags alone have relatively small impact on your video. But combined with a great title and description, the tags might help you reach more people on YouTube.
But don’t limit your video optimization efforts to YouTube only!
Tags may help your videos get discovered OUTSIDE of YouTube
IMHO, YouTube tags should still be a part of your SEO strategy.
Why?
With the ever-increasing competition on the platform and on the Web in general, you need to make sure you use every tool available to you to reach your intended audience.
The tags are part of the video’s page metadata. Not visible to the visitors but accessible to the search engines and AI search bots.
Thus, YouTube tags may help search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, and recently AI chat bots like ChatGPT) to find and categorize your videos.
To ensure your videos are discoverable by the search engines, you should include your main keyword in the title, description, AND tags.
This will help the search algorithm understand what your video is about and will help you reach your intended audience. You should also include other related keywords and phrases to further optimize your video for search.
It is important to keep your tags up to date. As trends and topics change, so should your tags.
This will help ensure your video is still relevant and will help you stay ahead of the competition.
Here’s more evidence that tags should not be ignored:
The marketing experts at Shopify recommend using your main keywords naturally in your video’s title, description, and tags noting that tags can still provide supporting context, such as common misspellings or alternate terms.
To conclude:
In general, tags still can help (however little) with discoverability of your videos on YouTube and elsewhere.
However, it’s important to note that the specific importance and relevance of the tags may change over time, and it’s always a good idea to stay up to date with the latest best practices for video SEO.
Do most popular YouTubers still use tags today?
Ok, so far the idea is that using tags is at least somewhat beneficial to your video.
But what about the most popular YouTubers? Do they still use tags?
I looked at the videos recently uploaded to some of the most popular YouTube channels using YouTube tags extractor tool and here are the results:
PewDiePie (100+ millions subscribers)
PewDiePie is somewhat modest with tags, mostly listing branding tags and the type of the video “react”.
But, hey, when you’re number one (or two) you can skip on some tags! But he’s still using the tags.
KidsDiana (70+ millions subscribers)
The creators behind KidsDiana channel take it a step further adding more tags related to the topic and the season.
DudePerfect (60+ millions subscribers)
Now DudePerfets takes it to the max! He is literally stuffing his videos with all sorts of tags, all the way up to the allowed maximum.
Is this a good thing? I don’t know but considering he’s one of the top 10 YouTubers, I’d say he knows what he’s doing 🙂
Do trending YouTube videos use tags?
I analyzed close to 140,000 trending videos and found that about 58.3% had tags populated. That suggests tags are still used by a majority of trending videos, even if a substantial share of videos also perform without them.
The practical takeaway is that tags may still offer some benefit as a supporting metadata signal, especially for reinforcing topic relevance, alternate wording, and common misspellings.
But compared to stronger ranking and click-driving elements like titles, thumbnails, and descriptions, their impact appears to be relatively limited, so they are best treated as a useful extra rather than a primary optimization lever.
Since a majority of trending videos still include tags, I’d recommend to keep using them as a minor supporting signal, even though titles, thumbnails, and descriptions likely matter much more.
How to quickly generate relevant tags?
You may not want to spend much time researching what tags to use in your next video.
I don’t blame you, nobody wants to spend time if it can be avoided. So here’s a simple a free solution: YouTube tags generator.
Watch the video below to see how you can automatically generate YouTube tags:
Do you think the tags are still relevant on YouTube?
Agree? Disagree? Have something to add from your own experience? Post a comment
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