Search and SEO
YouTube tags: do they still matter?
YouTube says tags "play a minimal role in your video's discovery". They're most useful when your topic is often misspelled. Add a few relevant ones and spend your time on titles, thumbnails and descriptions, which matter far more.
Cuetta team2 min read
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What YouTube tags are
Tags are words and phrases you add to a video in YouTube Studio. Viewers don't see them on the watch page. They give YouTube a small extra hint about what the video covers.
Do tags matter?
Not much. YouTube's own help page says "tags play a minimal role in your video's discovery" and that titles, thumbnails and descriptions are more important. Tags "can be useful if the content of your video is commonly misspelled".
So add them, but don't spend long on them. Ten minutes on your thumbnail will do far more.
How to choose tags
- Your main search phrase.
- Common misspellings or alternative spellings of names and products.
- A couple of close variations people search for.
- Your channel name, if people search for it.
Five to ten relevant tags is plenty. Tags that don't describe the video don't help and can look like spam.
Should you copy competitors' tags?
Looking at a successful video's tags can show you how they describe the topic, but copying them won't copy their results. Their views come from the topic, title, thumbnail and how viewers responded, not the tags.
What to focus on instead
For search, the title, description and spoken words do the heavy lifting. Read the YouTube SEO guide and YouTube keyword research.