VIDIQ vs Tubebuddy, my honest review (unsponsored) on which YouTube tool is better – VIDIQ or Tubebuddy.
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🕒Timestamps🕒
00:00 Start
1:12 What is keyword research
1:59 Keyword research
2:17 Keyword research in VidIQ
5:30 VidIQ keyword search dashboard
7:50 Keyword research in Tubebuddy
10:56 Video SEO for uploads
11:42 Video SEO for VidIQ
14:55 Tubebuddy’s video SEO
15:53 Pricing
18:49 My personal experience
🛠️Keyword research tools🛠️
VIDIQ: https://vidiq.com?afmc=7p5
Tubebuddy: https://www.tubebuddy.com/sara
Keywords everywhere: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
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VIDIQ vs Tubebuddy – Video Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the live stream, whether you’re joining live with me now, or if you’re catching us on the replay. In this video, I’m going to be looking at VidIQ versus Tubebuddy — which YouTube tool reigns supreme?
I’m going to compare the key features of both. And I’m going to look at how I use it and my recommendations on what I feel are things you should look out for if you’re considering one or the other, and what’s going to work best for you. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sara Nguyen, and I help coaches, consultants and creative pros build their business using video on social media with ease.
Now, whether you alive with us now on the chat, or if you’re watching the replay, please leave a chat question or a question in the comment and I’ll get to that at the end of the live stream, after I present the content and as usual links in the description to the timestamps, as well as any resources that I mentioned during this video.
Super excited and let’s get right into it. Now, just before I get into the nitty gritty, last time I did a live stream on, it was a VIdIQ tutorial. I just needed to clarify a few things. I assumed, assumed a few things and had a couple of questions. I’m specifically looking at three features today.
I’m looking at VidIQ and Tubebuddy in relation to keyword research. Those tools in helping you find the correct keywords in terms of what people are looking for for videos and the data that you get, and keyword research really is finding the terms that people are searching for and the search volumes, right?
And the second thing I’m going to look at is video SEO, so how these tools help you optimise your video for YouTube search. And we’re going to look at how both of these tools do that, and we’re going to talk about pricing. Let’s get right into it.
I’m going to talk about, first cab off the rank keyword research. How do both of these tools address that? Let’s get right into it. Let’s go into, this is a look at VidIQ. We’re going to start with VidIQ.
Now, if I am to start doing keyword research in VidIQ, and I’m going to search VidIQ versus Tubebuddy using VidIQ. I can see a couple of things within VidIQ that gives me information about how great this keyword is or not to go for. And on the right-hand side, I’ve just typed in search.
I can see for this search term, it gives me information such as views. It gives me information such as average subscribers of the channels that are currently competing. In the actual search results,
I can see the keywords that these videos are actually using or that are coming up for this term. This channel is using these keywords, this one doesn’t have many, I can just get that little bit of insight. Then we’ve got this overall score here that VidIQ gives you you, right?
And this score is a score of how competitive and how good this keyword is for you to go for. And they give you this score in terms of the volume so searches in YouTube per month. Is there actual demand or are people actually searching for this topic?
And according to VidIQ, it’s a yes, it’s in green. And in terms of the competition, it’s not very high. It’s actually very low. These are two good, these are two things that you really want, particularly if you’re a small channel you want to ideally go for keywords and topics that are, you know, moderate to high volume and low competition.
That’s the dream state. This would make this 78 out of 100, a good keyword to go for. VidIQ say to go for it, you know, try to go for at least 50 out of 100 because keywords, it’s not an exact thing, but it’s an indication. It really is an indication.
But keep in mind that this score is in relation to this keyword. And it doesn’t take into account things, things that are relevant to your channel, such as how old your channel is, if there are any other relevant videos on your channel in relation to this. If you are a channel that does cooking videos, right?
All of your videos or tutorials on cooking, you’ve got recipes on how to make, you’ve got recipes on how to make spring rolls and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘oh, I really want to do a tutorial on VidIQ versus Tubebuddy. In terms of how well that will perform, it’s hard to say.
But it’s not exactly relevant to your channel because your subscribers are a completely different niche. They’re a completely different category. Just keep in mind that, VidIQ doesn’t consider this when they’re giving you this data, they’re just telling you the keyword competitiveness and the keyword search volume across YouTube in general.
That’s really important to keep in mind. They also give you other things such as top channels and they give you other keywords that you can consider as well. And there’s scores for them too. That’s really handy.
I find like in terms of the keyword research, at first glance, when you’re just doing the keyword research within YouTube search, VidIQ is definitely really great in terms of giving you an overall feel of how competitive the keyword is. The other thing that VidIQ has is within VidIQ, their dashboard and the tool itself, they’ve got a little keyword search, right?
If you’ve ever used the Google keyword planner to find search volumes for Google search terms, this is kind of similar, but specifically for YouTube. If I was to do VidIQ versus Tubebuddy, I can see here all of the keyword that I’ve searched for it, it’s giving me the actual search volume, which I’m like, that’s great data to get.
And the other thing that’s really handy is that it gives me the competition. The same information that you saw before, but it’s giving me the actual numbers. And then it gives me related keywords. Let’s just say that this VidIQ versus Tubebuddy, wasn’t a great keyword.
I can see alternative ones that I could possibly go for. In addition to this, and this is a big tip here, the related keywords here are definitely keywords that you can use later to put inside your actual video tags, right? This makes it really, really useful.
This makes this information so, so, so valuable. This is how keyword research is addressed within VidIQ for the most part. And I find that, I’ve been using VidIQ for many, many years, and I find this keyword tool, the most powerful.
And I think the data’s definitely gotten better over time. And I definitely, definitely really, love and support. Now, I’m going to go over to, let’s go over to, let’s have a look now at how Tubebuddy addresses keyword research.
Now I’ve done the same thing. Within YouTube search, I’ve typed VidIQ versus Tubebuddy as a keyword to see how it, how it goes, to see how competitive it is. Now, the search data that I get here is slightly different to what you get within VidIQ.
Here I get these rankings of the search volume and the competition. And as you can see, the score that I had on VidIQ was like 70%. And here it’s only 33%. Right? And the difference is that within Tubebuddy, they give you scores that are weighted and unweighted, right?
They give you scores if you click on this, in their little keyword explorer, weighted means that it’s relevant to your channel so this is how well the video would do in relation to your channel. Unweighted is similar to what VidIQ.
They don’t take into account other elements of your channel that will help the video perform or not, right? This is a big difference. And do you need, this? Is this relevant? Does this help you? That’s a question for you to ask.
I do find that with this weighted and unweighted score, it’s a little bit hard because you’ll find that majority of keywords are poor. As you see here, they’re either fair or poor, and it’s because of the Tubebuddy algorithm, you know, looking at your channel and looking at the keyword and all the things that they consider that it will succeed with.
And I find that, you know, it’s okay. But for me, I personally would prefer to just look at the data and make the decision my own. Whereas, with this Tubebuddy’s kind of telling you, if they think based on their algorithm and all of their data points, whether or not that you’ll be able to perform for this keyword on your channel so that’s the biggest thing.
Now, the other things that you get in terms of the keyword research is you get the search volumes. Unlike Tubebuddy, you don’t get the numbers, you get like this sliding indicator of how, you know, how much volume there is, how much competition there is.
And that’s okay, but I’m a numbers girl. I need to see, okay, is there, is this orange because it’s a hundred searches a month? Or is this orange, because it’s a hundred thousand searches a month?
For me, that’s a bit hard to validate in terms of, okay, that’s, I need more than just the numbers scale. I need the numbers I wanted to, I want to determine this on my own. And then, you know, you get other information here. Similar to VidIQ, you’ve got related searches as well.
The thing that I find a little bit challenging about the Keyword Explorer is that unlike VidIQ, where I got all of the other options and all of the other keyword easily in the actual volume search, you don’t quite get that within Tubebuddy.
That I find a little bit strange, but you, you know, if you click around, you can see like they also give you other information though, such as if the keyword is trending on Google, you know, the interest over time. There’s other topics here and other common tags that you can add here.
You get, as I said, it’s different, depending on what’s important to you. And that’s how keyword research is addressed in both VidIQ and Tubebuddy. Yeah, that’s basically it. That covers the first one, which is specifically, keyword research. Hopefully, that helps you out there.
Now we’re going to look at the second one, which is video SEO for uploads, right? I’m going to break this down for you. Basically what video SEO is, is all the bits and pieces, the tags information, the checklist, all of the things that you need to do that mostly best practices for your video to help it surface in YouTube search.
All of the things that you need to do. How do these tools address video SEO? You need to be doing video SEO and I’m not talking about, you know, link-building and any of that, I’m talking about specific things such as having, you know, keywords in your title, having all of your tags, let’s look at how the tools do that. Let’s go over to, look at how VidIQ does it.
I’ve opened up a video specifically this one and you can see VidIQ here, we’ll have quite a few tools. They will tell you here the best time to publish. And then if I keep scrolling, they’ve got VidIQ SEO scores, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. And we’ve also got a checklist, right?
It’s telling me all of the best practice things that I haven’t done indicated by a red cross. And then, and then a green check for things that I have done so that tells me every time I do an upload that I want to try to get, I want to try and get all of the green checks.
I want to do all of these things. I want to have at least one card, one in-screen I want to at least have captions and the rest of it. In terms of helping you out there, that’s incredibly helpful. Now, if I keep scrolling, in terms of the tags, the extra tags that VidIQ gives you, these are the tags that I’ve added up here.
These are ones that VidIQ recommend. They only give you three here, which I find a little bit disappointing unless you upgrade to their boost plan. However, as I mentioned before, in their actual VidIQ dashboard, the keyword tool, you’ll be able to find all of their related keywords here anyway.
It’s not available directly within the upload section, but you can still access that same data within the VidIQ keyword research dashboard there. That’s, that’s how they kind of do video SEO.
And, you know, once you’ve done it, you’ll get an indication of how many tags you’re ranking for, how well it’s performing, let’s look at the front end of the video, and of how many–oh, I’m actually alive now, so then I can see if I scroll here at the front of the video, I get, you know, the scores here and I get indications of seeing all these green things. This is great. The green things.
All these blue things here, this is like for the video tags, VidIQ tells me, you know, the ranking of them in search and that’s very handy as well so I know that, you know, these videos performing for these keywords, these other ones I need to watch to see if I need to swap them out.
And it’s just a handy thing. In terms of video SEO, I find that they’re really, really good. They are, I am a little bit disappointed in that, you know, you have to pay to have more than three recommended tags. However, as I said, you do get the same data if within the actual keyword research section here.
And the other thing that they have as well is if you start typing, they have suggested tags as well. That’s another way of getting the actual information, but I find the best way to do it is to use this keyword tool that they’ve got, because it gives you the search volume and you can go scroll through and see, Oh, is there any search volume for this? I’ll add that as a tag, if it’s actually relevant.
That’s how I’m VidIQ do the video SEO. And I find it very good, you know, I find it actually really, really good. Now let’s go over to look at how Tubebuddy does their video SEO. All right.
I’ve had that there the whole time. Let’s look at now, Tubebuddy. Now in the back of the video, you’ll see, it’s looking very similar, right? I’ve got best practices and they’ve got a checklist as well, and they’ve got, you know, similar things. They show you, they give you an indication of what you need to do.
Let’s move myself here, covering this. I’m not covering. Okay, so they give you all the best practice checklist of things that you need to do just like VidIQ does. But instead of it being blue, it’s red within Tubebuddy. And they tell you what to do in terms of best practices.
In terms of the keywords, as you can see here within Tubebuddy, you get a lot of recommended tags, right? You get all of the tags, in terms of, heaps and heaps of tags, whereas VidIQ only gives you three. It’s a big difference, right?
Tubebuddy gives you a lot more tags, whereas VidIQ gives you the tags, but they’re like in another section. That’s something to consider just like VidIQ, if you start typing within your actual tag section, you’ll see alternative tags come up here just like them.
They’re kind of looking a little bit similar. And I think in terms of the tools that they give you for optimising, they’re really handy, and this is kind of a crash course into all of the elements, but I find it really helpful. They’re pretty similar in terms of the video SEO components.
And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that’s a good thing in terms of, well, there’s only so many best practice things that you can tell people to do it, and they both have them. That’s a good thing. Now let’s look at, let’s talk about the next part. I’m going to look at pricing.
Okay. Let’s look at pricing. Let’s talk a little bit about pricing. I’ve compared VidIQ and Tubebuddy. Both on the paid plans, and the first tier of the paid plans. And I did that deliberately because both of them have multiple tiers of paid plan, but I find that the first paid plans of both are more than adequate for what you need and they’re the cheaper ones as well.
I’m just going to bring up the pricing for the both of them. Just give me a second here, and we’ll go over to pricing. As I said, I compared the pricing for the paid plans with the first tier of the paid plans. Now on VidIQ, you’ve got a free plan and you’ve got the three levels of their paid plan.
The pro plan, which is the first tier paid plan, which I went through today, it start at 7.50 per month, and this is US pricing. Now, if you look at Tubebuddy, they have a free plan, but they’ve also got pro plans.
That’s the first one that I compared the first paid plan that I compared and it’s 7.20 a month, but they’ve also got this feature, if you’ve got less than a thousand subscribers, you get 50% off and that takes it down to 3.60 a month, which is pretty good, right. To get all of the information that you need.
In terms of pricing, they’re pretty similar. Tubebuddy has a, you know, under 1000 subscribers plan, which gives you access to the paid plan for a bit cheaper until your channels start to grow a little bit more. And pricing is pretty similar.
And in terms of what they give you, they’re pretty similar too. Let’s go back now. And I guess, you know, now I’ve kind of walked through everything that you need to know in terms of comparing VidIQ, in terms of keyword research, in terms of video SEO and in terms of pricing.
What’s my personal experience been? I find that when you first get started with YouTube, you’ll start with one or the other, because you’ve probably heard a YouTuber talk about it. I originally started with VidIQ because it was the tool that someone else that I was following recommended.
And I liked having the data from the keyword research tool, which is why I pay and I invest in it. For me, that’s been really handy. I find having search search data really good because not only do I take the research that I take from the tool, but then I compare it and validate it to, okay, YouTube, this is telling me that this is a search volume in YouTube.
Then I take that and I look at it, you know, what’s the actual search volume in Google as well so that gives me more information on, will this perform in YouTube? And does it have a chance of actually performing within Google search as well?
For me, VidIQ wins in that sense because they had that data, which Tubebuddy doesn’t. Now we did see that Tubebuddy does a weighted and unweighted so they give you the score based on your channel and what their indicators say will help your channel perform.
I find that a little bit biased, particularly when you’re just out starting to get out, because your channel is not going to perform for many keywords when you’re just starting out, that’s just the way YouTube works, right? It takes a while for you to upload videos.
It takes a while for YouTube to understand what your channel’s about and what your content is about. And so it’s a little bit disheartening when you see all of the weighted scores before, you know, it really, and it’s like, well, there’s nothing to go after, in my view.
I find that that makes it a little bit of a less great experience, but it really depends. You know, I know that Pete Johns and I, you know, Pete Johns, a fellow creator uses Tubebuddy loves and his channel is now, you know, he’s approaching over 85,000 subscribers.
I know both of these tools actually work. It’s just, what’s more important to you. And I’m just talking about my experience here. And in terms of pricing, as you saw there, they’re both really similar so it really just depends on what you like.
And really, because they’ve both got monthly plans, the reality is you could probably try it out for a month and see if it really helped you out. If you don’t like it, don’t go on the annual plan, just do it monthly until you’re happy with one, right?
You can try them out for $7 a month. See if you like it, you don’t like it try the other one. And then you can pick between the two, but hopefully I’ve given you a bit of an indication on how it actually all works and to compare the two. I’m just going to go over to questions now to see what do we got.
Hey, Bradley. Great to see you on the live stream. Nice to see you common people here today. And Ray from Activate LA, hey, great to see you on the stream as well.
Now, it looks like everyone had all of the answers and there aren’t any questions, but, if there are any questions, please do drop them in the comments and I will get to them after the live stream. That essentially wraps up today’s live stream.
Hopefully you found it incredibly useful. And if you’ve been considering, you know, which tool do I use, hopefully this will give you a breakdown of what you need to know so that you can make the informed decision.
If you did find this video useful, please give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already, where I do lots more tutorials on live streaming, YouTube, everything you need to know to grow your business using video.
Also make sure that you grab a copy of my handy-dandy fresh freshly created a couple of weeks ago, Thriving YouTubeCreator Blueprint. It’s my framework to go from, you know, struggling and overwhelmed to being a thriving creator on YouTube.
You’re going to love it. It’s a great blueprint and I’m excited to release it and provide it for you guys. As usual, thanks for being here, had a blast, and I will see you on the next live stream. Bye for now.
