Last updated on May 14th, 2025
If you’re trying to grow using YouTube Ads, one of the most common questions we get is: “What topics should I cover in my YouTube videos and YouTube ads?” What are the exact video titles, etc., that you should have on your channel to make it do well?
Here’s our research process and steps:
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1. What questions are people asking you?
Well, it’s a little bit different if you’re uploading videos to your channel organically, or if you’re doing YouTube Ads.
But generally the principle is the same. You want to basically know what is my best customer interested in? Short answer is make videos about the top 10 questions that customers ask you the first time you meet with them. That’s the short answer.
If you do just that, you’ve done a good job.
But let’s dive deeper because if you think about it, you really want not just “what” questions or “where,” like: Where are you located? What are your hours?
You might want to think about questions they ask about the process. Questions that can be answered in a video that might have the title, “How to Do XYZ?”
This is where your expertise comes in, not “what areas do you cover?”
a. First time customer questions
So think about those first questions people ask. Often they’re uninformed questions. You might call them beginner questions. What do they ask about the process that you follow?
Those top ten questions are fantastic topics for videos for your channel. The reason is, is when people meet you, they always ask these same questions. Thus, by answering them in videos in advance, by the time they actually do speak to you, they are a better prepared customer. They’re further along in the process. That means they’re better prepared to buy.
And real quick, YouTube Ads can quickly get you in front of your best possible customer, at just the moment they’re looking to solve a problem that you can help them with. So we recommend YouTube Ads as a key part of your growth strategy.
So this is where we start. Again, different from ads to YouTube videos, and also different between whether you’re doing shorts or longs or live streams. But this is the general process. Now we have to go a lot deeper though, if you really want to do it right, because the devil’s in the details
So we’re actually going to ask this question about your company in many different ways to get a fuller picture because getting you only 50 percent of the way there loses a lot.
So we look into different human and digital resources to find this out.
b. Customer service questions
The second person we want to talk about is not your salesperson, which is the first person. First person to reach the customer. The second person we want to talk about is the customer service person. You may have somebody like this, someone who answers, solves problems, deals with refunds, or it might be someone who’s an account manager type of status. These people know it at a different level than the sales people. They get slightly different questions, different problems. Okay, now I’m going to ask the same question, but in a different way.
Now, let’s look at the flip side. The customer is qualifying you when they call, but you’re also qualifying the customer. You ask them questions during that first call. Often it’s the same kind of questions, right? You know what those questions are. Those are questions to determine whether they’re a good customer for you. These are different than the first questions they ask. But these topics will be integrated into those first videos. Because they’re qualifiers. You don’t want everyone who asks a certain question to apply for your business. You only want the good people. So you weave in the qualifying questions. Maybe you only help people who are over 40. Maybe your best customer is people over 40. We manage an unusual YouTube channel that’s really best for people over 45. So, that’s one of the things we might ask them is, where are they in their life? If they’re younger, they’re not really qualified to be a customer.
c. Your website FAQs
Next, we’re going to look at your website, your FAQs, your Frequently Asked Questions, and we’re going to look and see why you’ve put on your website Frequently Asked Questions. Clearly, this is very commonly asked.
Some of these might be good for YouTube videos. If they are just one sentence answer, they might not be. But if they’re process oriented, then they would be good because YouTube is about helping people understand process. And as an expert, that portrays you as the person that they should work with.
So we look at those FAQs.
2. What words do you use when talking about your business?
a. Your website language
Next, I’m going to take all the language in your website, every word, and I’m going to make a word cloud. Now, there’s a number of apps you can do this with, you can do this with AI. But I want to know the top 20 or 30 words you use on your website. The reason is, you’ve spent a lot of time making this website, describing what people are interested in.
I’m betting that there’s some sort of keyword phrases. They may be insider jargon, or they may be more generalistic, the types of language that the uninitiated customer would use. But those are going to be helpful words in me understanding what’s going on. As I develop these key topics for you. I want the exact language that the customer is going to be used when they’re trying to solve a problem.
b. Your social content
Then I’m going to go to your social media and look for pretty similar things. What are people commenting about on social media? What types of topics are you talking about? What topic does better than another?
c. Your terms and phrases
Also, I take a lot of notes when I’m doing calls. Sometimes I record them, sometimes I just write them down or type them in. But the key is, I’m listening for words and phrases that you use to describe how you do business and your industry category. And I’m asking you questions about those phrases.
And I’m writing those down to figure out, Okay, here’s how they talk about their industry. And their expertise. A new user may use different phrases, and we want to keep those in mind. If we have to go with the sort of professional insider jargon, or the jargon that the customer uses, even if it’s wrong, we want to go with what the customer says.
Because they’re not experts, that’s why they’re coming to you.
3. What the numbers say.
a. Current YouTube analytics
Then we’re going to dive into your YouTube analytics, and there’s two key parts to this. Now, we presume you already have a YouTube channel, but if you don’t, we’ll skip over this. But let’s say you have started some YouTube videos. YouTube analytics is great at determining what kinds of phrases people are interested in.
We’re going to look at three parts to this. First, we’re going to look at YouTube search results that have driven traffic to your YouTube channel. Most views don’t come from search, but it’s a way of categorizing things in phrases.
That’s very helpful. It’s a leading indicator that shows what people think your channel is about. So what phrases end up with people visiting your YouTube video? How long do they watch? And then how long do they watch after they’ve searched for a phrase, clicked on your video and watched it?
Which of these phrases do they watch the longest? That makes it a rewarding video to them, and rewarding data to us. Even if it’s smaller than some of the broader terms, we can really narrow in on what that customer is looking for.
b. Your suggested video traffic
Also, we look at what kind of suggested videos are resulting in traffic for your YouTube videos. Meaning, what was the video they looked at before your YouTube video? So, we go back in time and they say, People who were looking at this type of title, which is someone else’s video, they then went to your video, and they found out that this was a rewarding video to go to, let’s find out what types of titles they’re using.
Those might be good or bad for us, but it helps us understand what people are looking for.
And for the videos that have done well, we actually watch the audience retention graph, which means where people tune in on a second by second, moment by moment basis. And when they really engage, we want to know what you’re talking about during that tiny segment of the video, because that’s something we’re going to want to talk more about.
c. Your Google Ads
We look at things like your Google Ads. What types of topics are you targeting there? What is really winning for you there? Those might be topics that will translate into YouTube videos, or maybe not. People look for different things on Google than on YouTube, so we want to make sure it’s applicable to the platform.
d. Your Facebook/Instagram Ads
We want to understand how you’re targeting your Facebook and Instagram ads if you’re doing that, because that can also influence how we’re going to target your audience on YouTube.
4. What words customers use.
a. Reviews about you
We look at reviews about your service. So, are people talking about you on blogs? Other YouTube videos? Reddit? Quora? What do people say? What types of questions do they have? Those are very interesting ways of determining what topics you should cover.
b. TubeBuddy keyword research tool
Then we go to some research tools. It could be TubeBuddy, great research tool.
c. VidIQ keyword research tool
VidIQ has a great research tool.
d. SerpFox SEO tool
We go over to SEO and look at SerpFox, that’s our tool of choice for SEO.
e. Google Trends
And then we go over to Google Trends.
Now, you may have some niche terms that don’t really show up on Google Trends, but even so, we can find some aligned words or phrases.
And we want to see if there’s times of year that people are more interested in things. For instance, with SaaS products, people do a lot more purchases towards the end of the year before the beginning of the year starts.
f. ChatGPT, AI in general
After this, we go to the AI and we ask a lot of follow up questions that can be framed by the research we’ve done so far, and create some new questions, new research. We may go all the way to the top of the process again, or we may just continue going down.
5. What’s your target bullseye?
a. Venn diagram
Now at this point we want to think about the old Venn Diagram. Remember the Venn Diagram? It’s a bunch of circles that have overlapping parts. Well, there’s really four areas we’re thinking about. Now we’ve accumulated some of our data.
We want to think about four circles. There’s things that you know about. You know about a lot of things in your industry, personally, whatever. What you sell is a smaller circle, some of which overlaps with things you know. Some, you may not actually be an expert in, and we don’t want to cover those things. Even if it’s part of what your business is, you don’t know everything. Industry, your profession, it’s always evolving.
b. Phrasing
There’s going to be some parts where you may not know what you’re talking about. We want to stay away from that.
c. Level of expertise
So things you know how to do. Things your business does. They will have an overlap. Now, there’s things people want to watch videos about, some things they don’t. So, number three is things people want to watch videos about. Then, the last circle is things your customer actually wants to buy.
That’s going to have an overlap. So in the center of these overlapping circles, those are the things you want to make videos about.
The massive number of things they’d like to watch videos about that don’t intersect with your overall business purpose are pretty much not helpful to you. They’re a distraction. And even if you make videos about those on your channel and they get a lot of views, that’s actually potentially detrimental to your channel because people may come for that video, subscribe, watch a long time, and then the algorithm shows them another video of yours, and they hate it because it’s not this thing.
So if your choice is lots of views or views that intersect with what you know, what you sell, what they want to buy, I’d go with the second thing.
Okay, now, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but you want to emphasize topics that are how to topics. rather than what, where, when topics. What, where, when topics generally are shorter answer and they’re more like Wikipedia or AI questions.
So at this point we want to talk about what kinds of questions. We’ve talked about this a little bit earlier. How to questions versus who, what, when and where questions. Remember that, who, what, when, where, and how, those are the reporter questions? We’re going to slice off how, particularly how to, because that’s a process question.
That’s really where your expertise comes in. The rest are really data, statistics that most people can answer. What time is it? Where is it? These are like event questions, right? Not great for YouTube generally. How to questions, even if you don’t use the word how to in the title, these types of process questions are best at showcasing your expertise as it overlaps with what people want to buy.
6. Testing and improving.
Now we’re getting narrower into the types of exact phrasing for these titles or topics. We’re getting more granular. We may use AI tools to help you come up with the exact best title.
And we make decisions on the level of expertise. Do we want to use jargon? Is that what people are looking for? Inside language? Or do we want to use more broad language?
a. Size of market – TAM
A lot of this depends on your TAM, your total available market, the size of the market you’re actually trying to target. Some people always want to go big, and that’s actually the opposite of the approach we use. We want to get fewer views, but more of the right customers. Our goal is not to tell everyone about what you do.
Because the vast majority of people don’t want it, don’t need it. It’s a waste of their time. We’re looking for people who are more likely to be customers.
So, if you have a very niche B2B product, for instance, jargon actually might help. If people know what that is. If your customer is going to know what that is. Now if you got something new, you might want to use more general knowledge because they may be turned off by those big words. They might be confused.
b. TubeBuddy title testing tool
Now we’re getting more into the process. So, we use a title testing tool by TubeBuddy to tweak the phrasing. There’s a number of tools. This is one.
c. YouTube Ads targeting terms
Now here’s the next step if we’re running YouTube Ads around this video or other videos on your channel.
What we do to promote these videos is we use something called YouTube search terms within the YouTube Ads platform.
Now we’ve built, by this time, dozens and dozens and dozens of phrases. We don’t actually know which ones work great, but we’re now going to pay YouTube to tell us to give us more granular information than they would give us within their YouTube analytics.
And what YouTube does is they tell you the cost of a keyword phrase. They tell you the length of time someone watched a video based on that keyword phrase.
And sometimes these phrases don’t get any views at all. So that’s really helpful information. Then we have this whole other process where we’ll break things up into segments. And sometimes run to those very, very seldom used words. Because those are actually the winning words.
And we don’t want the more common phrases using up all the budget on a campaign. So we’ll split into smaller and smaller campaigns so that each one gets to target some of the phrases, including those niche phrases, which may be the big winners for you.
But the process isn’t over because we’re going to be continually fine tuning these phrases on an ongoing basis throughout running new videos, running new ads, other items. And we’re going to continue looking at all those metrics that we looked at before.
We’re just going to be sort of updating, because as you start to cover new topics, other data and phrases may emerge. Or something comes up that we just didn’t think of before. So we’re going to continue looking at all those different phrases and brainstorming as we continue to do these topics.
d. YouTube audience retention
And one of the things we’re going to continue looking at is something called YouTube audience retention, because that shows in a given video where people are paying attention and where they’re losing attention. And so we look at the types of things you’re talking about during each of those periods of a video.
And then we ask what types of phrases could we use in the future? Bring those out and bubble those up so that those might be new topics that you didn’t think of before.
e. YouTube comments
Then we’re looking at YouTube comments, because now that you’re doing these videos, you’re going to get more engaged comments from engaged viewers, and the types of questions they ask may be some of the best topics you’ve ever covered, and they’re giving you those answers for free.
But you have to pay attention to the YouTube comments. And one of the best ways, by the way, to get YouTube comments is participate in your own YouTube comments. This is one of the best opportunities to connect with a new, engaged viewer who finds you interesting. You’ve given them a video where you’ve shown yourself and engaged verbally and visually one to one.
They found it interesting. They made a comment. Now it’s your job to communicate with them. The more people see that you’re engaged with the comments, the more comments they’ll give you. Now you’ve started a conversation. with your best potential customer.
f. Google Analytics and Search Console
And of course, we’re going to keep track of Google Analytics because what’s happening is people might go directly from your YouTube video to your Google Analytics, but more commonly, they might see your YouTube video, go to one of your social platforms, go to your blog. Search for you on Google, and so all of your numbers start to go up in ways that are not that easy to track, but they’re commonly happening, and we see this all the time, is that suddenly just your traffic goes up, and there’s really no direct explanation, except that you’ve changed what you’re doing.
So now your Google Analytics has changed the types of topics that people are looking for. Your Google Search Console has changed the types of terms they’re finding you on, in the types of terms they’re searching for and finding you on, on your website, etc. So we’re going to keep track of that as well.
And if we haven’t met, my name is Dane Golden from VidAction, where we help startups like yours drive growth with YouTube Ads.
And whether you’re a SaaS, AI startup, FinTech, B2B or B2C, we help you get more signups, leads, sales and members.
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