YouTube Tag Extractor Tool
Use our YouTube Tag Extractor Tool to uncover hidden tags, analyze competitors, and optimize your videos for better visibility and SEO results.
Extracted YouTube Tags
YouTube tags are hidden data elements linked to YouTube videos. Not every video has them—it depends on whether the person uploading the video chooses to include them during the upload process.
The YouTube tag extractor is very useful as it shows one the hidden tags of any public video. Seeing the tags on popular or competitor videos can provide good insight as to how they are using tags to their benefit for video performance.
Note that tags are not the same as hashtags. Hashtags can show in either the description or above the video title.
What are YouTube Tags?
YouTube can be tricky since it uses two different types of tags:
- Tags: Tags are hidden meta-data associated with a video. These are what the Tag Extractor tool finds and shows.
- Hashtags: These are visible above video title. You can learn about them more on YouTube’s help pages.
When someone uploads a video on YouTube, they can add tags to it. These do not begin with the hashtag symbol (#) and can include spaces between words to form phrases. The best way to write them is in all lowercase using letters and numbers.
In YouTube Studio, near the bottom of the Video Details page, there is a clickable link labeled “Show More”:
Once clicked, more settings appear, including the “Tags” section:
You can add up to an aggregate of 500 character tags per Video on YouTube! The video in example has 8 tags. These tags altogether have only 66 characters out of a possible 500, and so there is definitely room for them to add many more tags.
Now here’s the cool part. With the YouTube Tag Extractor, you can quickly see hidden tags with just one click.
The tags will be shown in the order they were added by video creator. This is extremely helpful as it highlights what the creator considers to be (a) the key subjects in the video, and (b) the most effective tags for improving the video’s search ranking (video SEO).
Why are YouTube Tags Important?
So now we know that the YouTube Tag Extractor works on any public video and shows the hidden tags while keeping them in the same order that the video maker put them in.
But why does this matter? You’re here because you’re probably interested in Video SEO. According to YouTube, many factors affect how a video ranks in search results—these include the title, description, hashtags, thumbnail, tags, and video quality, among others.
It’s a smart idea to take full advantage of all the features YouTube gives you to organize and describe your videos. While experts debate how much hidden tags affect rankings, we recommend always aiming for full optimization. The better YouTube understands your video, the more it will rank higher in search results.
Strategy for Using YouTube Tags
There are some smart ways to use the Tag Extractor tool when looking at competitor videos. You’ll usually come across two main situations:
1. The video has no tags
This happens often. The tag section is hidden behind “Show More” button at the bottom of video details page in YouTube Studio. If your competitors don’t know much about YouTube, they might skip this part and upload their video without adding any tags. This helps you, because any tags you add to your own videos will give you an advantage. Also, look closely at their video titles, descriptions, and hashtags—they can give you ideas for keywords and topics.
2. The video has tags
Once you extract the tags, take time to judge how good they are. Look for anything surprising or different about the tags they chose or how they’re arranged.
The way tags are arranged offers clues about what they consider to be the most important topics or keywords. Apply some of the more general tags to keep yourself in competition with direct competitors but also add unique tags that might help your video to come up in very specific searches where there could be a better chance.
Another crucial thing about tags is that you can readily alter them after your video has been published. So, if it feels like your video is not performing to its best or the competition is ranking higher for those important words, you can change the tags to assist your video’s search results.
One Last Tip on YouTube Tags
Because tags are hidden, they’re perfect for adding wrong spellings of your brand, product, or service. You can also include slang, nicknames, or internet language that people might use to describe your business or topic.
People often use informal or shortened versions of words online, so if these terms match your video, adding them to your tags can help your content show up more often in searches.