Straight answer: YouTube channel keywords are a short list of words and phrases you type into a settings field in YouTube Studio to tell YouTube’s system what your channel is broadly about, and you set them under Settings, then Channel, then Basic info, in a field capped at 500 characters. They help YouTube file your channel into the right general buckets, but they carry far less weight than the title, description and tags on each individual video, so do not spend more than fifteen minutes on this.
What YouTube channel keywords are
Channel keywords are different from video keywords, and this trips people up constantly. Video keywords (the ones you add under each individual upload) tell YouTube what that specific video is about, which video it should show up next to, and which search queries it might answer. Channel keywords sit one level up. They describe the whole channel, not any single piece of content, and they mostly help YouTube understand the broad topic of your account when it’s deciding whether to recommend your channel alongside similar ones.
So if your channel is called “Sanjay Talks Money” and it covers budgeting, investing basics, and UK pensions, your channel keywords might be a mix of “personal finance UK,” “budgeting tips,” “pension advice,” and “money management for beginners.” None of that changes how a single video about ISAs ranks in search. That’s controlled almost entirely by that video’s own title, description, and the first thirty seconds people watch.
Where to find the channel keywords setting (step by step)
This is a five minute job once you know where to look, and most people never find it because it’s tucked away one layer deeper than the settings people usually touch.
- Log into YouTube Studio (not the main YouTube app, the creator dashboard)
- Click Settings in the bottom left corner
- Choose Channel from the menu that appears
- Click the Basic info tab
- Scroll down to the field labelled Keywords
- Type your terms separated by commas, then click Save
The field allows up to 500 characters total, including the commas and spaces between phrases. That usually gives you room for ten to fifteen short phrases, depending on how long each one is. There’s no separate limit per phrase, so don’t waste characters on single filler words like “video” or “channel”, they add nothing.
A real example from a client channel
I worked with a financial coach in Manchester, I’ll call him Sanjay because that’s close enough to his real name, whose channel had zero keywords set for two years. The channel had 340 videos and a decent 8,000 subscribers, but he was convinced the missing keywords field was the reason his growth had flattened.
We sat down and built out a proper keyword list: personal finance UK, budgeting for beginners, ISA explained, pension planning, money mindset, financial coaching, that sort of thing, twelve phrases in total, filling most of the 500 characters. We saved it, and then we tracked what happened over the following ninety days using YouTube Analytics.
The channel’s overall YouTube search traffic moved from 4.1% of total views to 4.3%. That’s it. Barely a flicker. In the same window, we rewrote the titles and descriptions on his eight best performing videos, adding the exact phrases people were typing into the search bar, and search traffic on those specific videos jumped from around 12% to 34% of their total views. Same client, same channel, wildly different result depending on where the effort went.
That’s the pattern I’ve seen on every channel I’ve touched since. Channel keywords are a small, sensible box to tick. They are not the lever.
How to choose the right channel keywords
Once you accept they’re a minor signal, they’re still worth doing well, since it costs you nothing but a bit of thought. Here’s how I approach it with clients:
- Start broad, then narrow: write down the three or four umbrella topics your channel covers, not individual video ideas
- Check what your closest competitors use by viewing their channel’s page source (right click, View Page Source, search for “keywords”) to see the phrases they’ve picked
- Include both the formal term and the way real people search for it, for example “SEO” and “how to rank on Google”
- Put your most important two or three phrases first, since some tools weight earlier terms more heavily
- Skip your own channel name and brand name, YouTube already knows what your channel is called
- Revisit the list every six to twelve months, especially if your content niche has shifted
Before you even get to this point, it’s worth checking whether you need a dedicated channel at all for what you’re trying to do, because plenty of people set up channels and worry about keywords when a simpler upload setup would have done the job, and this piece on whether you need a YouTube channel to upload and share videos lays out exactly when a full channel is worth the effort.
How much channel keywords really move the needle
Here’s the bit most articles on this topic won’t tell you plainly: channel keywords are a legacy feature that YouTube has quietly de-emphasised for years, and the platform’s own creator help documentation frames them as one small input among dozens, not a ranking mechanism you can lean on. YouTube’s search and recommendation system today runs mostly on video-level signals: the title, the description, closed captions, click-through rate, average view duration, and how well a video keeps people watching in the same session. Channel keywords don’t touch any of that.
I say this because I’ve seen creators spend entire weekends obsessing over a 500 character box while their video titles sit there unoptimised, their thumbnails are blurry, and their channel homepage looks abandoned. If your channel homepage currently shows nothing useful to a new visitor, that’s a bigger problem than your keyword field, and it’s worth reading why your YouTube channel homepage might look blank before you touch anything else.
None of this means skip the keywords field. It means do it once, do it sensibly, and then put your remaining energy into the things that carry real weight: your video titles, your thumbnails, and whether the first fifteen seconds of each video delivers on what the title promised.
Common mistakes people make with channel keywords
- Stuffing the field with every possible variation of the same word (finance, financial, financing, finances) which wastes character space for no benefit
- Copying a competitor’s exact brand name into your own keywords, which can flag as impersonation and has caused channels to lose access to features during review
- Using keywords in a language your content isn’t delivered in, which confuses recommendation more than it helps it
- Never updating the list after a channel pivots from, say, gaming to finance, leaving old keywords sitting there doing nothing useful
- Treating this field as a substitute for a proper channel description, which is a completely separate setting with its own search weight, covered well in this piece on whether your YouTube channel description matters for SEO in 2026
On that last point, it’s worth being cautious generally about how you fill out any channel metadata, since aggressive keyword stuffing across a channel (not just in the hidden field but visibly in titles and descriptions) is one of the smaller contributing factors that can draw manual review attention, alongside the bigger causes covered in why YouTube channels get demonetised. It’s rarely the sole reason, but it’s not nothing either.
A quick checklist before you save
- Have you written down three to four core topics your channel covers, not aspirational ones
- Have you checked two or three competitor channels in your niche for phrase ideas
- Is your list under 500 characters including commas
- Have you avoided repeating near-identical single words
- Have you left out your own channel name and any competitor brand names
- Have you set a reminder to revisit this in six months
If you tick all six, you’re done. Move on to your next video title, that’s where the real work is. And if you’re newer to the whole ecosystem of how YouTube search behaves, it’s worth spending an evening with proper tutorials rather than guessing, which is exactly what I cover in how to learn SEO from YouTube tutorials without wasting six months, since the channel keywords field is one small piece of a much bigger picture. And if you’re wondering how much competition you’re up against for any given topic, this breakdown of how many YouTube channels exist and what that number tells you about competition is a sobering but useful read before you pick a niche and a keyword list to match it.
Related reading: check monetized channel.
Frequently asked questions
Do YouTube channel keywords affect where my videos rank in search?
Barely, if at all. Individual video titles, descriptions, and viewer retention carry far more weight in search ranking than the channel-level keywords field, which mostly helps with broad topic categorisation rather than direct search ranking.
How many keywords should I add to my YouTube channel?
Aim for ten to fifteen short phrases that fit within the 500 character limit, prioritising your two or three most important topics first rather than trying to cram in every possible variation.
Can I see what channel keywords my competitors are using?
Yes, visit their channel page, right click and select View Page Source, then search the page for the word “keywords” to see the comma separated list they’ve entered, which is a useful way to spot gaps or overlaps in your own list.
Should I update my channel keywords if I change my content niche?
Yes, and this is one of the most commonly forgotten steps. If your channel started as gaming content and shifted to personal finance, old keywords still sitting in that field send a mismatched signal to YouTube’s categorisation system, so review and rewrite them whenever your content direction changes significantly.
