YouTube SEO: The Secret To Ranking #1 in Search

Ranking in the top spot on YouTube. Search can do amazing things for your brand and your products and services. I know when I have a video doing well on YouTube because my sales of my courses tend to increase when a video is ranking high. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to show you the steps you can take to increase your chances that a video will rank on YouTube. Now, I want to preface this, that there are a number of factors that go into ranking of a video. So even if you do all these things perfectly, it doesn't guarantee that you're going to have a number one video. Because obviously channel size does matter, okay? The number of views you can get over to a video when you first release, it does matter, okay? So I don't want you to think just because you do all the steps exactly as written that you're going to have a number one ranking video. It also means that if you get a number one ranking video, someone else down the road could come out with a better video, a newer video, and knock you out of the number one spot. So just because you rank a video doesn't mean it's going to stay there forever. But we're going to go through a step by step process I use to get more views because of search. So step one starts with the keyword. Okay? The keyword is the most important aspect from a search Engine perspective. Now, YouTube is a search engine because you can type in a search query into the search box and it's the second largest search engine next to Google. Google is still the biggest search engine, But Google owns YouTube. So there is some benefit to having good SEO on YouTube because sometimes videos can show up over in Google search as well. Now, a good keyword generally would have, you know, low competition, a good amount of search volume, and, you know, sometimes even if it has lower search volume, but it's for a very specific audience, your audience, it can still be a good search term. So what I do is I use a keyword research tool. I'm in Vidiq today. So if you're interested in picking up Vidiq, I'll put a link in the description below. But I'm in Vidiq here today and I've just logged into my account. This is my creator Launchpad account. And what we're going to do is we're just going to go over to research and we're going to go over to keywords and I'm just going to type in a keyword. So for this video, I'm going to. I was focusing on, you know, YouTube SEO and keyword research. So I'm going to put in YouTube SEO, and you'll see here that we'll get a score. And hey, overall, this keyword gets a decent score. It has high search volume. The competition is pretty low. So that's great. So what I want you to do, you can see here that there's other keywords that are kind of like popping up, matching keywords, trending keywords, questions. These are all things you want to pay attention to because some of these keywords we can use later in our content. And also I'm going to talk about a very, very important last step at the end of this video. We can also look at, you know, the related keywords, matching terms. Maybe there's something better. So sometimes I'll search through and I'll say, hmm, you know how to SEO YouTube videos medium? I might rank it from competition low to high to say, hey, okay, what is the low competition? So this is very low competition. There's not a lot of search volume. Okay? These are searches per month. But hey, you know, a thousand search. If I can rank number one, even for a video that gets a thousand searches a month, that's a lot of people looking at my content, looking at my brand. Okay? So you can definitely scroll through and find a few things that you know are in the low, very low. You know, I don't know these. These seem like very, very specific keywords, but you can click on them and see also what those keywords are and see the related keywords that as well. So for me, I'm going to stick with YouTube SEO as a keyword because, you know, overall, yes, it probably has a little bit of competition, but the search volume is high. And I can probably do something like in 2025 to make it a little bit more specific to what I'm doing now. So now you see here, you know, it goes a little bit more to medium, and it's based on YouTube videos having this specific keyword. So what I want to do is I want to go over to YouTube and let's type into, you know, let's type YouTube's SEO into the search box here. We'll also get keywords filtering here as well. Um, and I. This one actually was 2025, but let's just do YouTube SEO and let's check out the video. So when I do this, I'm just like, are there videos that have a lot of views? So 213, 275. So I'm like, okay, so this topic, 43,000 177,000. So this topic in general has very good search volume. So that's a plus. If I came here and I saw a bunch of videos that only had like a hundred views or even maybe a thousand views, I might be like, oh, this might not be the greatest topic for me to spend time and effort into making a video, editing it and all that stuff. All right, so I have the little Vidiq tool open here, and this is very valuable because I can see how many views per hour these videos are getting. So this one's getting 15 views per hour. 5. This 20x means that this video did a lot to help this YouTuber grow their channel. Let me see, nine views for. This one's got 72 views per hour. This one was just released 10 days ago. So this is where you're like, okay, why is. You know, you kind of scroll down and I'm looking at the views per hour. It's like, this one's getting 72 views per hour. I might want to take a look at this video and see what that person's doing. Okay, what keywords they're going after. So this one is a full YouTube SEO keyword research tutorial. Okay. So that could be a whole nother video topic for me if. Because it's a. It's a much longer video. And I wanted to keep this one more of like a summary of how you can do research and how you can do ranking. So maybe that's a video that I could do. So, see, sometimes you go through and you might get other ideas for different videos, but there are videos getting some views per hour. Would I like them all to be a little bit higher? Like 20 views per hour? 40 views per hour? Absolutely. This one's got 121 views per hour. 14 things you must do after uploading your video. So lots of cool stuff here that can one just support. Is this a good keyword for me to go after the next step? After we do a little bit of research on this, we're going to actually record the content. And that makes sense. But now you can go back to Vidiq and you can take a look at some of those other keywords that match. Because, you know, with AI and everything in algorithms, they're analyzing everything, including what we say in videos. So, you know, I might want to start a video by saying, hey, you know, in this video we're going to be talking about YouTube SEO research. Okay. Because that is a keyword, and I'm going To show you how to rank your videos on YouTube. These are all keywords that if I went into VidIQ, I could find. So we want to kind of put these keywords naturally into our content as well. Because when YouTube is reading what you're saying, okay, because there's closed captioning and stuff, YouTube can read the transcript. It's going to find those keywords, and it's just going to give YouTube more ideas on what your content is about. And then the final thing is step three, which, you know, I think some people are kind of on the fence about this because it's kind of like what we call old hat SEO. But it still works. I'm going to show you why I know it still works because I have a video right now that's doing very well. So when we do videos, the thumbnails and the titles are made for humans. The description is made for the algorithm for the SEO. So I'm going to pull up a video here very recently of mine that's done very well because of search. So before I hop on to showing you the back end of this video, I just went into Vidiq real quick and I put in Simple Man Guitar Lesson. Because this emphasizes that just because something has low search volume and maybe medium competition doesn't mean it's a bad keyword. So this was the keyword for this guitar lesson. It was called simpleman Guitar Lesson. So if I come over to this video, it is 1.1 million views right now. Okay. And again, this is 8,000 views per month. Okay. So that adds up over time. But as you can see, you know, I would never have expected this video to go over all a million views. But part of the reason why it's doing so well is because of YouTube search. And earlier on when this video first came out, it was getting a lot of views because of Google search as well. So this video was so well optimized for SEO. I was getting traffic from Google and I was getting traffic from YouTube. And once again, this video was doing really well. I sold a lot of courses from this video. So let's take a look at the details and I'll show you how I do it. So if you can use the keyword in the title, awesome. It's not required, but it's much better to have a video that's, you know, a title that's going to be provocative and thought provoking and, you know, make people want to click on the video. But I just went straight up for keyword and that it was an Easy Three chord song. Okay. And you'll see here, Easy, Simple Magic. So here's the keyword. Simple Man Guitar Lesson. You're going to see it throughout here. You know this Simple Man Guitar Lesson again, follow along with my notes. Simpleman Guitar Lesson notes. Here's the chapter. So you can see throughout Again, this is kind of old hat. It's a little bit like keyword stuffing. Now we want it to be natural. You just can't type in it a million times. But if you can naturally work it in maybe three or four times, as you can see, it still works. It still works. This is evidence that this technique, as much as people think maybe it's old fashioned, it still works. Okay. And having the keyword, you know, the file name for this would have been better if it were, you know, Simpleman guitarlesson. Okay, I'll have to talk to editing on this because usually we would want the keyword to be the file name. Again, people are like, you know that that doesn't work anymore for me. I know YouTube is a search engine, it's a computer, it's an algorithm. I like to give it as much data as possible. So simple man by Lynyrd Skynyrd, you know, is okay. But I would have preferred this file name to be the keyword, which is simpleman Guitar Lesson just. It's another way to get the keyword and the data into the SEO. But you see here, it just had simpleman. It didn't have simpleman Guitar Lesson. And this video was still a number one ranking. I don't know if this is still ranking number one. Let's check. So as you can see, it's still. Here it is. It's still ranking number one. Simple Man Guitar Lesson and that's probably why it's getting so many views, is because it's just ranking number one. You can see here, this is still getting 29 views per hour. And this video has done wonders to grow my channel, grow my audience, grow my brand exposure. And the great thing about this in this video is I do have like a very small call to action that I have a course. So it's also helping me to sell and make more money off of the YouTube platform. So if you're a YouTuber and you don't yet have an SEO research platform, I highly recommend you go to the link in the description below, pick up Vidiq. It's not that expensive, but it's a really great tool to help you do some keyword research. And there's a lot of other bells and whistles in there too that are fun, but go to the link description below. You can register. You can either do a monthly or an annual plan, but it's available. Very, very great tool for doing research here on YouTube.