SEO is supposed to be the secret weapon whereby smaller channels can get noticed despite bigger channels making superior content, right?
If your video has a phrase in its tags that bigger youtubers don't have in theirs, then your video is supposed to rank higher in search results when people search for that specific phrase, right?
In that case, why isn't my newest video at the top of the search results for its titular phrase?
"Super Mario RPG vs Paper Mario - Who Nostalgias it Better?"
If you have tubebuddy, you can see that one of my tags for that video is "super mario rpg vs paper mario." According to Tubebuddy's keyword explorer, that has low search volume, but even low is better than nothing.
However, when I switch to a private window and search for the phrase "super mario rpg vs paper mario ," my video is only #29 in the search results.
Are the other 28 videos just better optimized than me for that search phrase? Not really. None of the other videos that rank higher than me appear to have the phrase "super mario rpg vs paper mario " anywhere in the video's title, description, or tags, nor do they appear to offer any phrasing that suggests that the video plans to juxtapose those two games in any way. The closest we get is RabbidLuigi's video "Top Five Mario RPGs," who is #1 in the rankings, but even that is hardly optimized for this specific phrase.
Granted, everyone who ranks higher than me are themselves a large youtuber. But here's the thing: Everything I have been taught about how youtube SEO works tells me that this shouldn't f*****g matter! If I am better optimized for search than X person, then I should rank higher in search than X person and that's all there is to it. It doesn't matter if he has a million times as many subscribers as me.
So what the hell?
If your video has a phrase in its tags that bigger youtubers don't have in theirs, then your video is supposed to rank higher in search results when people search for that specific phrase, right?
In that case, why isn't my newest video at the top of the search results for its titular phrase?
"Super Mario RPG vs Paper Mario - Who Nostalgias it Better?"
If you have tubebuddy, you can see that one of my tags for that video is "super mario rpg vs paper mario." According to Tubebuddy's keyword explorer, that has low search volume, but even low is better than nothing.
However, when I switch to a private window and search for the phrase "super mario rpg vs paper mario ," my video is only #29 in the search results.
Are the other 28 videos just better optimized than me for that search phrase? Not really. None of the other videos that rank higher than me appear to have the phrase "super mario rpg vs paper mario " anywhere in the video's title, description, or tags, nor do they appear to offer any phrasing that suggests that the video plans to juxtapose those two games in any way. The closest we get is RabbidLuigi's video "Top Five Mario RPGs," who is #1 in the rankings, but even that is hardly optimized for this specific phrase.
Granted, everyone who ranks higher than me are themselves a large youtuber. But here's the thing: Everything I have been taught about how youtube SEO works tells me that this shouldn't f*****g matter! If I am better optimized for search than X person, then I should rank higher in search than X person and that's all there is to it. It doesn't matter if he has a million times as many subscribers as me.
So what the hell?