How to Rank Videos on YouTube (YouTube SEO Tutorial)

43,965,638 views. That's how many views my channel has gotten from YouTube search alone. Not suggested videos, not browse features, not some viral TikTok sending people over. YouTube search, YouTube SEO, search engine optimization. 31.7% of every single view on my entire channel comes from people typing something into YouTube and finding my video sitting at the top. And I'm going to show you exactly how I made this happen today. Now, here's the problem. 99% of SEO tutorials on YouTube right now are teaching you garbage. Keyword stuff, your tags, write 2,000 word descriptions, add 47 hashtags. None of that is moving the needle in 2026. What actually works is a specific system. The same one that I use to pull 43 million views from search. And the same one that I teach my clients. And the same one that my 50-year-old brother used to get his very first video to 800,000 views. So if you appreciate me keeping it real and making this type of content, and you want to see me make more of it in the future, go ahead and gently tap that like button and let's jump into it right now. All right, so real quick, let's talk about what YouTube SEO actually is. Because a lot of people overcomplicate this and it's actually really simple. So think of YouTube like a massive library. Except that instead of books, there are over 800 million videos. And instead of a librarian helping you find a book, YouTube has a search engine. So when someone goes to YouTube and types in something like highest paying trades jobs, YouTube has to decide out of the millions of videos, which ones to show you first. And it ranks them based on two things. Number one, how relevant is the video to what you search for? And number two, how good is the video? And YouTube figures out how good a video is by looking at things like how many people clicked on it, or how long they watched it, and how many people liked it, commented on it, and shared it. So SEO or search engine optimization is basically just setting up your video so that YouTube picks your video over everyone else's. And when your video shows at the top, you get free traffic from people who are actively searching for that topic. Which is incredibly powerful because they have what's known as search intent. Meaning they are actively searching for solutions to a problem that they're having, and they're much more likely to buy your products and services, assuming that they solve that problem. And this means that you don't have to pay for ads. You don't have to promote it. People just find you. And I'm going to show you exactly how we do this using a real example from my brother's channel. All right, quick break. This week, I'm doing a one-time only workshop where I talk about And you can check it out down in the description and the pinned comment below. At this workshop, I'm going to be giving away the Niche Validator Pro completely free. This is a GPT powered by a piece of software that I've been working on for a long time now. And it's been trained on thousands of hours of my teaching, coaching sessions, and more. So you don't have to spend years to pick a profitable niche. You can do it in a matter of minutes. Heck, it's even possible to do it in seconds sometimes. And I'm going to be giving this away at the workshop. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And the best way to do that is to make sure you add it to your calendar once you've signed up for it. So you basically just click add this to your calendar once you're on the thank you page after you've registered. And it'll show up as either Google, Apple, or Outlook calendar, whatever calendar you have. So you can make sure you won't miss the chance to grab the Niche Validator Pro completely free. And you'll also be able to ask me questions live. So I look forward to meeting you. Can't wait to see you there. I'm going to be showing you this new opportunity. It's completely free. And it's amazing whether you basically want to use it to get a better job, use it to network, use it to make some passive income, start a side hustle, make a full-time income, or even start a full-on business. It works incredibly well with all of those. And it's completely free. So make sure you click the link in the description and then show up to the workshop. And now back to your regularly scheduled content. All right. So the main strategy that I use for YouTube is what I call the money ball method. And this is how you optimize your title so that your video actually ranks in search. Now, if you've ever seen the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt, you know where this title comes from. Three ball players. Three ball players whose average OBP is... In the movie, Brad Pitt plays the general manager of the Oakland A's. And they had no money. They couldn't compete with big teams like the Yankees who were paying for superstars left and right. So instead of trying to find guys who could hit home runs, they found cheap players that nobody wanted. Players who had a really high on-base percentage. Meaning they could consistently get on base 30 to 40% of the time. They weren't flashy. They weren't trying to hit grand slams every time they stepped up for the plate. They were just getting on base over and over and over again. Singles and walks. And guess what? That team won 20 games in a row, one of the longest winning streaks in baseball history, and did incredibly well, especially considering their salary cap was much lower than many of the teams they were competing against. And this is exactly how I approach YouTube titles. Most creators try to hit a home run every single time. They come up with these super creative, super clever titles, hoping that one of them will go viral. But the problem is, if nobody's searching for that topic, you're swinging at nothing. So you might hit a home run once in a while, but most of the time you're just going to be striking out. So instead, what I do is I put the searchable keyword right at the very beginning of my title. And that's kind of like getting on base. It guarantees that people who are actively searching for that keyword on YouTube are going to find your video. That's your single. That's your consistent hit. That's your guaranteed at bat. And then at the end of the title, I add a hook. Something that makes people curious enough to click. That's your chance at a home run. Because if the hook is good enough, YouTube might push it to browse and suggested where it can go viral. So basically, I try to hit a home run, but if I don't hit a home run, I always hit the ball and go on base. Meaning I try to get on browse and suggested, but if that doesn't work out for whatever reason, I can almost always make sure that I'm going to get views from search. So let me show you exactly what I mean. So this is my brother, Zach's channel. And look at his very first video, over 800,000 views. And this video was making him $214 a day within his first month. That's almost an 80,000 a year run rate from one video on a brand new channel. Now look at the title. Highest paying trades jobs. That's the keyword. That's right at the very front. That's what people are actually typing into YouTube every single day. Highest paying trades jobs or highest paying trade jobs or high paying trade jobs. And because we put that keyword at the very front of the title, YouTube knows exactly what this video is about and it shows it to the right people. That's your single. That's getting on base. Now, by the way, the way that I like to find these keywords or keyword phrases is with the paid version of vidIQ. I like to type in certain keywords into vidIQ and then I go to the related keywords feature. With that being said, you can use traditional SEO tools for this. It's relatively similar. Tools such as Ahrefs are really good too, but they are quite a bit more expensive. But there are cheaper tools out there like Ubersuggest where you can at least get some pretty decent keywords. But yeah, the keyword is your single. That's getting on base. And you want to put it as close to the beginning of the title as possible. Now let's look at the second part that no one is talking about. That is the hook. That's what creates curiosity because there's a difference between showing up in search results and actually getting someone to click. See, the keyword gets you in front of people that are searching. The hook is the thing that gets them to click. And that hook makes it more likely that you're actually going to get promoted on search, but it also gives you a shot at a home run. A chance for YouTube to push it out to browse and suggest it where it can go viral, which is exactly what happened with this video. And look at this. When you search highest paying trades jobs on YouTube right now, the first three videos that show up are all my brother's videos. And his channel doesn't have that many subscribers. You know, in this example, his channel has around 36,000 subscribers. And the next video is from a channel with over 2 million subscribers. And my brother is outranking them on a brand new channel. That's not coincidence. That's the money ball method. Keyword at the front, hook at the end. And this makes sure that you get on base every single time. Now let me show you one more thing that we did that works really well. Look at the description. We didn't go crazy with the keywords. We didn't stuff 50 keywords in here. A lot of people think that you need to write You don't. We just included the keywords that actually made sense for the video. Trade jobs, skilled trades, high paying jobs. That's it. Just the relevant ones. And YouTube's AI is smart enough now that you don't need to spam keywords everywhere. You just need to include the ones that matter and write them in a natural way. And that's the whole approach. You're not trying to trick YouTube. You're not trying to game the system. You're just making it really easy for YouTube to understand what your video is about so that it shows it to the right people. Now, by the way, there are AIs that we basically use to write these. And if you want to learn more about those, because we actually give these AIs away in our live trainings, go ahead and attend my live training this week by clicking the link in the description and a pinned comment below. We'll be going over some really valuable stuff, how to grow and make money on YouTube. And at the end of the live training, you can ask me any questions you have. OK, so now that you know how to optimize your videos for search, the next question is, how do you find the right topic to optimize in the first place? Because this is actually key when it comes to ranking at the top and getting views. Because here's the thing, you can have perfect SEO, the best title, the best keywords. But if you pick a topic that nobody cares about, none of it matters. And I'm going to explain this with a simple analogy. Imagine you're the best chef in the world. You make five star cuisine. Your food is incredible. Now, imagine that you take those skills and you open a restaurant in the middle of the desert, literally in the middle of nowhere. No roads, no people, just sand and rocks. I don't care how good your food is. Nobody's going to eat there because there's nobody there. Now, let's say that you move that restaurant into a city, but you put it on a street that already has 10 established restaurants. They've been around for years. They have a loyal customer base, great reviews and great reputation. Even if your food is just as good as them or even better, it's going to be really hard to get customers because nobody knows who you are yet. And there's massive amounts of competition. But what if you open that same restaurant in a place where there's a starving crowd of people? Of course, you're going to sell out every single time. In fact, you wouldn't even have to open a fancy restaurant. You could just open up a simple hot dog cart outside of a stadium full of 50,000 hungry people when the game just ended and everyone is pouring out and you are going to sell out of hot dogs every single time because they're hungry and you're the only one there selling food. So I'm telling you right now, you would sell every single hot dog you have. The food doesn't even have to be that good and you'd still crush it because you found a hungry crowd with zero competition. And YouTube works the exact same way. So here's exactly how we do it. You go to YouTube and you search for a broad keyword in your niche. And then you look for videos that have a lot of views from a small channel. My rule of thumb is the video should have at least five times more views than the channel has subscribers. So at least a five to one ratio. And you want to make sure that the channel is less than 100,000 subscribers. So you want to make sure that it's a small channel. And the reason for this is because you want to make sure the channel doesn't already have a loyal audience. And then the next thing you look for is the content itself is either mediocre or preferably bad. The reason you want to look for mediocre or bad content is because if the content is mediocre or bad, you know that it must be the idea that's doing the heavy lifting. If it's from a small channel, aka they don't have a loyal audience of people and the video got a ton of views and the content is either mediocre or bad, you know that it has to be the idea of the video that's doing the heavy lifting. And this is exactly how we found the idea for my brother's very first video. We found this video right here. Highest paying trade jobs that nobody's talking about from a channel that had about 46,000 subscribers. But the video had 1.8 million views. That is a 40 to one ratio, way above the five to one rule. So right away, we knew that this topic has a massive hungry audience. People clearly wanted this content. The demand was proven. So my brother made a slightly better version, better thumbnail, better production, better title using the money ball method. Keyword at the front, book at the end. And the video got over 800,000 views as his very first video ever. Brand new channel, zero subscribers, monetized in 21 days. And 29 days after posting that video, he had a $214 day. That's the hot dog method. Find a hungry crowd being served with mediocre food and show up with something better. Now, if you want to learn more about how this works, because yes, I did simplify this for the purposes of this short video, go ahead and attend my live training this week by clicking the link in the pinned comment below. We'll go deeper into how it works. And you can ask me any questions you want at the end as well. And if you are somebody who is very busy and you want to grow and make money on YouTube and you basically want a handholding experience where you literally work one-on-one with a coach that has 100,000 subscriber YouTube channel, AKA they have a silver plaque, then go ahead and click the second link in the description by clicking the second link down there below or clicking the link in my about section on my channel. And by doing this, you'll apply to work with us one-on-one. We work with a select group of people. We can only work with so many people at once. And we're very picky about who we work with. Typically, the types of people we work with are professionals who are very busy and they want to start YouTube on the side without taking too much of their time. That's the situation that I was in as a pharmacist who basically started YouTube as a part-time thing and was able to grow it to a full-time income in a matter of months. We also work with business owners who want to use YouTube to get leads and grow their brand. We also work with YouTubers who are getting views, but they're struggling with monetization, and we help them crush it even harder. So if any of those apply to you, go ahead, click that link in the description, the pinned comment below, and we'll figure out if we're a good fit to work together or not. Additionally, check out this video right here where we will deep dive even further on how to select the right video ideas.