5 YouTube SEO Hacks That Work in 2025

1. Keyword tools / chapter title: “How I use SEO against you”
2.
Most creators don’t know that 3rd party keyword research tools are often incorrect.
They tend to guess certain information like search volume and relevancy.

3,
That may sometimes be correct for large search volumes, but often not for small volumes.
And I’ve developed that into a technique that exploded one of my videos on my dj channel.

4
The tool that is most often wrong seems to be Tubebuddy.
But because it’s so widely used and trusted by many creators, when TubeBuddy gives a bad score a lot of creators leave the search term alone.
That is a unique opportunity to do manual keyword research and see if the search term indeed is not competitive.

2. A/B Test titles via mailing list; chapter titles: “Test titles before video release”
5.
Some mailinglist software comes with an a/b test option which can compare the performance between 2 email subjects.
For this you can use your 2 best video titles to see which one gets the best open rate.

6.
For the first 50%: the first half is sent with title A, the other half with title B and after an hour it chooses the option with the most clicks and sends out that email to the other 50%.
As soon as I have a winner and I pick that title for the video.
If you don’t have a mailing list as a YouTube channel, you should start today.

3. Optimize existing videos / chapter title: “This SEO hack so little used”
7.
Did you know that you can get more views on videos, without uploading new ones?
By changing the title and thumbnail.
This can even make you rank for new keywords sometimes.

8.
I have to note, it doesn’t work always and it can also happen that a video performs worse.
It helps to keep an A/B test spreadsheet, so you know what and when you changed something, you know when and can always change it back.

9.
And because click through rate is a very unreliable metric, use the significant drop or increase in views as measurement.

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But when a video is already dead, this trick almost never works.

11.
2. Video description “Oldest SEO hack in the book”
This one is definitely the oldest YouTube SEO hack in the book.
But since not a lot of creators use it, it’s an opportunity, especially now YouTube tags don’t work anymore.

12.
I’m talking about video descriptions.
With descriptions you have the part above the fold and the part below the fold.
The part above the fold is shown to the user on Desktop without clicking, and to see the rest below the fold they need to click “show more”

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above the fold:
1) above the fold, that is the part that has the highest weight for the algorithm.
So use the keywords you want to rank for.
It doesn’t help to repeat the keywords of the title, so use different ones.
But it is also an extra opportunity to convince viewers to watch your video, because it is shown in YouTube search on Desktop.
[broll: first line description]

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2) and it helps add a link above fold to a video for viewers to watch
[broll: link above fold]

below the fold:
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3) you can make a small summary of the video, it is called “video description” after all.
I often use parts of the script for that.
It the YouTube algorithm more information about the contents of your video, it better able to understand it, and rank you.

4) and below the video description in the the video description, you can put your social media handles and links to your products.

16.
5. Low competition chapter title: “the best way to rank #1 on YouTube”
The best way to rank first on YouTube is to be the first to have a video about a topic.
When a new movie is coming out, when a new version of software version is coming out.
But probably the best one is in December then you can use the next year in your video title.

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As soon as January hits, you have the most current video on the topic and you already rank for it, because it was so easy without the competition.

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Dexxter Clark
Music Producer / YouTuber

5 YouTube SEO Hacks That Work in 2025

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