YouTube SEO works differently than traditional SEO. On YouTube, the key components of video optimisations come from the meta data, which are your video titles, descriptions, tags, and other texts that can be found through subtitles and closed-captions (CC).
There are various metrics that YouTube seem to value when it comes to ranking YouTube videos, and the primary ones are the video titles, watch-time, and click-through rates.
In essence, YouTube wants to display the most relevant video for a search query, therefore, it uses various metrics to calculate the likelihood of a video being the most relevant for that particular query.
It can be a pretty exhaustive process to optimise an entire YouTube channel, but as a YouTuber since 2008, I can help you out based on what I’ve learned over the years.