YouTube SEO Study Reveals Keyword Cannibalization Is Actually A Good Thing

March 3rd, 2025

Hello!

It’s me, Sean Markey, daily SEO newsletter author coming to your inbox with another b-b-b-b-banger.

Today’s video is all about Youtube SEO (which… you probably guessed from the subject line...)

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Youtube

A Data-backed Study of How to Rank on Youtube in 2025

I keep talking about creating Youtube videos the way people keep talking about writing a novel and then never. writing. a fucking. thing.

So this study is of interest to me, a guy who keeps wanting to make a video.

Here’s the outline of the study:

The single most interesting thing to me, an SEO, was this:

WHAT, that blows my mind a little bit.

Of course, as someone working on SEO for approximately 8,000 years, the idea of keyword cannibalization has been beaten into my head for a decade or more.

But Youtube apparently is like YOLO we’ll just rank all three of your videos on how to make the nastiest, guts-left-in-the-sun-for-10-days fish sauce on the planet post that shit, straight to number 1-2-3!

Wild.

The study also found that shorter videos do better because our brains are collectively rotted and if they came out today The Godfather and The Godfather 2 would get a 7% on the Tomatometer because:

a) omg they’re so long, and

b) NOTHING HAPPENS for like 40 minutes

Anyway.

This is a really great study if you have clients going hard on Youtube/you’re trying to go hard on Youtube yourself.

Because this article is so… “bullet points presenting the data” there’s not much else to say about it or I’d just be copying/pasting it here and I try not to do that…

So here’s the link, go give it a read if you’re into that.

Last thing I’ll say about something from the study, apparently 94% of all top-3 ranking videos have a transcript. Interesting, guess that helps the algo with relevancy? So don’t stuff KWs in the title, stuff them in the “transcript?”

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Sean