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Leslie, while in theory you are right, Google is still using an algorithm that is very much keyword-driven, and while changing the Meta Description should not affect rankings, changing the Meta Title can and often will have an impact.

I may be old school but I believe the Meta Title should be target keywords focused first, and CTR second, while the Meta Description should be CTR focused first and target keywords second.

If you changed Meta Titles that removed or partially removed the target keywords for those specific pages, I would recommend you add them back. Your Meta Descriptions with the new CTR focus should be ok to stay what they are.

Make sure the YouTube channel is linked to along with your website's "social links" in your footer or header, and also add the YouTube channel link in the "sameAs" section of your website's Schema code.

If you have already done both of these I would work on the following-

1. Optimizing the YouTube channel as much as possible with a long description, and as many details as they will let you fill out to make it as robust as possible.

2. If it is possible and you have a business address, work on online business directory citations. They often will let you add social links on your profile and I would be sure to add the YouTube channel link on as many as possible, over time these external links pointing to your YouTube channel page will help its authority and ranking relevance for your brand.

My initial thought is Google does see your website as authoritative, which is why you are ranking for some of the "secondary keywords", but you are getting outranked on the "top keywords" due to the competition being more optimized.

I would look into the links that the outranking competitor websites/articles have that you do not to see if you can duplicate any, and then revisit your page's on-site SEO. So In addition to the link profiles, check the higher ranking competitors pages total content length, H2s, H1, Meta Title and different types of content (videos, images, embeds, etc) to see if this gives any clues to why Google is ranking them higher for your top keywords.

Over the years Google has drastically devalued the SEO impact of Footer links, however, we have seen them generate a benefit in the form of referral traffic. I would be careful with having Exact Keywords in the footer links though, could seem spammy as you pointed out.