There is a HUGE check list of things I go through myself.
1. Is your title better optimized than your competitor?
2. Do you have a longer description, minimum of 1000 words, keyword optimized? (google doesn't read videos)
3. Are your tags organized better than your competitor? (you can grab their tags with SEO Suite)
4. Do you outrank them on YT? (not always necessary but it definitely helps)
5. Are you competing against solo niche accounts, or authority niche accounts? (if your competitor has an account with more related videos this gives their entire account more relevancy / authority)
6. Did you try reindexing EVERY link you've ever created? (sometimes this has popped my videos up on G)
7. Did you compare their anchor text to yours? Who has better anchor text?
8. Did you actually check out their links manually? (sometimes ahrefs is glitchy and reports false data)
9. Did you compare the age of their backlinks to the age of your backlinks?
10. Did you compare the age of your video to the age of your video?
There is really an endless list of bullshit you can check & consider.
With that said, I think your main problem is that 40 days isn't a whole lot of time. And I think Google did some type of "smart update"... I don't remember what it was, but I remember my SEO guy telling me about it. Because I HAVE noticed a pattern / change in rankings lately. Which is that its taking about an extra month for all my local sites to rank. Like they use to consistently rank in 6-8 weeks #1 on G but not its taking more like 12 weeks to hit #1.
And I also know I have some videos I've been working on that are ranking really slow. One I've been working on 6 weeks, another one for 4 weeks, and neither is ranking yet. But I guarantee you you will rank at some point. I have low competition videos that took me 3 months to rank. And right about 2 1/2 months I send another round of views / likes / subs / comments then reindexed all of my links including the video link itself. More links showed up in ahrefs, and the video ranked like 2 weeks later.
So I think you got to be a bit more patient buddy. Give it 2-3 more weeks and try to "wake up" the video. It may sound stupid, but don't just fizzle out and wait for Google to rank it. I always like to send little blasts of anything just to tell Google "my video is here, its getting lots of attention, so please rank it!" And they ALWAYS rank. Its just hard as hell to be patient sometimes. Which is why I have a small and steady stream of videos I'm always working on. So when one ranks after 2-3 months (you're not even up to 2 months yet) I have another video 2 weeks younger, and another 2 weeks younger than that one.
It can drive you insane, but I think your main issue right now is sheer patience.
Also dude, we really should work together on some shit. I got to skype your ass one of these days so we can talk about strategy and what not.
-SB
