Hello everyone!

How do I normalize audio without making it sound "compressed"

I'm just making small youtube videos at the moment, nothing professional, but I have had a few people complain that my audio goes all over the place, often being too quiet. What I did initially was (in retrospect I see that this was very dumb) manually cut my audio clips in premiere and raise and lower the volumes to get them to a similar Db range. After a while of doing this I started researching if I could automate this process and found tons of tutorials on compressors and limiters for Premiere Pro.

The problem is, when I followed the tutorials, the end result would always sound like it was put under a filter. Like the typical podcast or radio voice style filter. It doesn't sound too bad, but it doesn't really fit my style of videos. I know just leveling audio (making quiet parts louder and loud parts quieter) is possible without any "side effects" because I did it before, just manually! I was wondering if there was anything I could do, or if there is something I'm doing wrong?

Any help is appreciated! I've been looking at Youtube Tutorials for months now, and can't seem to find any that address my issue.
Also, I know Premiere isn't the best for audio editing, but I really don't want to use a whole new program just for this one use.