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Table of Contents
What is YouTube Title?
YouTube title or (YouTube video title) represents the high-level context of your video. Usually, it is a group of 4-8 words that summarize the information of your video and set expectations among viewers.
To put that in simple words, your YouTube video title should answer two important questions
Why should I watch your video
What is the takeaway from your video
Why YouTube Video Title is Important?
YouTube title plays a major role in Click Through Rate stands next to YouTube thumbnail.
Before viewers watch your video, they quickly undergo a 2 step process.
That is 1) see and 2) read
Yes, they quickly see your thumbnail, if convinced read video title and click & watch your video.
I personally use this online thumbnail editor
Technically, all videos are treated as a blog post and YouTube assigns h3 tag to all video titles when listed on the search results.
It assigns an h1 tag on the watch page so keywords in the title add more weightage than description and tags when comes to ranking.
Now you understand the importance of YouTube video titles.
Before You Find the Best YouTube Video Title
You must complete your video keyword research process and have your focus/target keyword ready. I personally use TubeBuddy for keyword research.
YouTube Video Title : Best Practices
Place Your Focus Keyword in the Front
I would want you to have a look at how SEO expert title their videos
When I search for the keyword “Keyword research”.
Here are the search results from the SEO expert’s channels.
You could see one common pattern across all videos.
They all used the keyword “Keyword research” in their title and they try to place the target keyword at the beginning of Youtube video title as much as they can.
That’s a takeaway. You must place your target keyword at the beginning of the video title.
Include Numbers
Numbers commonly easily grab viewers’ attention and if you put the exact figure you can definitely see an increase in the click-through rate.
Odd numbers tend to outperform even numbers.
Let’s say you’re making a video on “how to earn $1000 a day” then if you keep your title as “How I earned $1378 in a day” it easily catches viewers’ attention and your title stands out from the crowd.
A guy tried a similar approach along with decimal value!
Include Year
If your video content is closely tied with time or event it’s good practice to include a year at last in YouTube video title.
For instance, Programming languages get outdated soon. Let’s say you’re making a tutorial video on Python and no one one will watch if you teach the old Python 2x.
So when you add a year at the end of the video title, it conveys that your video is the latest one and you’re teaching the latest version.
Few other examples like “oscar award winners 2017”, “2019 horror movies”
Note that you should add only at the end of the video title.
Start with "How To"
When you want to search something on Google or YouTube, agree that most of the time you should start your search query with “how to “+
Start your YouTube video title with “How to” for evergreen content which doesn’t change over time.
How to lose weight fast
How to make a kite
How to tie a tie
How to write best youtube title that get views
How to title a youtube video
When you use the “How to” title you have more chances to get external traffic from search engines.
Often Google list videos on the search results for “How to” keywords
When I search for the keyword “How to tie a tie” the very first result is YouTube video.
Before publishing your video, search with your “How to” title on Google. If you don’t find videos you have a very good chance to see your video on SERP.
Optimize Video Title Length for readability and SEO
Nobody watches your video if they can’t properly read your title on the YouTube search results.
Pay close attention to Youtube title length.
Even though YouTube graciously allows you to write a title for 100 characters, it chops off the last few words when it lists videos on YouTube suggestion feed.
So limit your title to 70 characters to tap the suggestion feed traffic.
If most of your views are from mobile then you should limit your title further to 51 characters.
You can find the device status in the Analytics section.
Use Power Words
According to the study conducted by rankmath, usage of Power words in the title increase CTR and boost the conversion rate drastically.
To name a few power words: Jaw-dropping, Fail-proof, Discount
They have a huge list of 500+ Power words, try to use one on each YouTube video title.
Usage of power keywords on Youtube titles along with matching thumbnail compel viewers to click on your video.
Here are the sample YouTube titles that use Power words
Jaw Dropping Pole Dancers on Got Talent
5 Fail Proof Weight loss tips
10 ways to generate amazing content for Blog
How Much Money Indian YouTubers Earn From YouTube [Proof Inside]
Negative Words
We humans generally pay close attention to negative words. Put that on the video title to influence viewers to watch your videos.
To name a few negative words:
- Fail
- Warning
- Disgust
- Bad
- Harmful
- Stop
- Worst
A recent case study by Outbrain concluded that usage of negative words on title gets 65% higher CTR than positive keywords.
Here are the sample YouTube titles
Stop doing SEO and just do this
Humans are dangerous do you know why?
Worlds 10 worst cities to live
How to Fail better and heal faster
Measure the Video Title Performance
You may wonder how to measure the video title performance, well you can measure it easily from the YouTube dashboard.
Launch YouTube Dashboard and go to the video tab on the left side.
Click the video that you want to measure the performance. Go to Analytics tab and on the top select “Reach” tab and scroll down.
You can see a section called “Impressions and how they led to watch time”.
Impression tells you how many times your video was listed on the search results and suggestion feed.
Click through rate(CTR) tells you how many times your video was clicked during the impression.
Impression solely depends on the YouTube algorithm and how well your video is optimized. So, you can’t make any changes to the impression but you can alter the CTR.
CTR is directly proportional to thumbnail and video title. If you increase the CTR rate, you’ll get more views.
So, you need to adjust the thumbnail and video title to let more viewers to your view funnel.
When you have best thumbnail then it’s a video title which is dragging down your CTR.
Come up with another video title and try it out or do an A/B test on your title and pick the best one. You’ll learn more about A/B tests in the below section.
Do A/B Test
Sometimes your video title experiment may fail so why not go one step further and do an A/B test to come up with the best Youtube title.
If you don’t know what an A/B test is – It is a kind of experiment done with two or more variants shown to viewers and determines which ones bring more revenue/conversion/output.
Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t have this feature but you can do A/B testing on YouTube video title, thumbnail, description, and tags with TubeBuddy.
As we want to measure the success of video titles, we can ignore other variants such as thumbnail, tags, and description.
Install TubeBuddy, select the video, add two variant titles, and run the test for 14 days. It automatically shuffles the video title every 24 hours on YouTube.
At the end of 14 days, you’ll be listed with metrics that tell you which title outperformed. So, you can easily find the best Youtube titles for videos.
Emotional Words
SeoPressor has come up with a detailed study on how the usage of emotional words on titles influence the people.
They gave a list of 18+ emotional words that you can use on YouTube video title. Try emotional words only if that is relevant to video content.
Here are the few titles
Best restaurant near me
Proven ways to build muscle fast
9 Powerful traffic generation tricks
Use Emoji
Emoji are dominating the internet and social media. Google started showing Emojis on the SERP.
His brother YouTube is no exception to that. YouTube accepts Emojis on Title and description.
Just look at this if you are wondering how to add emoji on YouTube title and description.
Images speak better than words. Try to replace long non-target keywords on your title with Emoji because it takes just 1 character.
This guy used biceps emoji to show the power of ahref.
Steal From Competitor
It’s nothing wrong to check how competitors Youtube titles that get views. Do a search with your focus keyword on YouTube and note down titles of the first 10 videos.
Think about what could you do so that your video title looks unique when ranked for that keyword.
Keep Up the Promise & Avoid Clickbait
Clickbait title definitely gets a lot of clicks but if you don’t keep up your promise it badly affects your audience retention rate and YouTube puts your videos down on the search results.
Overpromising and under-delivery hurt your channel SEO.
So simply avoid clickbait title.
We can see those clickbait titles commonly among finance and health niche videos.
For example
How to make $1000 a day
How to be a millionaire in a day
How to lose 20kg in a week
Write Down 10 YouTube Titles for a Video
According to Pareto’s 80-20 rule, 20% of your YouTube video titles are responsible for 80% of your viewers. I know we put a lot of effort into video content just put the same effort for the title as well.
Because in the end, it’s a title that sells your video content. It’s not the other way around.
When we are done with video editing, we are so urged to hit the publish button. Most YouTubers come up with the video title when videos are uploading 🙂 Admit it if you did that.
Spend at least 15-20 minutes, jot down 10 different titles for a video. Read it loud and pick the one you tend to click. May sound silly but give it a shot.
Use Delimiter to Target More Keywords
Sometimes you may need to target multiple keywords for a video. For better optimization, those target keywords should be included in YouTube video title. In that case, you can use this delimiter | to separate target keywords.
It’s a traditional practice among SEO experts just in case you are not aware.
When you look at the below image, you can find three target keywords on the title.
Include Brackets {} [] and Paranthesis ()
Using brackets or parentheses in the title is another good approach to make your video title stand out and increase the click-through rate by 38%(case study by Hubspot) when listed on SERP.
It’s recommended to add a call to action keywords inside brackets. Some YouTubers prefer to put a year inside the parenthesis.
Yes you can.It's highly advisable to add hashtag at the end of video title. If you don't add hashtag on title box, your first 3 hashtags on description will be included.
Yes you can edit youtube video title after uploaded but make sure to click on the save changes.
Yes YouTube allow Emojis on YouTube title, description, tags, and comments.
Unless your content is related to that famous person you are not supposed to use that in video title. It highly impact your channel SEO.
Yes according to YouTube terms and condition you should not add Misleading meta data information.
Conclusion
I believe this detailed post on how to write a compelling YouTube video title gave a good overview of titling YouTube videos.
It’s not necessary that you should follow all these tips on every single video. Just keep these tips in mind and apply them when times come.
If you are very serious about your YouTube channel growth then I highly recommend you install an exclusive YouTube SEO plugin for complete channel optimization by clicking on the below button.