Youtube Video Titles - Best Practices in 2021
Guide to Youtube video titles
What you should know about Youtube titles?
Youtube Titles are a crucial element of getting more views and consequently subscribers on Youtube. Mainly, for two reasons:
- Youtube Titles play important role in Youtube SEO. It is crucial to mention your main focus keywords in Title and you might get much more views from Youtube Search and External Google Search.
- Well-written Youtube Titles (along with Thumbnails) can significantly boost CTR – Click-Through-Rate – of your videos. In new Youtube studio, you can clearly see CTR, Impressions divided by clicks.
So, without further ado, let’s jump straight into best tips for Youtube titles.
Youtube Video Titles – best practices
1. Include your main keyword in Youtube title to boost Youtube SEO.
Youtube titles are super important for SEO.
There is a clear correlation between keyword titles and Youtube video rankings.
How to know which keyword to put? Well, you need to perform Youtube keyword research first. And many keyword tools (free and paid) will help you with that.
In my case, I try to include an almost exact keyword.
Keyphrase “how to enable cookies on mac” has an estimated 2.7K monthly search volume.
Among these countries.
In fact, this video brings even more recurring monthly views from Youtube search. And it already accumulated 69K+ views on Youtube. Not bad!
2. Optimize Youtube titles for CTR
Some tips to boost CTR:
– Include numbers – e.g. “Top 20 ways to promote Youtube videos”.
MrBeast includes a number in almost every title.
– Emotional hook – emotional titles, descriptions and videos overall can easily go viral.
– Contrarian title – people might click on titles with contrarian info, like ”Why I left my perfect job at Google?” or “Why you won’t lose weight by exercising”.
– Attention-grabbing, emotional words – e.g. “shocking”, “WOW”, “I cried”.
– Experiment with lowercase, uppercase – sometimes titles like “SHOCKINGLY CHEAP deals at Amazon” or “Best FREE things to do in London” can grab some clicks, but not always…
– Emojis? – adding emojis to Youtube title can also drive millennial views
– Developer your own style – some big Youtubers have their distinct title style; their audience can quickly identify new video just by title.
3. Clickbait won’t help
You might get few additional clicks with clickbait, but in long term it will bring more damage, than good.
It is strongly discouraged by Youtube creator academy.
Also,
4. Use triple keywords
Keywords, which are included both in Title, Description and Tags – are called triple keywords.
Youtube titles, descriptions and tags (less) are the most important parts of metadata.
By which, both people and Youtube crawling bots can understand what your video is about.
If your video is about “London Eye experience”, it is a good practice to include this key phrase in title, description and tags. This way you will clearly tell Youtube, that your video is about the London Eye.
5. Thumbnails and titles should work together
Titles and thumbnails should tell one compelling story.
For example, MrBeast is famous both for his titles and thumbnails.
6. Use tools
There are some tools, which might help you either with titles in general or titles for Youtube SEO.
For example, Headline analyzer from Co-schedule is an amazing tool to analyze your title and put more emotional, strong keywords. It’s free.
You can check your length analysis.
But, the best part is the analysis of emotional and power words in your headline.
There are also bunch of Youtube SEO tools. I really like VidIQ Chrome extension and/or TubeBuddy.
7. Additional tips
- Keep your Youtube titles under 60 characters
- Check that your title isn’t cut off on different devices
- Put episode, vlog, season numbers at the end of the title.
Further reading
Was this blog helpful for you? Here are some additional resources.