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Steve Dotto here. Today, I want to talk about the importance of titles in the whole business around YouTube SEO. This is probably a topic that we’re going to return to over and over again in this series as we strive to reach the astronomical level of 100,000 subscribers for our humble little channel. Now I recognize, as we all do, the importance of keywords in search. The bottom line is YouTube is really a search engine. It’s the second largest search engine in the world so making sure that the proper words or proper terms are properly articulated within our videos is very important in building our channel.
One thing that I have noticed in YouTube search, several of my videos a couple of months ago started ranking quite high in YouTube search. Those videos are really driving the acceleration of my channel growth. What did I do in those videos that caused them climb up in views? I wish I knew but there seems to be a bit of a cocktail of things that we have to put together. Let me first show you one of the videos that’s doing really well, and I’m quite proud of this. If we type in “Evernote” today into YouTube search, you will see that right there, I’ve got a video. There are the two paid for posts that you can pay for to have posted and then one, two, three, four—I’m in fourth place right now with my Five Favorite Evernote Features.
Now this is a pretty good little video I put together. It’s whimsical. It’s fun. It shows some of the best features within Evernote. It’s a good video and I’m really quite proud of the fact that it’s now ranking fourth place in organic search on YouTube and it is driving my channel acceleration. Just this one video is getting almost as many views as my other views for the current time. It’s kind of like the current darling of my line up.
Now what did I do right? Well, I have created a pretty good video that was in a pretty good area and I used the word “Evernote” right there in the title. Those are things that we probably recognize right away. I also tagged it and all those other things. As I said, we’re going to talk about a lot of those things in the future videos.
But what I wanted to talk about today specifically was the importance of that title itself. If I go back to my video manager, YouTube does a great job. If we go into our dashboard, as a channel partner if you go into your dashboard, right here under Notifications they give you a list of the different things that they think might be important to you, that you should be reading and they’re little tutorials. This is one that I haven’t read for a while, “Titles are Important” which seems rather self evident.
But when we click on that and take a look at it—let’s have a look at it right now; it’s in the Creator Playbook which we’ll talk about in other videos—here is what they say and this really kind of resonated with me. It’s not a big deal but they said, “In a title, include descriptive and relevant keywords towards the beginning of the title.” That’s something that I hadn’t thought about, especially for this current string of videos around building my brand.
I’ve been putting my brand first and then the title second. Look, it says here, “Display branding and episode numbers towards the end when appropriate.” So YouTube—I didn’t realize this—in the title, they look at what’s first before they look at what’s second. I thought the title was all equal. Not so, Steve. Wake up and smell the coffee.
“Keep the titles concise so they don’t get cut off because a high character count.” I tend to be wordy in my titles.
“Always represent your content accurately. Misleading titles can audience drop-offs…” Well, that’s pretty self evident. We know YouTube will punish you if you try and create views of your video that aren’t appropriate. If you start talking about the fact that you’re going to teach people about how to do something but you’re just going to sell them something, well then you shouldn’t rank as highly.
“Create titles that reinforce their respective thumbnails. Together, they should tell a cohesive click-compelling story.” I never heard that term, “click-compelling,” and “Update titles so they remain relevant.” Again, something that I hadn’t really thought about doing, going through and massaging our titles as we go ahead.
So what have I learned today? Let’s take a look at my channel again and let’s take a look at my video manager. The videos that I’ve just been creating, this is the fourth one now, but 100K subscribers, I thought that was a kind of cool term. I’ve got to put that down at the back. Actually, I’m going through them and I’m going to rename all of these videos so by the time you see these videos, each of these should be renamed. I’m going to put the content, the topic more towards the front and I’m also going to get the YouTube in the content and the title every time, or I’m going to try to.
That’s number one that I’ve learned, keeping it concise, putting the keywords towards the front rather than towards the back, doing branding in the back so it’s going to be something-100K Subscriber because I kind of like that, at least for the time being. They definitely resonate through with what’s happening with the thumbnails. That’s lesson #1 that I’ve learned.
Lesson #2 that I’ve learned is I’m going to go back and I’m going to look at titles of other videos that I’ve got and I’m going to re-title some of them. I’m going to change them to make them a little more relevant. I’ve been Dropbox versus Google Drive and doing quite well. I wonder if I change that to Google Drive versus Dropbox. This video is doing pretty well with 11,000 views. I’m not sure I want to do that but I will think about it.
Lesson today: Pay attention to your titles. Put the keywords at the front of the title and possible go back and massage titles of older videos to kind of refresh them and make sure that they are getting the respect that they deserve on YouTube.
I hope you found this be useful. If you have, please give us a Subscribe. After all, we are trying to get to 100,000 subscribers and every one helps. I hope you found it useful. Drop us a comment down below. I respond to all the comments. If you want to engage in a conversation about this topic, it is one that I am obviously passionate about and I hope you are passionate about it, too. I’m Steve Dotto. You have a great day.
