There are 3 main tools that can be used to attract customers to your videos. The video thumbnail, description and as we will talk about in this post, the video title.

You might be saying 'surely you just name the video after the content', but if you do this you are not optimising your video for SEO. In this post I will break down the different factors that go into creating the best video title.

Keywords

You may already know about using keywords to improve your website but do you know that your video title also contains keywords which search engines use to discover the subject of your video?

As with keywords for your website it is always best to undertake keyword research. The most common way to research keywords is using the keyword planner tool in Google Ad Words.

I will not go in to detail here about how to conduct keyword research as that is a subject that deserves it's own dedicated blog post but I will give a few pointers. If your video is a tutorial on how to set up a certain product then you will search for 'How to set up 'product name''. Google Ad Words will then give you suggestions for similar keywords as well give you figures for the search volume and competition for the given keywords. You are looking to find a sweet spot of a high search volume and low competition for your chosen keywords.

Another small tip. If you are optimising your video for Google search rather YouTube, add the word video at the end of the title as consumers will likely type this keyword if they are searching for videos.

Character Count

Character count for the video title plays a very important role when optimising your video for search, especially for Google.

First of all Google truncates it's page titles to around 66 characters. If your video is hosted on YouTube then ' - YouTube' is automatically added to the end of your video taking your character count down to around 56 characters.

If you exceed 56 characters then Google will add an ellipse '...' to the end of your title which could block off important information about your video in the title.

The character count forces you to be creative and figure out a way to be as descriptive as possible in as fewer words as possible.

A good way to start is by removing words such as 'the, and, a' etc. as these words are useless to search engines and do not affect search results.

Structure

The structure of a title plays an important role as the first few words can be enough to persuade or dissuade a potential customer/client to watch your video. The following three steps should help you structure your title to help with SEO and draw people's attention.

Find a relevant, highly searched and targeted keyword (as I covered in beginning of this post).
Add the keyword to the beginning of the title.
End the title with a benefit driven or curiosity provoking statement.

For example, you have a highlights video of a plumbing trade show featuring the future innovations coming soon to the plumbing industry. You could title the video 'Plumbers World 2015 highlights'. This title isn't very descriptive and doesn't draw your attention. The keywords for this title are 'Plumbers World, 2015, future' so I would change the title to 'Plumbers World 2015: What is the future of plumbing?'. Immediately this title asks a question that the viewer wants answered as well as being more descriptive and creating interest.

Conclusion

Creating high value content is not enough to get your videos viewed, you need to convey your videos value to potential customers through the title. Using sales tactics such as promoting curiosity, fear, pain and pleasure or selling the benefits of your videos you can create video titles that stand out and make your potential clients/customers click through.

In my next blog post I will be covering how to write a compelling video description. If there are any parts of this blog you would like me to cover in more detail in the future, please let me know by leaving a comment below or posting on our Facebook page.

David Proud
Director