Does Changing YouTube Title Affect Views?

In this article we're going to take a closer look at the impact of changing the title of an existing, published video when it comes to views.

Firstly, it is always best to get your video title right the first time upon publishing your video. When you publish your video YouTube will analyse your video content, title, description, and tags. As well as look at the overall theme and quality of your YouTube Channel.

Therefore, having an effective and accurate title to start with will always give you the best outcome.

However, what happens when we get it wrong? What happens when our well-thought-out title doesn't grab the attention we were hoping for? This leaves us no choice to either settle for sub-par results and views, or to change our title for an improved version that will gain more traction.

Before we continue it is also important to understand that the title is only one half of the problem that we have control over. There are two elements that essentially attract people to click through to our video. Those are the title and thumbnail.

Having a great title but a poorly designed thumbnail will not help matters and will also lead to sub-par results. It is important to have a great title and a great thumbnail to achieve great results and maximum views.

Let's look at the worst-case scenario and imagine that we are experiencing a low click through rate with our video. If we are seeing lots of video impressions but few clicks, it means our video title and / or thumbnail is most likely lacking.

(Video impressions are the number of times our video appears in the search results and is visible to potential viewers).

What we would do when we see poor results is re-evaluate our video title (and thumbnail). We would make changes that would further entice people to click on our video.

We would create some intrigue or curiosity. Include a question or bold statement within our title - whilst at the same time keeping our title semantically strong so we see our video drop in ranking.

One tip is to look at the other competing videos in the search results and see how they have formed their titles. The competing videos that have lots of views.

Are the titles short or long? Do the titles generate curiosity? Be sure to also look at their thumbnails and see how they differ to your thumbnail.

Your title and thumbnail both need to stand out in the search results.

After you have made the changes to your title (and possibly thumbnail), hit the 'Publish' button and that's it.

You can learn how to do this process with a lot more accuracy using our YouTube Title Finder.

This process is worth while doing anytime you feel that your videos are not performing well or if you notice your YouTube views declining.

It can take up to a couple of days for the changes to get fully picked up by YouTube. Sometimes it may only take hours but it's best to forget about it and a week later check your stats in your YouTube Analytics.

In conclusion, yes changing the video title does affect views. Partly due to how your audience responds to the new title, and partly down to the SEO impact of using different wording.

You'll be able to view your CTR (click through rate) data graph and if your changes were successful, you should see a spike in the graph that shows an increase in click through rate.  We have an entire article that reveals how much CTR is good for YouTube.

Of course, more clicks equal more views - Which can lead to more subscribers, leads and sales.

To help you create powerful, highly optimized video titles that rank high in the search results, be sure to check out our TubeSerp software.

TubeSerp comprises of 3 main modules. Video Optimization, Keyword Analysis and Video Tracking.

The optimization features are highly effective and will help you to rank your videos much higher in the YouTube search results for the long-term.

To your success!

Andy Black
TubeSerp