I watch pretty much every YouTube guru’s “Don’t Upload Another Video Until You Watch THIS” or “The 9 Things I Do After EVERY Upload” video.
Partly because I’m always trying to find out if someone is recommending something completely opposite to what I’ve been doing and learned.
But mostly because I’m curious if there’s any new trick or feature that YouTube rolled out and I missed.
Guess what.
So far it’s all the same!
But here’s the biggest and most important tip that you sometimes see and sometimes don’t see on those videos.
Add well-named chapters to your video!
There are two real reasons to do this:
1. Boost Your Video Retention
I think we all know to add chapters. But sometimes creators are reluctant to put the names of their super-secret tips.
They figure, “if someone can see the tip on a chapter, they won’t watch my whole video and retention will crash!”
It’s actually more likely to help than to hurt you though.
If you’ve got 5 tips and your first one doesn’t grab someone but they look for chapter titles to figure out if the rest are worth viewing then they’re already disengaged.
So the best case scenario is that you have something that will grab their attention and reengage them.
That’s what strong chapter titles can do! They give you that extra shot at reengagement!
2. Improve Your YouTube SEO
There are plenty of articles on how chapter titles improve YouTube SEO. I won’t get into the details.
But I’ll frame it like this, just looking at everything from a logical perspective:
YouTube uses your title, thumbnail, description, keywords, and video transcript to help figure out your audience
Some of these key signals are easier to find/analyze/store than others
YouTube parses your description and handles chapters a specific way (making the timestamps clickable)
So it seems insane to me to even think that YouTube wouldn’t use chapter titles for SEO.
Anyway, add GOOD, descriptive, intriguing chapter titles to your videos, folks.
Make them helpful for YouTube SEO by providing accurate context (no keyword stuffing)
Make them interesting enough your viewers will click on them or stick around to see what you have to say
That’s all for this week.
I hope you had a good one and I’ll see you next Saturday!
-Steve