Knowledge Bank
3 min read
Picking a YouTube title: under 60 characters, keyword near the front
Choosing from your five titles comes down to a few rules: keep it under 60 characters, put the keyword near the front, and keep the curiosity intact.
Not sure if Package is your weak phase? The free 3-minute workflow audit will tell you.
You have five titles. Now you choose one, and the choice is not just which sounds best. A YouTube title has to survive being cut off on mobile, get found in search, and still make someone want to click, all at once. A few concrete rules turn picking from a gut feeling into a decision you can defend.
Get this wrong and a good video underperforms quietly, which is exactly what low views really mean in most cases. A title too long gets truncated and loses its point; a title with the keyword buried gets missed by search; a title that is all keyword and no curiosity gets scrolled past. The pick is where you balance the three things a title has to do.
The rules that decide it
| Rule | Why |
|---|---|
| Under about 60 characters | Longer titles get cut off on mobile and in search, and the end is often where the point is. |
| Keyword near the front | Search weighs the front of the title more, and so does a skimming viewer. Lead with what it is about. |
| Curiosity intact | The title should promise without giving the whole video away. Tell them what, make them click for how. |
| No false promise | If the title says more than the video delivers, the click is wasted and retention suffers. True beats tempting. |
Run your five through those four rules and the field usually narrows to one or two. Between the last two, pick the one a tired person scrolling at 11pm would actually tap.
Title and thumbnail are a pair, not two jobs
The biggest mistake here is choosing the title in isolation from the thumbnail. They are read together, in the same glance, and they should not say the same thing twice. If the thumbnail already shows the result, the title does not need to; it can add the context the image cannot. The two working together, each carrying a different half of the message, beats two that repeat each other.
Look at your chosen title next to your chosen thumbnail at phone size. Do they combine into one clear, tempting idea, or do they fight, or echo each other? Adjust the title so the pair pulls in the same direction without using the same words.
Where Chewbr fits
Lock the title is step 26 of the 47, the moment the words lock in. The five candidates were drafted back in Plan at step 5, so all this step has to do is commit to one. The shrink test comes straight after, checking that choice against the thumbnail before the description gets written around it.
Keep reading
A title is only half the promise, so check it against the image in the title and thumbnail as a pair. With both set, the rest is quick: tags, in about four minutes.