Two videos on the same subject, from two channels of roughly the same size.
The first one published, took its views in the first three days, then dropped, settled, and never moved again. The second started quietly, and after a month it was bringing views every day. Two years on, it still is.
The difference was not the edit or the thumbnail. The difference is that the second one is named after what people type into a search box, and the first is named after what its owner was thinking.
There are two kinds of video, not one
Every video you publish lives in one of two ways.
A video that gets recommended. The platform shows it to people who never asked, because it guessed they would like it. This kind lives on the hook, the thumbnail and a title with some pull. Its life is short and loud: it catches fire, then cools.
A video that gets searched for. Someone has a problem, types it, and finds you. This kind never catches fire, but it never dies either, because every day there is a new person with the same problem.
A channel that lasts has both. The first brings you new people; the second brings views while you sleep, or travel, or stop publishing for a month.
This article is about the second, because it is the cheapest one and the one we neglect most.
Viewers do not write the way you write
This is where the real problem sits. We write titles in tidy, correct Arabic, and people search in the language they speak at home.
Four gaps show up every time:
They type in dialect. You write "how to repair microphone audio"; they type "mic sound has crackling in it". You write "choosing suitable luggage for travel"; they type "a bag that works for flights".
They type a question, not a title. "Why does the picture come out shaky", "what is the best...", "how do I...". The raw question is what actually gets typed.
They type product names in Latin script. Nobody searches for "the professional editing programme"; they type the name of the software as it is written. Leave brand names in Latin letters instead of transliterating them.
They type with mistakes. Missing letters, missing hamzas, an extra space. You cannot put a misspelling in your title, but you can put the common phrasing in the description.
The upshot: your title has to carry the viewer's phrase, not your elegant translation of it. For the craft of the title and description in more detail, see the text that decides whether the video gets opened at all.
How to find the phrase without paid tools
You do not need a monthly subscription to anything. Four free sources are enough, and three of them are already in front of you.
The search box itself. Open YouTube, type the first two words of your subject, and do not press search. The list that drops down is phrases people are really typing. Then type the same words and add one more letter, and another, and you get a different list each time. Write down what repeats.
The related questions block in a web search. Search your subject in an ordinary search engine and scroll to the questions section. Those are real questions in their real wording.
The comments under similar videos. Open three successful videos in your subject and read the comments. The questions underneath are what people did not find inside. Each one is a whole video, with its phrasing already written for you.
Your own analytics. If you have published videos, there is a section telling you which phrases brought people to you. That is the most honest source you have, because it is about your audience rather than someone else's. In how to read a video's performance and feed it back into your ideas we covered how to turn that reading into ideas instead of anxiety.
Where to put the phrase once you have it
Five places, most important first:
In the title, near the front if you can. Not tacked on after a decorative clause. "Echo on your mic? Here is the cause and the fix" is stronger than "my journey with sound and how I solved an old problem".
In the first two lines of the description. Most of what you write there is neither read nor counted. The first two lines are what show, so put a sentence there that explains the video in the viewer's own words.
In what you say out loud inside the video. The platform listens to you and turns it into text. So if the video is about echo, say the word echo plainly in the first minute instead of gesturing at it.
In a subtitle file you write yourself. Automatic transcription of Arabic gets a lot wrong. A hand-written subtitle file fixes that and serves everyone watching with the sound off, which we covered in why people watch with the sound off.
In the file name before you upload. A small, almost free step: make the file name the sentence itself instead of a camera number.
What no longer works
Stuffing tags. Thirty tags at the end of a video do nothing worth measuring. Use five and move on.
A pile of keywords in the description. A list of words with no sentences hurts you rather than helping.
The clever, vague title. "This is what nobody told you" gets searched by nobody, because nobody knows what it is about.
Repeating the phrase ten times. Once in the title, once in the description, once in your speech. Anything beyond that reads as padding.
Three steps before every upload
Type your subject in the search box and look at the suggestions, then pick the phrase closest to your video. Put it in the title and in the first line of the description. Then make sure you said it out loud in the first minute.
Three minutes before uploading turns a video that lives a week into one that lives two years.