Most church channels title sermons with the date. Sometimes the date and the service: "8-4-24 Contemporary". It is not laziness, it is what happens when the person uploading is doing it between packing down the sound desk and getting to lunch, and nobody ever told them it mattered.
Why the date title costs you
A title is the main thing a search engine reads about a video. "8-4-24" tells it nothing, so the video can only ever be found by somebody who already knows your church, already found your channel, and is willing to scroll.
It gets worse when the description is empty too. We checked a church in Texas with 1,439 videos: searching their own name returned their homepage, their channel, and then a run of date-titled videos whose search snippets were filled with Billy Graham and Charles Stanley. Not a penalty, a vacuum. There was no text near those videos, so the only words available were the suggested-video titles beside them.
The shape that works
Four parts, and you can drop the last two when they do not apply:
- What the message is actually about, in the preacher's own words if possible
- The passage
- The series, if it is in one
- The preacher, if it is not your usual one
| Instead of | Try | Why |
|---|---|---|
8-4-24 |
When God Says Wait | Habakkuk 2:1-4 |
Somebody who is waiting on something can now find this. Nobody was ever going to search the date. |
Sunday Service August 4 |
The Cost of Following | Luke 9:57-62 | Counting the Cost, part 3 |
The series name gathers the other parts, so one message found is four messages found. |
Guest Speaker |
A Faith That Survives Doubt | John 20:24-29 | Guest: Dr. Ellen Shaw |
The guest's own name is often the thing being searched, especially locally. |
The description matters more than people think
Two or three sentences about what was actually said, the passage written out, and timestamps if you have them. That is the text a search engine reads when somebody searches a phrase from your sermon rather than your church's name.
The fastest honest way to write one: open the recording, listen to the first three minutes and the last three, and write what the message was for. The middle is usually the argument; the ends are usually the point.
About the old ones
You do not have to fix fifteen years in a weekend, and you should not try. Start with the last two years, because those are the ones people still find, then work backwards when you have an evening.
Retitling a video does not reset anything. YouTube keeps the views, the comments and the URL, so nothing you have already earned is lost by fixing the title.
Where we come in, and where we do not
Everything above works whether you ever speak to us or not, and a church with a volunteer who enjoys this will do it well. What we sell is the time: we write the titles and descriptions from the recordings and hand them over, or write them straight into the channel if you would rather. On a decade of messages that is the difference between a project nobody ever starts and a thing that is done.