The main opportunity is not to choose either Shorts, SEO, or retention but rather to make all of them work in conjunction. With shorts, you get the attention of a person and with the long videos, you give him an incentive to hang around.
I feel that the most important change is being aware of the fact that growing on YT is all about creating a journey for the viewer as opposed to focusing on every video individiually. While a compelling thumbnail will help get the click, the presence of related videos, pacing, and a purpose for watching helps build up growth.
First of all good content quality and put real value on your content after that SEO and thumbnail. If you do these things consistently you’ll grow for sure
From my experience, audience retention has been the biggest growth driver, combining Shorts for reach with solid SEO on titles and descriptions delivers the most consistent long term growth.
i would looks at the audience graph before i would changes everything. If the drops off is in the first 20 to 30 seconds improving the introduction will have more impact than making even more shorts and editing the tags.
Retention, however, has been the largest factor driving me recently.
Retention is the one that concerns me the most. SEO will grab the click while shorts will give the push initially but if users bail out earlies then both fail to contribute any thing towards channel growth.
It appears that topic selection is some times forgotten about. even a poorly produced video on something everyone is interested in could be better than a well produced videos that nobody cares about.
