How to screen record only one tab (for SEO traffic)

Most screen recorders default to everything. You press record, and the result includes your desktop, whatever was open behind the thing you meant to show, the notification that arrived halfway through and the row of tabs across the top with their titles readable.

Recording one tab means telling the recorder, at the point you start, to capture a single browser tab as its own video source. The tab is the picture. Scroll inside it and the recording follows. Switch to another tab and the recording keeps showing the one you chose.

That matters for anyone filming a walkthrough of software. The screens you want to show and the screens you do not want to show often sit a tab apart.

When I film, I say it out loud as I go: we're gonna share a tab, then we're gonna share this tab. It takes a second and it is the whole trick.

Open the tab you want to record and get it into the state you want it in before you press anything. Log in, navigate to the page, close the modal. Setting up while recording is the main reason people retake.

Start the recording in whatever tool you are using. When the share picker appears, it will usually offer three choices: entire screen, window, and tab. Choose the tab option. Entire screen captures your desktop. Window captures the whole browser, including every other tab's title. Only the tab option captures one tab.

Pick the tab from the list and confirm. Check the recording is showing what you think it is showing before you start talking. A moment spent confirming beats discovering it afterwards.

Then talk. Keep your mouse moving to whatever you are describing, because with one tab there is no wider context for a viewer to orient themselves against. Say what page you are on and what you are about to press.

One more thing worth knowing: you are not limited to the whole tab. I added a function where you can draw a box over the exact thing you want recorded and press show only this, rather than sharing everything on the page. It is useful when part of a page has information on it you would rather not broadcast.

Full screen recording is the easy option and the one people regret. Everything on your desktop is in the frame, including whatever arrives while you are speaking.

Recording a whole browser window is better but not enough. The tab strip is still in shot, and tab titles say more than people expect. If you then need to switch tabs mid-recording, viewers see it.

Cropping afterwards is the third option, and it is the one that quietly costs the most. You open an editor, you set a crop, you export, and a one-minute walkthrough has become an evening. For most people the edit is where the recording habit dies.

Tab sharing solves the problem at the start rather than at the end. You decide what is in frame before you speak, and then you never touch it again.

Recording one tab cleanly is the easy half. The harder half is that a raw screen recording is not yet a video anyone will find. It has no title anyone searches, no intro, no outro, no description, and it sits on your drive.

That is the gap Underway fills. It reads the tools you work in, asks you about your day out loud, and hands back a finished numbered episode with no editing. You share a tab, you talk, and minutes later there is an episode with its title and captions written. No timeline, no retakes.

Everything stays private in the vault until you choose to share it, which matters if you are walking through software that is not public yet.

This is the half that makes tab sharing worth bothering with. Recording cleanly only pays off if the clean recording actually goes somewhere.

Here is the part founders miss. How to screen record only one tab is not a core function of Underway. Nobody buys a build-in-public app because of it. True. But it is the type of thing people search on a large basis that would bring eyeballs.

Underway suggests these to me. In the background it scans my website, my GitHub, everything connected to it, and it understands what I do, what my functions are and what the software does for people. Then it finds the general, widely searched things adjacent to that, and tells me which ones I could rank for and why.

On this one it told me: for Underway's own article, the article ranks on Google, and a video with the same title gives the search a video result. When it is posted to YouTube, the article's link goes in the description by itself, and the video goes on the article.

So one search gets covered twice, from both directions, from one piece of work. People type this into Google and find the article. Founders and creators search the same words inside YouTube, and the video is there.

It is slow. Search is a slow one. For a long stretch I had almost nothing from organic search, and getting onto page one is very hard. But on episode 83 I was looking at 477 impressions in 28 days, up 167 on the week. It moves.

The format that suits a search like this is short: a 60 to 90 second walkthrough, your screen and your voice, open on the search, show it done.

In Underway, the suggestion comes with how to film it written out, and a Film this button. I click Film this walkthrough and boom, we're in. It edits itself. It adds the intro, it adds the outro, it thinks about the search engine optimisation for YouTube and for Google, and it puts it out. It goes on the article and it goes on YouTube.

The reason that matters is the one I keep coming back to. The thought of doing this with lighting, with scripting, with hooks, with editing is what put me off documenting in the first place. Take those out and a search-titled walkthrough is a few minutes of talking over one tab.

I am honest about the rough edges too. Looking at that suggestion screen while filming this, it was killing me. There is a lot on it, it is hard to read, and the rows do not light up when you hover over them. I had added a hover state so they go light, because black screens like that are hard to read, and it was not working. So I went and fixed it.

Choosing the tab instead of the full screen costs you one extra click at the start of the recording. That is the whole cost of the technique itself.

The walkthrough is a minute or two of talking, plus whatever time you spend getting the tab into the right state first. If you are editing afterwards, add the edit: the crop, the trim, the title, the description, the thumbnail, the upload. That is where the hours go, and it is the part most people stop doing after a week.

With Underway the edit is not a step. You talk once and the finished episode arrives with the intro, the outro and the words written. The time cost is the talking.

Publishing to both places is the last bit of time. The video goes on YouTube, the article's link goes in the description, and the video goes on the article. Done together it is minutes, not a project.

Tab sharing suits anyone filming software walkthroughs, tutorials or build-in-public updates from a browser. It suits people whose screens contain things they would rather not show, which is most people running anything real.

It does not suit you if what you need to record lives outside the browser: a desktop app, a design tool you run natively, anything where the action moves between applications. Window or full screen capture is the right choice there, and you accept the tidying up that comes with it.

On the wider habit: Underway is for people building something who mean to document it but stop at the camera and the edit. If you do not want to speak, a written journal will suit you better. If you want a produced podcast with a script, guests and an editor, use a studio.

Off camera is fine here. You can answer by voice and it is still a numbered episode, and the cut keeps what you said, in the order you said it.