How a Simple Title Change Could Skyrocket Your Podcast's Popularity

A Small Change, A Big Impact: Unraveling the Hidden Influence of Your Podcast Titles on Audience Reach, Engagement, and the Overall Success of Your Show.

Episode titles are often neglected, even though they add a lot of value. Not only for SEO, but also for users. This short issue explains why and shows you a tool that grades your title and generates optimized alternatives.

Surely, you’ve heard of SEO and how much it helps your podcast grow, but how do you differentiate between people who are trying to sell you their latest product and what is actually helpful? I’ll touch on two points.

1. The actual value of SEO for search engines

   
   

2. The far more important value for listeners

SEO: Increasing Your Content Visibility Online 🔎

SEO means Search Engine Optimization and describes how well a search engine finds your content. This can be a podcast, a website, or anything else that is online. Since I am developing tools for podcasters, I’ve come across a couple of podcasts.

A good title should be the default, but I’ve seen many that do not put much weight on it. Episode 20, Episode 21, Ep 05, there are many variations. This is not very appealing even though the content might be great.

I understand the trouble: preparing, recording, editing, and now a creative title? This might be annoying for some people. Imagine the best book with a non-expressive title: Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 — it won’t be a New York Times bestseller, don’t you think?

Think of it that way: How should a search engine pick up on your great podcast without giving it something to work with? An SEO-friendly title is not a novel concept; nevertheless, it’s sometimes overlooked because it can be tedious and time-consuming.

Creating a transcript would also help. I wrote about this and another free tool on Medium as well: LemonSpeak🍋

UEO (User Engagement Optimization): Engaging Your Audience Beyond Clickbait 👥

This is far more important, so let’s break it down. You don’t come across many articles about UEO, so it’s a bit of a leap of faith, but the pieces fit together pretty well. User engagement describes how much a user engages with something.

That can be physical or digital, it doesn’t matter, but to get people to interact with your content, you have to trigger something in them. There are many sides to this.

One of them is known as “click baiting”, which is usually achieved by either inducing fear or making you, the user, feel like you’re missing out (FOMO, e.g., If you don’t read this … ). It’s the bad side of SEO and the internet.

From ‘The Sea Cook’ to ‘Treasure Island’: A Lesson in User Engagement Optimization

I’ll give you a positive example that’s actually super old! Have you ever heard of “Treasure Island”? An adventure novel about sailing, pirates, and buried gold, published in 1883. It’s a bestseller, but it didn’t start out that way.

It had already been published as “The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys” in 1881. The book with that title was not particularly successful when it was first published. The title was probably changed to ‘Treasure Island’ because it better conveyed the adventure and intrigue of the story.

The new title is more evocative and intriguing, suggesting a story of exploration, adventure, and, of course, treasure.

Do you feel the difference? “Treasure Islands” sounds much more exciting to me. It’s a perfect example that showcases User Engagement Optimization.

TLDR: A well-chosen episode title helps with SEO and UEO. Please do it. ✅

The episode Title Grader: A Free App to Optimize Podcast Titles 🛠️

Best of all, I have developed a free tool that will grade your chosen title. It will then suggest alternative, optimized titles.

You can find it on Streamlit:  Episode Title Grader🎈

Exploring more

I write about building free apps that help podcasters do their jobs. If you don’t want to miss an issue or read about other topics that will help your podcasting journey, follow me on Medium or Substack 👉: Exploring AI for PodcastsExploring AI for Podcasts

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