In this Speak PR episode, host Jim James walks viewers through two free headline analysis tools—ShareThrough and CoSchedule—showing how to interpret their scores (engagement, impressions, word balance) and how to improve headlines by adding context‑sensitive words. He demonstrates the process with a real podcast headline, iteratively refining it to raise its overall quality score, engagement, and impression metrics. Jim explains why longer, context‑rich headlines often perform better, contrasts the tools' differing recommendations, and ties the practice to Speak PR’s broader technology‑assisted marketing methodology. The episode ends with calls to subscribe, join the newsletter, and consider Speak PR’s mastermind program.
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Hi, welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. And on this podcast, I like to share tools and tips that anyone can use in order to get noticed, largely using technology. Today, I'm going to talk about creating headlines and using some of the free headline analyzers that are available online to help you to increase the searchability and the engagement of your podcasts and your articles and your tweets. So I'm going to dive in because I've been helping people on the Speak PR course on creating content. For many people, including me, sitting there with a blank dialog box is one of the most challenging and daunting things you can face. The technology is there to help us, so I wanted to share a couple of tools and give you an example of some work I'm doing so that I can enhance the performance of my podcasts. So now I'm going to just give a quick name check here to somebody who shared a lot of great information, and that is Joe Warnemont over at The Me Aisle. So Joe kindly gave us some great tips about these different tools. Now the first one is called ShareThrough Headline Analyzer. Now ShareThrough is a company that has a number of different tools that you can use, but for the purpose of this episode, I just want to focus in on the headline analyzer. What I like about the ShareThrough headline analyzer is that it's free and easy to use, and also there's no requirement for any registration. You don't have to give it your email address or anything, just gives you the data, which is fantastic. It also gives you some really nice suggestions on headline length, context, alert words, and passive language, and gives you a score. Now it also has, um, an engagement and impressions score, and both of those are defined on the website. So what you can also do is to keep a history per session of the different headlines. So I like that. The other one is called CoSchedule, and CoSchedule is a platform that helps people to do content scheduling. No surprise there. Now this is also a great platform that I've also been using. The downside of the CoSchedule headline analyzer is you do need to give it your name and email address first. That's okay if you don't mind that, but it just does slow down the process a little bit. Again, it's free, it logs your history, and it provides a total headline score for you so you can see which words were emotional, powerful, uncommon, and common. And then it also does this idea of categorizing generic or emotional, and that's something we've talked about in an earlier podcast about whether you're making your content emotional or practical and which way you should be going. So this, this toolset is identifying the word you're using and categorizing that. You're also getting a look at the headlines on search engines and social media, so it's giving you some previews. So quite a lot of detail there. And it also gives you some tips including some links. And you can also, by the way, upgrade. And there are a number of different platforms that can do some of this that are on this article. I put a link into this excellent article in the show notes. But what I've done for the purpose of this podcast, I'm just going to take the CoSchedule headline analyzer and the ShareThrough Headline Analyzer. So they're both called Headline Analyzer. So the first one I'm going to look at is the one by CoSchedule. And what I've done is I've taken a Buzzsprout, uh, podcast that I've got, and the headline that I had was 82.4% of buyers are going to choose award winners, so how can you enter to win? So on the CoSchedule, uh, it took out the point and just put 82 space 4 of buyers are going to choose, and it gave me a score of 52. In terms of the word balance, it said that I had a lot of common words, 48%, no uncommon words, no emotional words, and only 12% of my words were power, which include award and to win. Now it makes some suggestions and says, for example, uh, could I look at my word count? Currently it says my headline is too wordy with 17 words and the character count at 79 is too long. My sentence— my sentiment is positive though. It also gives a nice skimmability where it says when skimming the content, most readers will only look at the first and the last 3 words of a headline, in which case 82.4% of buyers And the final, enter to win. So it's saying that basically people are going to read, 82.4% of buyers enter to win. So is that right or not? Now, if I want to increase my score, I can pay for some additional features. So that's the review, 52 out of 100. Now, if I look at the same headline on ShareThrough, The same headline, 82.4% of buyers are going to choose award winners, so how can you enter to win? This gives me a headline quality score of 54, so 2 higher. And it says the, uh, strengths are that the optimal headline length— more is better. So that's in direct contradiction to the CoSchedule. It says more is better. Longer headlines increase engagement and can tell a better story. Says you've got strong use of context words, and you've got— you're likely to increase the brand lift by using different words in the text. And also that I have got no need— not too much passive. So I don't have words like almost, doubt, guess, for example. Now when I then look at the, uh, recommendations, if you like, lower down on the share-through. It says I have an engagement score of just 20, which is below average, and I have an impression score of 94, which is above average. So it's saying that it's common knowledge less than 1% of all ads are clicked on. So I could use more context words. That's something we talk about on the Speak PR, the need to use place, location, uh, names of brands and places that people can associate with. So I've got a below average on my engagement, um, and I have got above average on my impression score. Um, so that would mean that things that I'm talking about, awards, are more sought after. Now interestingly enough, on the headline share-through, it also gives me the ability to see my history. So It says here that with this particular headline, I've got a 54% overall. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to experiment here by putting in some different words and seeing what I can get better. So now I've changed my headline to 82.4% of Chinese customers choose award winners, so how can you prove you are best? So I've increased my length and I've gone up to 63. And it says more is better. I've got longer headlines, so some of these suggestions are pretty much the same. But it says now that my engagement score is still only 36%, below average, but my impression score is 94. So I'm going to try one more time because I've gone from 54 up to 63 by having essentially the same content Okay, so now I have used the context guide that you can download for free from the Sharethrough website, and I've made my headline, 82.4% of young Chinese customers approve award winners, so how can you prove you are the best today? Now, by adding in young and approve and prove. And today I have increased my score to 67. So I have increased my score from what was originally 54, which was 82% of buyers are going to choose award winners. So how can you enter to win? We've got 54 with 20 and 94. I've increased my engagement to 43 and my impressions to 98. Now, of course, you have to make sure that you're talking to Chinese customers, and you need to be sure you're proving today. But you get the point. By establishing context, what I'm able to do is to increase the engagement and the impression on this podcast headline. So I'm now at an overall much better score than I was before. And this is all done for free, just looking at what words you've got in your headline and which words you can add that are what we call context sensitive. So in Speak PR, we talk about the need for content to be creative but also to be context sensitive. In other words, for the avatars, the people listening and reading or watching it to associate with it. If it's too generic, of course, then it has no meaning to them. So when you're creating content, if you're creating something that's so generic as to appeal to everybody, it appeals probably to nobody. You can use a tool like ShareThrough or the CoSchedule headline analyzer to start to refine the headlines to get a much better ROI on the time that you spent creating that content. So there are many other tools that we can talk about in what I'm calling the technology-assisted marketing methodology for Speak PR. Today I've just looked at very simply the headline analyzer. So thanks for listening, and I hope you found this of value. And if you do, please subscribe. And if you like to get our newsletter on a Friday from eastwestpr.com, please subscribe, or If you're interested in a mastermind with me, and we have our 5-stage methodology with a 6-week program, check out speakpr.co. And in the meantime, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that if you're going to be writing things, just check that your headline is optimized to make the time you spent worth your while.
