Why Consistent Podcast Titles Matter From Youtube To Apple To Your Own Website

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today. Get ready to finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey everyone, welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard, your host for today. And today we are talking about your titles for your episodes. And I'm not talking about how to title your episodes. That's a really discussion for another time. I'm talking about why consistent podcast titles matter. And this means across different mediums from YouTube to Apple Podcasts or the other listening apps to your own website. I think with podcasters often the title of episodes is an afterthought. I think most podcasters know if they're having an interview or a discussion with somebody else, who they want to interview, what discussion they want to have, or if you're doing a solo cast and you're just like I am today, speaking on a subject that you want to communicate to your audience, they understand what they want to talk about. But the title is one of those things that I think is all too often.

Left to the end if not avoided. It's like reluctantly, oh, I need to title it. Oh, I really should think about that title. What's a good title? What's not a good title, right? But titles are really important. But what I want to share today is as important as what the title is. It's very important when we are multicasting our content, when we're publishing a podcast and a blog post that's related to that. And many of you may call that show notes or think of that as your show notes that that title should be consistent. But many of us are also recording and distributing video to a YouTube channel, publishing that video on our website, among other places. Maybe you've gone live on Streamyard or Facebook or LinkedIn. I even this week got a new customer that does Amazon live stream videos. And I'm like, what? I mean, I'm in this business and I hadn't heard of that before. Well, tell me about that. That was fascinating for me to learn. And it's going to be the subject of a future podcast episode. I can tell you that right now. It's very exclusive invitation only thing. You have to be an influencer and be invited at this point to do that on Amazon. But wow, fascinating stuff. But more to the point, when you are publishing, distributing video or going live, it's very important that your titles are consistent across all the platforms. Right now, as I'm recording this episode, I am recording it live, broadcasting live on Facebook to my private Facebook group, only for customers, so they get the advanced look at all that. But still my title is. And actually because this episode is talking about consistent titles, my title is why consistent podcast titles matter from YouTube to Apple to your own website. Now, we could talk about that title just for a moment. Again, this is not a how to on how to title your episodes today. It's more about what you do with them across all the platforms. But we were very specific in choosing this title. Where we're mentioning YouTube, we're mentioning Apple, and of course your own website.

Platforms that you want to mention different keywords, you want to be in that title. It's very important. And we've chosen YouTube and Apple as key ones to be in there. And of course, podcast titles is the other one. Because a lot of people search in Google on podcast titles because they want to learn what's important about podcast titles. What do I need to know about them? Well, today, again, not going to take a deep dive. I may mention a few aspects of creating a good podcast title, but this is not a deep dive on how to make the best titles. But it is more of a discussion about how we consider them across all the different platforms that our content is published and why that's important.

I have actually something we're preparing for an upcoming trade show and talk. Tracy's giving it at she Podcasts October in Scottsdale, Arizona. And I usually don't ground these things in time. I know some of you may be listening to this after mid October, but we're going to be at the she Podcast event in Scottsdale October 14 to 17. And you know, that is something that if you're listening to this or watching this in advance of that you might consider coming. And we have some discount available code for tickets if you want to go. But we're preparing a bunch of things for that event and one of them, and I'm holding up here is are your episode titles click worthy? And this is something that we're going to have available to discuss. And so I just give you some example of a decent title and a better title. And this is just a little bit of this episode here where I'm going to show you a difference between a decent title and an even better title. And then we're going to get into the importance of consistency across platforms. So here's a decent title. Three Ways to Be More Confident. Yeah, that's a decent title. It's going to get people's attention. I think people like titles that talk about actionable things you can do. And here, you know, before you listen to this episode or watch this episode, they're going to be three things you can take away from that. But here is a better title. Three Unexpected Traits of Confident Leaders with Tracy Hazard. So you can see there are different things in there. You're building anticipation. Talking about three unexpected traits, not just three ways, but when you say unexpected traits, that kind of builds some anticipation. Ooh, what are unexpected traits? All right, wait a second. I think I may want to know about that. Builds a little anticipation and curiosity. It sets up that there's a payoff that these are unexpected ways. And then it tells you it's talking about leaders. Not just about being confident, but of confident leaders. And, oh, I want to be a leader. I want to be a confident leader. Yeah, I'm going to listen to that. And then who is delivering the message with Tracy Hazard? So what's even better about that does relate to what my primary subject is today, about why you want to have consistent titles across different platforms. A lot of it is about SEO. It is about what comes up in search results when people Google something about being more confident. Confident leaders, things like what's going to come up in the search results. Well, there are probably more things to. You're casting a wider net for when you have that even better title than the decent title. Okay, now here's another example where of sharks. Okay, there's actually titles that we've looked at and used sharks. Talking about maybe business sharks. It could be A lot of people search on shark tank. Sharks are considered business people that are maybe preying on others. But here's an even better title than just Beware of Sharks is Beware of Sharks colon. This is another approach. The New Rules of Funding with Tracy Hazard. So again, we're talking about who it's with. Again, SEO, getting your name out there and associated with these other terms, that makes a better title, but then new rules of funding. So the catchy part, Beware of sharks gets people's attention, but the colon, then New Rules of Funding really tells you what you're talking about regarding sharks. There's just a little more information. And though that phrase maybe gets associated with the word sharks, things like that, so you can see that there's a better title there. And here's a third. So I'm just going to go through three quickly. Battle of the Banks, that would be a decent title, but an even better title is Battle of the Banks. Again.

How small Banks are making a comeback with Tracy Hazard. So again, as the host, your name in there, or if it's your guest you're featuring, it could be the guest name you're featuring and not your name. I mean, your name is probably associated with pretty much every episode you do anyway. But things to consider about titles, not just so short, something catchy at the beginning, a colon a little more descriptive, and then maybe who the special guest is or who you're wanting to feature in that title. Those are all pretty important. And then again, not trying to take too deep a dive into the structure of titles today, but just wanted to set up a couple examples there so that you understand when we're talking about putting out our video on YouTube, putting out our podcast on Apple, having our blog post on our website, maybe doing a live stream through streamyard that's going live to Facebook or doing a live to now Amazon Live, which is a thing, or LinkedIn Live, whatever it might be, those titles being consistent is very helpful. So now let's start to talk about why it's important to have those consistent titles. Remember podcasting, we always recommend you have a comprehensive blog post for each episode published on your website. The blog on your website, because your website should be the home base for your show, should be the resource for your listeners, where they go to get more information. That's all very important. And if you work with us, you know that, I mean, we do this in our done for you production with all of our customers, they don't really get a choice. If they're doing video, we're producing a video and putting it on YouTube. If they're obviously the recording audio, because the podcast, we're putting that on the podcast apps. And if they work with us, they're getting a comprehensive blog post whether they want it or not. Because we don't produce episodes without that. There's a huge SEO component to that content marketing component. It's very important. It helps you be found by more listeners. But when people search on something in Google, which is usually their primary go to, if they're already intending to watch YouTube video or they're not already intending to find a podcast episode, they're going to go to Google first. So in Google, what Google does is Google serves you up several different kinds of content. So if you were searching on new rules for funding or the latest funding rules or current funding rules, whatever that might be. Your Google is going to serve you up several different kinds of content on the same page. One, it's going to show you YouTube videos that are available. Why? Because Google owns YouTube and it knows some people would rather watch a video than read a blog or listen to a podcast. But all three of those are going to come up. So in what order depends on Google seeing your past searches and knowing what you prefer to consume first. It knows if each of us prefers to read first, listen first, or watch first. So it's going to put all those on page one. But some of us will get videos first, some of us will get podcasts first, some of us will get blogs first. And I'm talking underneath the sponsored content, the ads. There's always some ads at the top, but when you get below the ads, it's the organic content which is the real important content. So all those are going to come up together. So one of the reasons it's really important to have consistent titles is guess what? Your blog post on your website gets closely associated with YouTube content on YouTube. Not only content on YouTube, but then content on the podcast apps. So it elevates your content. Things that are on Facebook, things that are on YouTube, things that are on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts or Spotify are associated with and related to similar content on your own website. That elevates your website in the eyes of Google and in the rankings. It is so important that we have consistent titles. Plus people, if they prefer YouTube and they might check that out first. Usually they're going to check out a couple of results for whatever they've searched on and not just leave it to YouTube. They're going to see, oh, well, wait a second, there's this other content here and oh, it's a blog. I click it, I get to this blog, which ideally looks like a magazine page for your episode, that has the YouTube video embedded there anyway. But there's a lot more content and a lot more value for them. So having those consistent titles across all those platforms helps your show come up in multiple different formats, multiple different ways in the search results. And then the person searching can decide which kind of content do they want to consume first. They can have what they prefer first, but they're also going to be reminded multiple times for what else is there for them to consume on your episode. Here's the other great thing it does, because you have this title in multiple different ways consistently on all these different platforms. Think about it you have your blog post and you put out a Facebook post where you have copied and pasted the blog post URL for that episode in Facebook, in LinkedIn, all these different places, that same title ends up being published on Facebook. It's published on LinkedIn, every different social platform, it's published on Twitter or Instagram. All these different places, there are so many results for that same content that anything else that was published and Google had in their search algorithms for that search term gets pushed further down on the page. Because now you don't just have one thing that has that title and it's coming up for that search term related to you. You've got multiple, at least three to half a dozen or more depending on all the different social posts that are happening, all the different places that it's being shared by you, by your guest, and then obviously buy new listeners or fans. So think about it. All these different things, push down any other results because Google is usually going to provide not only the most relevant search results, but the most current, the newest first. And then older things get pushed down. It also helps because you have multiple different posts on different platforms using the same title elevates the importance of new search terms. SEO that comes from that title. See, there's a reason why when we publish an episode of our podcast and or an episode of our done for you clients podcasts that the blog post URL that permalink it's also called which is what eventually when people click something in Google, it's sending them to for the blog post. There's a reason why the title of the episode is also.

Within that blog post URL that permalink meaning the web address on your website for that episode contains the title in those keywords. Now, sometimes there's some slight variations and slight variations are okay. They probably don't allow colons I think in a blog post URL. So if you had that title beware of sharks colon and then the next thing that doesn't matter, you don't have to have the colon there. The SEO is not that picky. It's really looking for words and words that are closely associated with each other. But one important factor in your blog post being ranked for some of the primary phrases keywords that the primary keywords in the title be in the title be in the blog post URL be in the metadata or the snippet they call it. And I'm not trying to teach SEO here in this episode, but for every piece of content there are opportunities to reinforce the primary phrases. That it's going to come up for in search. And we configure this for ourselves. We do it for our clients. But you can do it for yourself. If you listen to this podcast and you're just doing it yourself, that's great. You want to learn all the different ways to reinforce the title. And that's so that it. When Google starts to see people searching on it. Well, there's this, there's that, there's the other thing. There's multiple things coming up for that search title.

Whoa.

The search criteria is important and it's going to list them all on page one, ideally of that search term.

So we always configure our episodes for what we think those primary search terms are, and they're in the title again. That's part of why you want to reinforce it and have the same title everywhere. Now, one thing that I want to share that's very important and some of you might be thinking, well, it is definitely critically important that a blog post for your episode be original and only contained on one website. You cannot publish that same content on a second website or multiple websites. And sometimes this is a mistake. Co hosts of a podcast maker. We have some podcasts that have two, three, or even four regular co hosts that are participants. You cannot have duplicate blog content on multiple sites without doing some special things. That's really tricky. And trying to make sure Google doesn't see that post on multiple sites. There are things you can try to do. I'm not going to really talk about that. It's highly technical because it doesn't always work well. Anyway. You really want your main blog post for the episode to be just on one website. And there's one primary website that's the home of the podcast and the podcast content. Now, if you want to have your podcast audio on multiple websites, absolutely go for that. Nothing wrong with that. Your podcast audio can be available as track players or as a big window player of all the episodes of your show can be on as many different websites as you want them to be, and it just makes your content available on multiple websites. If you've got a website that's willing to have your content, your audio content, or your videos too, embedded in their website, by all means, go ahead and do that. No reason not to do that. But the written content Google's very particular about that can only exist on one website. And that's why podcasters who create comprehensive blog posts that are unlocking all the SEO power of what they said in the episode are getting very high keyword rankings for their own website. There's equity that gets built there. But again, your blog will be associated and related to all these other pieces of content on all these other platforms. And when people see one, they're going to see the others. They start experiencing some of it all. Right now I want to go to this blog post. Here's another piece of content I'm going to check out. And there's more for them to experience on your website. Brings more traffic there. And then of course, they see whatever else it is you have to offer as a podcaster or a business person. So you can hopefully start to see why it's very important, all these different ways of broadcasting your episode content to the world. It's very important to have these consistent titles from YouTube to Apple to Spotify to your own website and of course on social platforms as well. Facebook, LinkedIn, very important to all and associated. And you're going to start to dominate search pages that are related to that term or to that title, Right? Or that term that's within the title. So, really important stuff, and I hope it's becoming clear to you listening to this or watching this video that titles should not be an afterthought. They are really able to help you significantly in how you reach other people, how you are found, and your level of authority as a content creator, as a Persona out there on the Internet in the eyes of Google and on social media, in the eyes of LinkedIn or any other whatever your primary platform is, it's really very important that you get that authority and equity that comes from the SEO of your episodes. And the title is really probably the most important part of that SEO. Now, I want to be transparent here that Google will decide on their own when they scan your blog post for your episode, go through all the phrases and words in there, they're going to decide on their own what they think is relevant to what people are searching for on their platform. So even if we say, hey, beware of sharks, colon the New Rules of Funding with Tracy Hazard, we think obviously those are some of the most important phrases that we want this post to be found for, because it's in the title. That's great, but Google's going to scan the post and yeah, they're going to see that. They're going to associate it with that, no question. But they're going to decide on their own, hey, there's this other phrase that 325,000 people searched on last month in Google Search Bar. So you know what we're associating that post with that phrase as well. That's great. That always happens. There should be dozens of phrases in every episode, especially with the blog post, because Google's primary search algorithm is related to written content more than anything else. So that's why this stuff gets converted to text, put in your website. So you get found. People click the end up on the blog. They can watch, they can listen, or they can read, depending. If you've got all that kind of medium embedded there and published there, they'll decide on their own what's really important. I'll give you another example that I think really illustrates this well. That is a podcast episode that Tracy and I recorded of feed your brand podcast. I want to say back in 2017, I think it was, or about four years ago, I think I'm remembering this right. But guess what? You can go to politize.com and search on the feed your brand page. There's a search bar through our blogs, and you can search on this term and you'll come up with this episode if you're interested. And you can also search on some of these same terms in Google. And you should find it now. Four years ago, okay, we recorded an episode on best and worst podcast websites. Something like that. I think it's the best and the worst podcast websites. What we were talking about in that episode was about the platform that you use for your website, whether it's WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Kajabi, ClickFunnels, whatever that were. That type of platform is what we're talking about. We weren't ranking the best podcast websites. We were talking about the platform podcast websites are built on. We had a particular reason for doing this. We had experience and belief that WordPress was one of the best platforms for websites. We still believe that today, in the four years since, that's only been reinforced and proven over and over again. But we decided to put out an episode that was providing information on what we believed were some of the best and some of the worst podcast website platforms. Now, we didn't use the word platform in the title. I think it was literally best and worst podcast websites, which I think gets your attention pretty quick. Well, we recorded that episode, we prepared it, we had our blog post, we had our audio recording. I don't remember if we were publishing video at the time. We may not have been back that far, but there's a chance we did so many years ago. But we published certainly the podcast episode and the blog post at the same time on the same day. And it was in the summer of 2017. So it was at least four years ago, and we usually publish our episodes in the wee hours of the morning, like between midnight and 3am, well within 11 hours by noonish. On the day that episode published, we actually got an email for somebody who was not happy with some of what we said, that when somebody publishes something on podcast websites, they wanted to be alerted to it. So we sort of got a tip off. I got an email from the CEO of a company who thought that we had disparaged, or disparaged, maybe a too strong a word, had sort of been highly critical of their platform. And in fact, after I pointed out to him, I'm not so sure you read that the right way. In fact, we were actually pretty complimentary about their product or service related to websites. But we then quickly did a Google search and we found that that blog post and our podcast and the other pieces of content we had put out there were ranked on the very first page of Google Search for three different keyword phrases which were best podcast websites, worst podcast websites, and one other. I forget, maybe it was best and worst podcast websites or something. There was some long tail keywords. Some of them were three words or four and five words. But three of the really very relevant search terms on Google. Boom. We came up on the very first page of Google Search within the first day that blog post was published. And that was getting our podcast episode seen and found by so many people that were searching on it. It was a very popular episode as a result, and I wasn't intending to mention that episode today or I would have looked up if we had a video for it or not. I don't really remember, but if we did, obviously it would have had the same title. But it's really important again for these same reasons that not only do you want to come up on the first page of Google Search for as many search terms as possible, it can happen very quickly the same day you publish an episode. As long as your URL anyway for your website is not brand new, you're going to be in the Google sandbox for a couple of months. When you have a brand new URL. If you have a new website but an existing URL that has trust with Google, then it happens very quickly, much quicker. But the only reason that this wouldn't happen is if Google doesn't really have a profile on your domain yet and doesn't know what kind of content you're going to publish. As long as they know once you start publishing regular content, then your content gets scanned. By Google. Indexed is the term meaning ranked and associated with different keyword terms. And all your stuff comes up in their search. And the more you publish, the better it all does. And that's the whole point of using your podcast to be seen, heard, and found. Obviously, you're being heard on all the podcast apps, and. And that's awesome. I mean, your podcast, if you already have one, is syndicated on all the different apps where people are getting their podcast content today. And if they're looking for a podcast, hopefully you'll be found when they search on subjects that are in alignment with what you do.

This is about being found in a broader context. Okay. Your podcast. I love podcasting. I love the podcast ecosystem, and I love recording these podcasts. I have fun doing it. I have a little more fun when Tracy and I are here together this month. That's not really possible, so I'm recording a few episodes without her. But I really enjoy doing it. I enjoy providing value to our listeners, providing them some, hopefully actionable tips they can take advantage of and help themselves be seen, heard, and found by more people who would like to be listening to your show, but they just don't know it exists. And if you leave your podcast just as a podcast, an audio show within the podcast ecosystem, you're only going to be found by so many people. Now, fortunately, there's tens of millions of people listening to podcasts. I mean, I think even over a hundred million in the US Listening regularly to podcasts. So there's a big market of people wanting to listen and who are listening. Great. But as big a market as that is, and as wonderful as it is to be found in your podcast, it's even more important that you get found where the vast majority of people who want to learn something or want to be entertained or want to investigate or discover something, educate themselves or feed their minds. Search first. And the statistics, the numbers consistently say when people want to find something, they're going to go to Google first. Primarily, that's what they're doing now. Yes, there's other ways people search. There are other search engines. But fundamentally, Google is not only the number one search engine. And remember, of course, YouTube is the number two search engine, and Google owns YouTube. But let's just take that comparison for a minute just to illustrate the proportionality of the. Which one is more important. And that's not even the podcast apps, okay, Like Apple podcasts or anything. I mean, number one search engine worldwide, Google, especially in the U.S. google. Number two, YouTube. But YouTube, even though it's the number two search engine, it's not like Google's 50% of searches and YouTube is 40%. No, no, no, no. Google is 90 plus percent of searches. YouTube is a far distant second and it's a single digit percentage of searches. I do have a graph I can put in the blog post for this episode@potatoes.com of some articles that show you this. And you don't have to just take my word for it. I mean this is published data that is absolutely verifiable. Google's number one, YouTube's number two. But YouTube is like 2 or 3%. It's so low. And then all these other ways that people are searching for things are even distant 3rd, 4th, 5th, 12th, 20th. I mean all the other search engines are slicing up very, very small percentages of a fraction of a percent of market share of searches. So you can understand why it's so important to come up in Google. It's people's number one go to. Even if they're a podcast listener, a lot of times they search on Google first. They don't just go to search for a podcast. Now podcasts will come up in that Google search. Great. You can listen to that, you can watch that and get that information as a podcast if that's how you want to consume it. So that's why what we talk about at Potitize is absolutely. Podcasting is still an ever growing medium. People want to consume things listening to podcasts and I think we all know how powerful that is. But then you want to be found. You want to take that podcast recording and convert it into all these other kinds of content. Video on YouTube, video clips you're posting on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever to get raise awareness through social media, putting it out as a blog post on your website so it gets scanned by Google. And really it's that blog post that's the linchpin that gets indexed for so many more phrases and helps you just be found by more people. And Google matches them up. So you know, when they come to your website, they're in alignment with what you've talked about and hopefully they're going to listen to your podcast and then want to subscribe and then they'll go to their podcast app and subscribe and get everyone you've done. And that's wonderful. That's the whole idea. It's a great way to consume content and more and more people are doing it. So titles, I hope the point has been made clear. Titles across all your different platforms being consistent, as consistent as you can. It doesn't absolutely have to be every word, word for word. It can be close, right? But it's really important and titles are very important. So just want to put an emphasis on the point. Don't let your titles be an afterthought and make sure you realize, hey, you know what? They need to be the same everywhere. Okay, so that's what I wanted to share with you today. Hopefully this provided you some value. If you have any questions or want to see, I will put a link to an article and a pie chart as to search engine market share that I referenced here. And I'll have a link to that past episode of Feed you'd brand about the best and worst podcast websites just so you can see. And I'm going to go google that again today and see if we're still coming up on page one. There's probably been a lot of other things published in the last four years on that subject, so wouldn't surprise me if it came down, but at the time it was right up top and shows the power of podcasting and multicasting your content. And again, those titles being consistent everywhere. So hope you've enjoyed it. I will be back next week with our last episode in this series of Video month. And I know this was kind of a stretch, but video titles in YouTube very important SEO configuring on YouTube. It is relevant. But last in our series on Video next episode. So come back and check that out. Until then, this has been Tom Hazard on Feed your brand.

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