A short tutorial by Tracy Hazzard about how podcast episode titles affect discovery and listener engagement. She argues for a "two-title" approach: one title tailored to human listeners and a keyword-focused phrase for AI/searchability, and recommends structuring titles (e.g., keyword: headline, use subtitle) to balance attraction and SEO.
You know, this is the thing. When I audit and review for my tv, for my show, the binge factor for my podcast show. When I audit and review people's podcasts and I'm looking through their feed and I'm listening and I'm picking episodes to pick. This is the number one thing I see that is going wrong with very successful podcasters out there. They aren't doing a great job of titling. Now remember, we have a two title rule here, okay? And I want to set that in because this is a potatoes brandcasters rule, right? We have a two title rule. One, you want a certain title that's attractive to podcast listeners, and then you may want another one that serves the AI, serves the bot part of the process. So we try to accommodate both in the title. Sometimes they conflict with each other. In other words, if I put in my keywords, because we are not allowed to keyword CFRAM based on AI rules. However, if you don't put the proper keywords in there, then you don't get noticed if somebody only types in that small phrase, those small things. So podcast monetization might be something that I would normally want to be known for so that if somebody typed that in, then they would in the Apple feed, in Google, in anywhere, they would find my episode, so they would find my show, right? So we want to have those things going on there so that we can understand how that's working and that AI is driving people to it. They do very short phrases because we don't take a lot of time when we're typing into our podcast app, right? When we're searching for shows, we don't type in long convoluted questions. We type in something simple. Now if we're going to ask Alexa, we might form it in a question, right? And so there's a difference in how we do it. And we have to revolves still around the key words that people want. And so I look at that as two to three words that you want associated. You want to lump them together, make them right next to each other so it becomes a phrase. And that's going to be critical to our blog, critical to our searchability. From an AI standpoint, it's not necessarily the most common thing that a listener is attracted to. So when you analyze your headlines from a good headline standpoint, from a journalist or. Or from the standpoint of a editorial integrity, right. You may look at that and go, that should have been simpler. Like that seems weird. So sometimes what we do is we put that phrase colon and then the real headline. And when we create graphics, we take that phrase off of it and we just put the headline. So we have the ability to utilize our headlines in three ways. One, we can utilize a portion of it on the graphic, which is always shortened because the graphic doesn't have a lot of room. We want to have the keyword somewhere because that's critical to the search engine that's finding us. And then we may want to have a longer title, or what I like to use more often is the subtitle, because that's also searchable within our blog post. So we want to combine those things together.
