Consistency is key to success. If you want your podcast to reach more people, then you need to make sure you have consistent podcast titles. In this episode, Tom Hazzard discusses why your podcast title needs to be consistent across all platforms. Tom delves into the reasons why titles are often relegated to the backburner and why they shouldn’t be. He looks at keywords and why consistency matters, especially for SEO and content marketing. Tune in for more podcasting tips and tricks from one of the best in the business.

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

We are talking about the titles for your episodes. I’m not talking about how to title your episodes. That’s a discussion for another time. I’m talking about why consistent podcast titles matter. This means across different mediums from YouTube to Apple Podcasts or the other listening apps to your website. With podcasters often, the title of episodes is an afterthought.

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, 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 is all too often left to the end.

Why Titles Are Important To Your Podcast

If not avoided, it’s reluctantly, “I need to title it. I really should think about that title. What’s a good title? What’s not a good title?” Titles are really important, but what I want to share 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. Many of you may call that show notes or think of that as your show notes, that title should be consistent.

Many of us are also recording and distributing videos to a YouTube channel. Publishing that video on our website, among other places. Maybe you’ve gone live on StreamYard, Facebook or LinkedIn. I even got a new customer that does Amazon live stream videos. I’m like, “What? I’m in this business and I hadn’t heard of that before. Tell me about that.” That was fascinating for me to learn and is going to be the subject of a future podcast episode. I can tell you that. It’s a very exclusive invitation-only thing. You have to be an influencer and be invited at this point to do that on Amazon. Fascinating stuff.

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. As I’m recording this episode, I am broadcasting live on Facebook, to my private Facebook group, only for customers, so they get the advanced look at all that. This episode is talking about consistent titles. My title is, Why Consistent Podcast Titles Matter From YouTube To Apple, To Your Own Website.

We can talk about that title just for a moment. This is not a how-to, on how to title your episodes. It’s more about what you do with them across all the platforms. We were very specific in choosing this title where we’re mentioning YouTube, Apple and your own website. Keywords and different platforms that you want to mention and different keywords you want to be in that title. It’s very important.

Creating Great Titles

We’ve chosen YouTube and Apple as key ones to be in there, and of course, podcast titles. 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? I’m 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 into how to make the best titles. 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.

 

We’re preparing for an upcoming trade show and talk. Tracy’s giving it at She Podcasts in Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re preparing a bunch of things for that event. One of them is, Are Your Episode Titles Click Worthy? This is something that we’re going to have available to discuss to give you some examples, a decent title and a better title. This is just a little bit of this episode here where I’m going to show you the difference between a decent title and an even better title. Then, we’re going to get into the importance of consistency across platforms.

Here’s a decent title, Three Ways to Be More Confident. It’s going to get people’s attention. People like titles that talk about actionable things you can do, and here you know that before you read 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 Hazzard. You can see there are different things in there. You’re building anticipation by talking about three unexpected traits, not just three ways when you say unexpected traits, that builds some anticipation.

“What are unexpected traits? All right, wait a second. I think I may want to know about that.” It builds a little anticipation and curiosity. It sets up that there’s a payoff that these are unexpected ways, and it’s talking about leaders. Not just about being confident, but of confident leaders. I want to be a leader. I want to be a confident leader. I’m going to listen to that. Who is delivering the message with Tracy Hazzard? What’s even better about that does relate to my primary subject is about why you want to have consistent titles across different platforms.

A lot of it is about SEO. It’s about what comes up in search results. When people Google something about being more confident, confident leaders, what’s going to come up in the search results? There are probably more things you’re casting a wider net for when you have that even better title than the decent title.

Here’s another example, Beware of Sharks. These are titles that we’ve looked at and used sharks. A lot of people search Shark Tank. Sharks are considered business people that are preying on others. Here’s an even better title than just Beware of Sharks. It’s Beware of Sharks: The New Rules Of Funding With Tracy Hazzard.

We’re talking about who it’s with. SEO. Getting your name out there and associated with these other terms would make us a better title. The catchy part, Beware of Sharks, get people’s attention, but the colon The New Rules of Funding really tells you what you’re talking about regarding sharks. There’s just a little more information. Though that phrase gets associated with the word sharks, you can see that there’s a better title there.

Here’s a third. Battle of The Banks. That would be a decent title, but an even better title is Battle of The Banks: How Small Banks Are Making A Comeback With Tracy Hazzard. As the host, your name is in there, or it could be the guest’s name you’re featuring and not your name. Your name is probably associated with pretty much every episode you do anyway. Things to consider about titles are, not just so short, something catchy at the beginning, a colon, a little more descriptive, and then who the special guest is or who you’re wanting to feature in that title. Those are all pretty important.

Having consistent titles across all platforms helps your show come up in different ways in the search results. Click To Tweet

Not trying to take too deep a dive into the structure of titles, but I wanted to set up a couple of 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 posts on our website, doing a live stream through StreamYard that’s going live to Facebook, doing a live to Amazon, which is a thing, or LinkedIn live. Those titles being consistent is very helpful.

The Importance Of Consistency

Let’s start to talk about why it’s important to have those consistent titles. Remember, in podcasting, we always recommend you have a comprehensive blog post for each episode published on the blog on your website. Your website should be the home base for your show, the resource for your audience. Where do they go to get more information? That’s all very important.

If you work with us, 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 the video and putting it on YouTube. If they’re recording audio because of the podcast, we’re putting that on the podcast apps. 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. It’s very important. It helps you be found by more people. If they don’t already intend to watch a YouTube video or they do not already intend to find a podcast episode, they’re going to go to Google first. What Google does is serves you up several different kinds of content.

If you were searching for new rules for funding or the latest funding rules or current funding rules, your Google is going to serve you up several different kinds of content. On page one, it’s going to show you YouTube videos that are available. Why? It’s because Google owns YouTube and it knows some people would rather watch a video than read a blog or listen to a podcast. All three of those are going to come up.

In what order, it 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 of those on page one. Some of us will get videos first, some of us will get podcasts first, some of us will get blogs first. I’m talking underneath the sponsored content. There are always some ads at the top. When you get below the ads, it’s the organic content, which is the real important content. All those are going to come up together.

One of the reasons that it’s really important to have consistent titles is, your blog posts on your website get closely associated with content on YouTube. Not only content on YouTube, but then the content on the podcast apps. It elevates your content. Things that are on Facebook, on YouTube, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify are associated with unrelated to similar content on your own website. That elevates your website in the eyes of Google and in the rankings.

 

It is important that we have consistent titles. If people prefer YouTube, then 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, “There’s this other content here. 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.

SEO And The Power Of Consistent Titles

Having those consistent titles across all those platforms helps your show come up in multiple different formats, multiple different ways in the search results. 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 of what else is there for them to consume on your episode.

Here’s the other great thing it does. 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, LinkedIn, and 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 you don’t just have one thing that has that title and that’s coming up for that search term related to you. You’ve got at least 3 to 6 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 guests, and then by, ultimately, your fans.

Think about it. All these different things are pushed down by the other results because Google is usually going to provide not only the most relevant search results but the most current, the newest first. The older things get pushed down. It also helps because you have multiple different posts on different platforms using the same title. It elevates the importance of new search terms, SEO, that comes from that title.

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 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.

Sometimes, there are some slight variations and slight variations are okay. They probably don’t allow colons in a blog post URL. If you had that title, Be Aware of Sharks, colon, 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 it is important. One important factor in your blog posts being ranked for some of the primary phrases and keywords is that the primary keywords in the title, be in the title, be in the blog post URL, being the metadata or the snippet.

For every piece of content, there are opportunities to reinforce the primary phrases that it's going to come up for in search. Click To Tweet

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 come up for in search. We configure this for ourselves. We do it for our clients, but if you’re reading this and doing it yourself, that’s great. You want to learn all the different ways to reinforce the title. When Google starts to see people searching on it, there’s this, there’s that, there’s the other thing. There are multiple things coming up for that search title. The search criteria are important, and it’s going to list them all on page one, ideally, of that search term.

We always configure our episodes for what we think those primary search terms are and that they’re in the title. That’s part of why you want to reinforce it and have the same title everywhere. One thing that I want to share that’s very important and some of you might be thinking. It is 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 or multiple websites. Sometimes this is a mistake co-hosts of a podcast make. We have some podcasts that have 2, 3 or even 4 regular co-hosts that are participants.

You cannot have duplicate blog content on multiple sites without doing some special things that are really tricky and trying to make sure Google doesn’t see those posts 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 posts for the episode to be just on one website. There’s one primary website that’s the home of the podcast and the podcast content.

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. It can be on as many different websites as you want them to be. 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 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. It can only exist on one website. That’s why podcasters that 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 websites.

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. When people see one, they’re going to see the others and they start experiencing some of it. “I want to go to this blog post. Here’s another piece of content I’m going to check out.” There’s more for them to experience on your website, which brings more traffic there. They see whatever else it is you have to offer as a podcast or a business person. You can hopefully start to see why it’s important for all these different ways of broadcasting your episode content to the world.

It’s important to have these consistent titles from YouTube to Apple, to Spotify, to your website and on social platforms as well like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s very important to all and associated. You’re going to start to dominate search pages that are related to that term, or to that title, or to that term that’s within the title.

 

I hope it’s becoming clear to you reading this that titles should not be an afterthought. They are 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, social media, in the eyes of LinkedIn or whatever your primary platform is.

It’s very important that you get that authority and equity that comes from the SEO of your episodes. The title is really probably the most important part of that SEO. I want to be transparent here that Google will decide on their own when they scan your blog posts 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. Even if we say, “Be Aware of Sharks: The New Rules Of Funding With Tracy Hazzard,” we think those are some of the most important phrases that we want this post to be found for because it’s in the title. Google’s going to scan the post and they’re going to see that. They’re going to associate it with that, no question. They’re going to decide on their own. There’s this other phrase that 325,000 people searched on last month in the Google search bar.

We’re associating that post with that phrase. 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. That’s why this stuff gets converted to text and put on your website, so you get found.

People click then 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 illustrates this well. It is a podcast episode that we recorded of Feed Your Brand podcast back in 2018.

You can go to Podetize.com and search on the Feed Your Brand page. There’s a search bar through our blogs. You can search on this term and you’ll come up with this episode if you’re interested. You can also search on some of these same terms in Google, and you should find it. We recorded an episode, The Best and 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, that type of platform is what we’re talking about.

We weren’t ranking the best podcast websites. We were talking about the platform podcasts 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 since that’s only been reinforced and proven over and over again. 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.

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. Click To Tweet

We didn’t use the word platform in the title. It was The Best and Worst Podcast Websites, which I think gets your attention pretty quickly. 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 videos at the time. We may not have been back that far, but there’s a chance we did. We published the podcast episode and the blog post at the same time on the same day. We usually publish our episodes in the wee hours of the morning, between 12:00 AM and 3:00 AM.

Within 11 hours by noon-ish, the day that episode was published, we got an email from somebody who was not happy with some of what we said. They must have had a Google alert set that when somebody publishes something on podcast websites, they wanted to be alerted to it. We got a tip-off. I got an email from the CEO of a company who fought that we had been highly critical of their platform. After I pointed out to him, “I’m not sure you read that the right way.” In fact, we were pretty complimentary about their product or service related to websites.

Google And Keywords

We then quickly did a Google search and we found that blog 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 podcasts websites, worst podcast websites, and one other, I forget, maybe it was best and worst podcasts websites. There were some long-tail keywords. Some of them were 3, 4 or 5 words, but three of the relevant search terms on Google, we came up on the very first page of Google search within the first day that blog post was published.

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. I didn’t intend to mention that episode or I would’ve looked up if we had a video for it or not. I don’t really remember, but if we did, it would have had the same title. It’s important for the 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 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 much quicker.

The only reason that this wouldn’t happen is if Google doesn’t have a profile on your domain yet and doesn’t know what kind of content you’re going to publish. Once you start publishing regular content, 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.

The more you publish, the better it all does. That’s the whole point of using your podcast to be seen, heard and found. You’re being heard on all the podcast apps and that’s awesome. Hopefully, your podcast, if you already have one, is syndicated on all the different apps where people are getting their podcast content, and if they’re looking for a podcast, 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. 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 we are here together. This month, that’s not really possible. I’m recording a few episodes without her, but I really enjoy doing it. I enjoy providing value to our listeners, providing 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.

 

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. Fortunately, there are tens of millions of people listening to podcasts. Over 100 million in the U.S regularly listening to podcasts. There’s a big market of people wanting to listen and who are listening, 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, feed their minds, search first.

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. There are other ways people search. There are other search engines, but fundamentally, Google is not only the number one search engine. Remember, YouTube is the number two search engine, and Google owns YouTube.

Let’s just take that comparison to illustrate the proportionality of which one is more important. That’s not even the podcast apps, like Apple Podcasts. The number one search engine worldwide is Google, especially in the U.S. Number two is YouTube, but even though it’s the number two search engine, it’s not like Google’s 50% of searches and YouTube is 40%. No. Google is 90% plus of searches. YouTube is a far distant second and it’s a single-digit percentage of searches. I do have a graph. I have some articles that show you this, and you don’t have to just take my word for it.

This is published data that is absolutely verifiable. Google’s number one, YouTube is number two, but YouTube is 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. All the other search engines are slicing up very small percentages of a fraction of a percent of the market share of searches. 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. 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. That’s why what we talk about at Podetize is podcasting is still an ever-growing medium. People want to consume things by listening to podcasts. 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 raise awareness through social, putting it out as a blog post on your website, so it gets scanned by Google.

It’s that blog posts that’s the linchpin that gets index for so many more phrases and helps you just be found by more people and Google matches them up, so 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.

They’ll go to their podcast app, subscribe and get every one you’ve done, and that’s wonderful. That’s the whole idea. It’s a great way to consume content. More people are doing it. I hope the point has been made clear. Titles across all your different platforms being as consistent as you can. It doesn’t absolutely have to be every word, word for word. It can be close. It’s really important and titles are very important. I want to put an emphasis on the point.

Don’t let your titles be an afterthought and make sure you realize they need to be the same everywhere. That’s what I want to share with you today. Hopefully, that’s provided you with some value. I’m going to go Google that past episode of Feed Your Brand again and see if we’re still coming up on page one. There has probably been a lot of other things published on that subject, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it came down, but at the time, it was right up top.

It shows the power of podcasting and multicasting your content and, again, those titles being consistent everywhere. I hope you enjoyed it. I will be back next time with our last episode in this series of Video Month. This is a stretch, but video titles on YouTube are very important. SEO configuring on YouTube is relevant and last in our series on video next episode, so come back and check that out. Until then.

 

Important Links

• The Best and Worst Podcast Websites – Previous episode

 

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