Click-Worthy Episode Titles

How do you write your episode titles? Serious question. It sounds easy, right? It is, you just choose something descriptive and evocative. But does that guarantee a click?

A few weeks ago I authored a podcast growth thread on Twitter containing five things that I see podcasters doing wrong every day and quick ways to fix them.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going deeper into each of these problems to add more context, take a closer look at how to implement the fix and why I suggested each particular approach.

Last time, I talked about why you shouldn't buy that $97 guru crap, before that how to grow your podcast by being more human and the week before, how to produce less and grow your podcast more.

Next up, problem/fix #4, to recap is... your episode titles.

Episode titles are easy. Good episode titles are very hard.

You might have heard about "SEO". It means "search engine optimisation" and here's how Wikipedia describes it:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.[1] SEO targets unpaid traffic (known as "natural" or "organic" results) rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search,[2] news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a website will receive more visitors from a search engine when websites rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). These visitors can then potentially be converted into customers.

Here's my paraphrased rewrite of that as it relates to podcasting:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of new listeners to a podcast from search engines.

As a podcast marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, the computer-programmed algorithms that dictate search engine behavior, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines, and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. SEO is performed because a podcast will receive more potential new listeners from a search engine when shows rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

These listeners can then potentially be converted into followers and fans.

Every podcast app is a search engine. Every. Single. One.

In fact, Wikipedia tells us that, too - look:

...and industry-specific vertical search engines.

With this in mind, then, we need to think about our episode titles like "SEO" titles.

Outside of getting traffic, though, SEO has another goal: to get the click through to...