105. What Are Best Practices for Episode Names? | Podcasting Tips and Strategies

FAQ Friday answering the podcasting question of "What Are Best Practices for Episode Names?"

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Transcript

Welcome to Podcasting for Solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a podcasting question in five minutes or less. Today's question is, what are best practices for episode names? This question comes from Mikael Woodruff, host of the brand new podcast, Small Ship Cruise Talk. Hey, Mikael. Thanks for listening. This is a complex question. And inside of the podcast growth collective, I have multiple lessons dedicated to this. So if you're interested in more info, be sure to check it out at the podcastteacher.com/collective. Doors are opening soon, but let me try and give you an overview of some of the best practices.

First, I highly encourage you to number your episodes. Even though you're just getting started, your back catalog will be an asset for you down the line. When someone asks a question, you wanna be able to say something like, oh, you need to go check out episode 42. It has some great tips on that for you. I do this in Facebook groups all the time, and I often reference past episodes within my new episodes to refer back to related content. And it's really, really hard to refer people back to prior episodes if they aren't numbered. So I do encourage you to number them, but do not put the word episode or even an abbreviation of EP in your title. I do just the number and a period.

SEO is one of the most important parts of your episode titles because it's one of the few searchable fields within podcast players, and it's very heavily weighted. So it's definitely a best practice to be strategic about incorporating search friendly terms into your episode titles so that you will show up in search results and get discovered by new listeners. We dive really deep into podcast SEO inside of the collective because it's one of the best ways to get new listeners, and it's a completely different strategy than web SEO. Another best practice for naming your episodes is to focus on creating curiosity. You want them to be excited to press play, maybe you want to even create a little FOMO. So for a listener that has already discovered your show, your episodes are already showing up in their weekly queue with a bunch of others. You want to entice them to choose yours to listen to next. You also want to convey the value.

You want to let them know what they're going to get within the episode, of course, at a high level. So for this episode, you would know from the title of what are best practices for episode names that you're going to learn best practices for episode names. Now these FAQ Friday episodes are very straightforward, so that is not a very exciting title, but it is clear about the value and what you're going to get when you tune in. Creating your titles is definitely a combination of these best practices and weighing the different factors for each episode. Sometimes you'll want to be a bit more attention grabby and sensational, and sometimes you're going to want to be more concrete and focused on SEO strategy and the value that you're delivering. It's a balance. If you have a podcasting question, click the send me your question link in the episode description, and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Until next time, happy podcasting.