If the following two insights seem trivial – consider titles are the most important thing you can work on.
You can put a ton of extra work into your content, but if the title falls flat, people won’t even give your extra work a chance.
Insight one is about how GPT 4o surprisingly writes high-performing YouTube titles if you give it your video transcript (self-tested).
Insight two is my formula for SEO page titles: “Target Keyword | Benefit or Searcher’s Goal | Brand Name”.
GPT 4o writes better YouTube titles than me
I’ve been doing copywriting – actively working on improving it and doing it daily – for the last 15 years…
And GPT 4o comes up with higher-performing YouTube titles than me.
For those that don’t know, I have a daily digital marketing podcast – today will be 697 consecutive days doing the podcast.
I got this comment 12 days ago: “BTW, you are blowing up on YT recently. I just checked your recent videos and the comments are increasing. Also, more views. Congrats. What happened?”
One of the major things I started doing – honestly – was letting GPT 4o write my podcast titles.
Here are some recent ones:
- The SEO Trick That Skyrocketed My Page from #50 to #1!
- Rand Fishkin on SEO, AI Overviews, and the Future of Content Marketing
- What the Latest Google Core Update Really Changed
- The SHOCKING Truth About Shared Hosting & SEO Rankings (Real Experiment Results)
My workflow used to be:
- Come up with idea for episode.
- Agonize thinking of the title.
- Record podcast making sure to address the title.
- This had the added drawback of making it hard to change the title in the future if I thought of something better.
- Make thumbnail based on title and what I say in podcast.
My new workflow is:
- Come up with idea for episode.
- Record podcast riffing on the idea.
- Give transcribed podcast to GPT 4o with the exact prompt, “Here’s the transcript for today’s podcast. The podcast comes out to YouTube and Spotify/Apple Podcasts. Give me a good title for the podcast episode. Transcript:”
- Pick best title (usually just the first one GPT gives).
- Make thumbnail mostly based on title and a bit of what I say in podcast.
Saves a lot of time and gives more results.
Nobody knows this about SEO page titles
It’s crazy to say but something I’ve found is even established SEOs don’t know how to write effective SEO page titles.
This is my formula:
Target Keyword | Benefit or Searcher’s Goal | Brand Name
Examples:
- Personal Injury Lawyer NYC | Free Consultation | ClaimRise Legal
- Free Business Chat Software | Simplified Team Chat | Chatterly Pro
- Coffee for Headache Relief | Headache-Safe Caffeine | CalmBrew
Most digital marketers: Don’t even have a target keyword.
Most SEOs: Have target keyword but don’t add an extra reason to click.
Sidenote – other SEOs will tell me my page titles are too long and will get cut off by Google. It’s true. The important distinction is that what is not cut off is the keyword and most of the benefit or searcher’s goal.
You can use this tool to test your page title length.
Why my formula gets above average rankings and results:
- The keyword at beginning says, “This result is for you (the searcher)” – which increases clicks.
- The added benefit or searcher’s goal distinguishes your page from others in the search results – increases clicks.
- The brand name (when visible) slightly boosts trust – slightly increases clicks.
- The amount of clicks your result gets relative to other search results is a very strong ranking factor.
- You then just have to make sure you give searchers what they’re looking for right away.
Bonus
My article last week, if you didn’t see, is all about how to humanize ChatGPT for copywriting.
Wrapping
Content that doesn’t get clicked is content that doesn’t get seen.
Do these things to get more clicks to your titles, more views to your brand, and ultimately – more conversions.
Converting
BTW – if you haven’t checked it out – I have a 13.5 hour beginner-to-advanced SEO course entirely about doing SEO that gets you customers.
Not vanity clicks or impressions – but actual customers.
Here are a few of my favorite recent testimonials:
👆 In Angel’s first month, the sales made from Compact Keywords SEO pages already repaid half the cost of the course. And it’s growing everything else – general traffic, ad retargeting, email signups.
My SEO course teaches in 13 hours what it took that SEO manager to learn “in 8 years and hundreds of tests.”
And in case you have had bad experiences in the past with marketing courses (which unfortunately is rampant in this industry):
Compact Keywords, hope you’ll check it out.
