Make Your Podcast SEO-Friendly

0:01
It would be nice if every podcast had a robust marketing budget to help get the word out about their show. But the reality is, most don’t. Yeah, you can promote to your client list and share some cool stuff on social. But you really want podcast audiences to know about your content. And that’s where SEO, search engine optimization, matters. So how do you make your podcast appear in the search results? That’s what we’re talking about today. Hit it, radio man! Podcast your business.

0:38
Hey, hey, welcome to Podcast Your Business. I’m Sunny Gault. I’m a podcast coach and mentor who’s been podcasting for 17 years. I’m also the founder and CEO of Independent Podcast Network. And I am here to help you create amazing podcasts for your business. Now, I just got back from Podcast Movement. And I’m a little sick kind of sort of, I have no idea what I have. But you can think this sultry voice on a weird little bug that is messing with my vocal cords. Which is why this episode is late getting to you this week. But better late than ever, the show must go on. We are here to create amazing podcasts for your business. And we do this by mastering the Five P’s of podcasting. This is another great reason to have Mr. radio man, I don’t have to talk as much in an episode. All right, the five P’s of podcasting, I talk about this in my online course, which is called how to launch your profitable podcast in 30 days. So the five P’s are prep, plan, produce, promote, and profit prep. Should you even start a podcast? What are some of the big questions you should be asking yourself before you even dive into this whole thing? Plan? What is the look and feel for your podcast? And how is it different from other shows out there? Produce creating your content? What are some tips and tricks to be able to do it the best way possible? Promote How do you tell everyone about it and profit? How do you make money doing this? Because you are doing this for your business? Mr. radio man, what are we talking about today? promote promote chats, right, today, we’re going to discuss how to promote your podcast and your episodes, through SEO, which of course stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is how people find your content. When they go and they search. Maybe it’s Google or another search engine, maybe it is Apple podcasts or Spotify. Whatever search bar they’re typing in, it is going to pull up results based on keywords. So we’re gonna talk about the three places where you need to be mindful of those keywords. When you’re uploading new episodes, this is part of your RSS feed that goes out to all of these different sites. So what areas of your RSS feed are super important for search engine optimization. Next, we’re going to talk about episode transcripts, and how they can help you with your podcast SEO, as well as help you in other areas of your podcast. So we’ll explore that. And then finally, we’re going to talk about the importance of having a website for your podcast. And I’m going to share a story with you of how I went all in on my website and completely turned off social media. That’s what I did. I’m not saying that’s what you have to do. But I’ll share my story with you. We’ll get started right after this quick break.

3:31
SEO, search engine optimization can be intimidating, right? Do you guys feel this way? I didn’t go to school for SEO, I have paid a lot of money for people to try to rank me in different ways. And let’s face it, people get paid like really big bucks to rank different businesses high in search engines. Well, the good news is SEO is much more simple for podcasts. When you just look at promoting your podcast and SEO that goes out in your RSS feed. It is pretty simple. So let’s go ahead and dive into that. This is all about keywords, just like you would be focused on keywords for your website, you’re going to be focused on keywords for your podcast. And there’s three places when you upload a new episode where you need to be mindful of those keywords. Actually, two of the places are more when you’re starting your podcast and then the third one is really more about when you upload a new episode. Okay, so let’s break this down. The first place is your podcast name. What did you decide to call your podcast? Now I have to tell you I made a pretty big mistake when I was developing my parenting was actually a show about pregnancy but I talk about my pregnancy and parenting podcast right. And I was trying to be all cutesy with the name. And this was a show that was specifically about pregnancy for the first you know for the nine months that you’re pregnant. What do moms go through? And we explore all these different topics. And they didn’t want to use the word pregnancy because I thought that sounded kind of boring. So I called the show Preggie Pals, P-R-E-G-G-I-E. And it totally messed me up for people finding my show. Nobody is searching “preggie”. They’re searching pregnancy and pregnant and maybe maternity, nobody’s searching, Preggie Pals, and it really hurt my show in the beginning. Now later on, I added a tagline. And that’s what I include in the show title as well. So if you have messed up the name of your podcast, you know, you don’t want to go back and rebrand everything, consider adding a short tagline. So mine is Preggie, Pals: Your Pregnancy, Your Way. I got the word pregnancy in there, my numbers went back up. I’m good to go. So think about your podcast name, keep it short and sweet. And focus in on those keywords.

5:59
Okay, now the other thing, as you’re creating your show that you need to be mindful of is the author tag, it’s going to ask you Who is creating this content. So when your author tag, you should put your name, you can also put some of your titles, you got to keep it short, though, okay, Apple used to ding people for this, I don’t really know if they’re doing that anymore. You certainly don’t want to load keywords in there. Okay, be fair to everybody. But if you have, you know, as part of your title, it has some good keywords in there, then it makes sense to include your title in there, or perhaps the name of your business has some really good keywords in there. So be mindful of your author tag. And what really matters when you’re uploading new episodes. So after you’ve created your show is the episode titles. Again, you do want to keep these short, nobody likes super long titles. If you’re looking at a podcast on your mobile device, they’re not gonna be able to see the whole title if you make it super long, right. But make sure you’ve got keywords in there that are relevant to the content that you’re talking about. I cannot tell you how many times I see podcasters. And they’ll interview someone and the name of the episode will just be the person’s name. And these aren’t even necessarily popular people. But even if they were like celebrities or something like that, still, you want to know what what is that person talking about. So make sure you can put their name in there, but make sure you give some keywords that people would be searching for if they were interested in if they wanted to find content like you’re producing. Okay, so those are the three places your podcasts name, your author tag, and your podcast episode titles, where you need to put keywords, because when you go searching in Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or Google podcasts, those are the places that their little bots or whatever they are, think that’s the technical term, right? So you can tell I am not an SEO genius. But there are some things that I’ve definitely learned. So if you want your podcast to pop up when people do the searching, make sure you focus on those three things for your actual podcasts and your RSS feed.

8:16
Now let’s talk about how episode transcripts can help SEO. I do recommend for every episode you put out, you have a transcript that you know you guys know what a transcript is, right? It is the written word of everything that’s in your episode. And I recommend that each episode has its own transcript. Why? Because there’s more keywords. Because most of your content is in audio format. Or if you’ve got a video podcast, it’s in video format. So you’re not getting all of the benefit of having the words directly on the page. Now I made a mistake early on. Okay, I didn’t have all of my podcast transcribed. So I had to go back and transcribe hundreds of shows. That was my first mistake. Second mistake is that even when I put it on my website, it wasn’t on the same page as the episode player. For whatever reason for SEO purposes, that’s a big no, no. So make sure that when you have an episode transcript, it goes on the same page as your player. And then you’ve got your headers on your page with all the good keywords and stuff, which is similar to blogging, you would do some of that as well. But make sure it’s on the same page. Now you’re not going to get the exact same boost as a blog post would because you’re not going to have as many of those headers and sub headers and things like that. But it can still help you with SEO. So I recommend that you do it. Now in addition to that, it will improve accessibility, which is really important as well, right. I’ve gotten a couple of emails from people this is before I had transcripts on my website that said, we really love your content. We think it’s amazing. Say we want to share it with other people. But we’re hearing impaired, you know, do you have the transcript available, it’s difficult for us to, you know, just be able to listen to your episode. And so if you get someone emailing you like that, you make the decision pretty quick that you’re going to start to do transcripts for your show. So I highly recommend that. The other way that this can help is with you repurposing your content. So if every episode is transcribed, then it’s really easy to take that content and repurpose it in other ways. For example, many times, I have used my transcripts to write blog posts, maybe not of the entire podcast episode, but maybe I take a certain topic that we discuss, and that’s an offshoot that I create a blog post from, or maybe I use a portion of that content for a downloadable write something that I want people to download in order to get their email address, so I can work with them in the future. Or maybe it’s for a social media graphic, maybe I want someone’s quote on there. So there’s so many different ways that you can use this. But if you don’t know what the words are, you’re not going to get very far. That totally rhymed. And I didn’t mean for it to know as far as resources that you can use for this, I prefer otter.ai. That is a really accurate transcription service, it is all done by machine. So you’re not going to have an actual person going through it. But I usually just upload my podcast file of my completed episode, it will go through it will transcribe it. And then I’ve got the ability to go in and edit it. And I really don’t have to do that much. Maybe change some people’s names. And you know, if there’s any medical terms or unusual words, I’ll have to go back and fix that. But it maybe takes me 15 or 20 minutes to do a 30 to 45 minute episode, so it’s totally worth it. In the links below this episode in the description, I have a referral code for you guys. If you want to get more minutes as part of your otter.ai account, as well as some other cool features for free, you can sign up with my referral link.

12:12
Now let’s talk about your website. You all have a website for your business, please tell me you do if not get one ASAP. And for your podcast, I recommend putting the word podcast in your main navigation. And then every episode needs to have its own separate post and link that just goes to that episode. And we do that for two main reasons. First, whatever you call, your episode is going to be in the link. And that gives you a lot of SEO value. If those keywords are in the links. Second, you want people to be able to go directly to an episode. So if you’ve got a guest on your show, you want to be able to give them the link directly to an episode. You don’t want to say go to this player and then it shouldn’t be the first one in the player. But you may have to look around for it. No, no, no, no, no. You want a unique link that will always be there there will always be accurate. So whoever promotes this is promoting the right content. Now earlier in the show, I kind of teased the fact that I was going to tell you a story about how I went all in on my website. And it’s true. About two years ago, I had just had enough of social media, I was running ragged, I wasn’t even putting out the best content on social, I was just there because everyone told me I had to be there. So I made the somewhat difficult decision to literally shut down pretty much all of my social media accounts, the only thing I kept was LinkedIn and YouTube, I got rid of everything else. And instead of focusing on social media, I put all of my effort into my website, creating content on a regular basis, doing YouTube videos. That’s what I focus in on now. So when I talk about the importance of a website, trust me, I know what I’m talking about. Now, I can’t say I have any official metrics to share with you that that’s the way you should go with your podcast. I’m not saying that. But I will say since just focusing in on my content and not worrying about social media, I have had at least three times the amount of advertisers reach out to me, this is for my parenting shows, and a ton more people find the content for Independent Podcast Network and choose to be members of our network. So that’s enough proof for me. So there you have it tips for putting keywords in your podcast using episode transcripts. And then of course, putting it on your website so you can promote it and everyone can find your content. Are you still considering creating a podcast for your business? I’ve got five big reasons that will make you start today. I’ll tell you how to get my free podcasting guide for entrepreneurs after the break.

13:44
Why should you seriously consider starting a podcast for your business? You’re listening to this podcast you’re obviously interested. But how will your business benefit? I’ve got five reasons for you in my free PDF, check out the link in the episode description. And if you need a little bit more guidance as you launch your podcast, I would love it if you would consider working with me through my coaching packages, there is a price for every budget. Again, all of those links are in the description until next week. Remember, podcasts are awesome!