Podcasts are a great way to share information, speak to your audience, engage with your clients and customers, and build your brand presence. You can cover a wide range of topics in your podcasts. For instance, a weekly SEO podcast by SEO Vault discusses Google’s algorithm updates and SERP changes. You can listen to this podcast for the latest updates by Google and learn about what is working for SEO and other related topics.
Making Your Podcast SEO-Friendly
A podcast will be useless to your brand if people cannot find and listen to it. Optimizing your podcast and making it SEO-friendly can help you reach a larger audience and build a stronger brand presence. Below are tips for making your podcast SEO-friendly:
Know What is Trending
Research trending topics to build your podcast episodes. Like blog posts, your podcast needs relevant and trending topics to keep a listener interested. Once you narrow down the topic, do keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to this topic. These keywords will give you a starting point to outline the themes and questions you can cover during the podcast.
Create a Strong, Keyword-Friendly Title
How do you get people interested in your podcast before they listen to it? You will need something to grab their attention. This is where the title comes into the picture. Choose the topic you think is most relevant to your podcast from your keyword research. Add this keyword naturally to your podcast title. Ensure your podcast title is interesting and instills curiosity in the readers. At the same time, optimize it with relevant keywords so it shows up in search results. While each episode will have keyword-friendly titles, ensure the most important keywords are used in the podcast title. However, don’t overstuff the title with keywords to avoid getting penalized. You can also use subtitles if your podcast’s primary keyword doesn’t organically fit into your main title.
Don’t Ignore Keyword Placement
Many people think the podcast title is the only place where you can add relevant keywords. But this is not true. You can use keywords in individual episode titles as well. But you should avoid using the same keyword again and again. Instead, choose different keywords or variations of the same keyword for each episode. This will allow your podcast to rank for a wide range of topics.
You can also add keywords in your podcast description. While the title will grab people’s attention, the description will explain what your podcast is exactly about in detail and entice people to click on the link. The description should ideally include the following:
- As many relevant keywords as organically possible
- A call to action
- Links that take listeners to another location online, like your social media page.
Target Relevant Questions in your Episodes
Most of Google’s searches today are voice searches. When people talk into their devices to look for something, they typically ask an actual question instead of saying a few random words. Titling your podcast with the exact same question you will be covering will make it easy for users to find your content on search. It will also increase the chances of your podcast ranking higher in search results.
Create a Website or Blog Post to Increase Your Reach
Creating a blog post about your podcast or having a website feature is a great way to make your podcast SEO-friendly. The webpage or blog post will allow you to appear in more search results. Text content will widen your target audience and help you reach people who may not be used to listening to podcasts. Adding text will also help you target hearing-impaired people who may be interested in your content. Again, you must ensure your blog post or webpage is well optimized with relevant keywords to rank in search results.
Transcribe the Podcast
Transcribing your podcast episodes will also help boost its performance in search results. Transcriptions will help you increase the content on your webpage and reach a larger audience. The transcriptions will also help crawlers read the content of your podcast and identify relevant keywords.
Split the Podcast into Chapters
Splitting your podcast into chapters will make it easy for listeners to grasp everything you are saying. An extremely long podcast can become boring, and your listeners will eventually lose interest. Short podcasts with specific chapters will also help your users skip to parts that interest them most without listening to the entire audio file. In addition, splitting the podcast will give you another opportunity to add keywords to the chapter titles.
Create a Write-Up
Creating a write-up about your podcast before its release is a great idea to promote it. This will create unique content on the podcast page and pique your audience’s interest in the upcoming topic. It will also give you another opportunity to incorporate keywords. Creating the write-up doesn’t mean you can ignore transcribing the podcast. Both of these are two different things. The write-up will give your listeners a brief description of what will be covered in the episode, while the transcription will cover your entire podcast in text for Google to crawl.
Promote on Social Media
While podcasts are auditory media, your target audience should be able to access them on your social media channels. You can choose the social media accounts to promote the podcast depending on the topics covered. For example, if you have thought leadership or serious topics, you can consider promoting the podcast on LinkedIn. However, if you have a fun and relaxed topic, you can promote it on Facebook. Also, consider creating a YouTube channel and adding your podcast to it. Promoting your podcast on social media will help you engage with your listeners, interact with a larger community, and spread the word about your work to a larger audience.
Podcasting is a great way to reach your target audience and build relationships. Creating an SEO-friendly podcast will make it easy for you to reach a larger audience and grow your brand’s presence in search results.
