How do you attract listeners to your podcast? Chances are, you don’t just finish up recording your podcast, upload it to your podcast host, and call it a day. You need a promotional plan AND you also need to take care of SEO optimization for your podcast as much as you do for your website.
For example, you make your site work faster, adapt it for mobile devices, and use keywords and meta descriptions. Actually, some of the tips for promoting podcasts in search are the same as for sites.
Here are five SEO strategies to improve your search engine rankings to boost your podcast exposure and attract more listeners and potential clients.
1. Pay Attention to Site Speed
Uptime and loading speed is a crucial ranking aspect in technical SEO. If your website is slow to load, it won’t top the search results.
In order to avoid harming your ranking (and your listeners’ impression of you), you need a fast loading website. How do you optimize your website speed? One of the solutions for speed optimization is to create progressive web applications using Magento 2 PWA Studio or other solutions, depending on your platform.
How is this relevant to your podcast? Podcasts are heavy media files that you need to store. You can use your website hosting to do it, but it requires a lot of server resources.
If the number of your listeners exceeds what the hosting service can handle, it will simply backpedal the broadcast. Therefore, always make sure your platform is capable of seamless podcast delivery to users.
2. Make Use of Podcast Listening Apps
How do you get high podcast rankings on Google? Get others to talk about your podcast on their websites, blogs, social channels, and podcasts. The more your podcast is mentioned and shared, the higher you’ll rank on Google.
Moreover, be sure to distribute your episodes through podcast listening apps. The more apps you utilize, the better. It raises the chances that you’ll reach out to as many people as possible on various sites.
The most popular podcast directories include:
- Apple Podcasts;
- Spotify;
- Google Podcasts;
- Stitcher;
- etc.
According to Statista, Spotify is the most popular podcast provider among the American audience, followed by Apple Podcasts and Pandora.
Image credit: Statista
Take a look at the screenshot below. That’s what a podcast preview looks like on Apple Podcasts. There is the logo, title, and author. You can also see the category to which this podcast belongs.
Below the logo is the number of recorded episodes and a description of the show. Also, you can read the episode summary in the list to get the main idea and see how people rate the podcast.
Screenshot taken on Apple Podcasts
3. Select Keywords for Each Episode
Why do you need keywords for your podcast? Because it’ll attract a target audience who insert certain phrases while searching.
How do you choose keywords for your podcast? Find one short phrase as your main topic. And add a couple of other important keywords. For example, type the “marketing trends” phrase in the Apple Podcast search bar.
You’ll see a list of episodes and shows corresponding to this phrase. Click on the episode called “3 Big E-Commerce Marketing Trends for Q3 2021”. What do you see in the screenshots? The podcasters use a keyword phrase in the title, description, and timeline.
Screenshot taken on Apple Podcasts
4. Create Blog Posts for Your Episodes
Blog posts streamline the search of your podcast on Google.
How can they promote your podcast? First of all, a title and text are additional opportunities to boost your podcast’s SEO with relevant keywords.
Also, the text tells what to expect, so it’ll be easier for people to understand podcast relevance to their queries. And whether you need to turn them on at all. You can list important information about guests, attach a link to the required resources, such as the landing page, and mention what you missed in the audio.
Pro tip! If you’ve used Ecamm Live to create your podcast, you can take the video file of your episode and upload it to Descript to grab the transcript. Use the transcript to create a keyword-rich blog post from your podcast episode.
Do you already have blog posts relevant to your podcast topics? Check if you can add your episodes to them. Take advantage of your existing blog’s on-page SEO and increase the number of visits and potential subscribers to your podcast.
Here is an example of the Trellis blog post with an inserted podcast. The authors tell the podcast’s origin story, include a YouTube video of the discussion, and mention platforms to download the episode.
Screenshot taken on the official Trellis website
5. Encourage Ratings and Reviews
Another way to boost your podcast SEO is to get feedback and ratings on your podcast. Positive reviews help you rank better than your competitors and create credibility for your listeners.
Ask your audience to leave stars, comments, or likes on your episodes with powerful calls to action. However, ask moderately so as not to irritate listeners.
6. Bonus Tip! Don’t Forget About Video
Even if your priority is your podcast, you can add video and/or live streaming into your workflow to expand your reach. If you start with video or live video, you can simply turn on isolated audio in Ecamm Live to have Ecamm grab the audio tracks for you for your podcast. Now you have both video and audio from one time creating content. Win!
Did you know that YouTube is actually owned by Google? It’s also the second largest search engine on the Internet.
Having a video element to your podcast helps you to get your content, keywords, and brand into the YouTube search engine.
Many of our Ecamm Live members have video podcasts or live shows that accompany their podcasts. This allows them to engage with their viewers live in the comments on YouTube and helps their podcast/content rank better.
Check out all of the engagement on one of our recent videos.
Screenshot taken on the official Ecamm Live YouTube channel
To Wrap Up
When it comes to enhancing your Google and other search engine rankings, you need to consider many things. You must keep in mind your site’s load time, distribute your podcast to multiple platforms, and take advantage of keyword research.
Remember that listener reviews are as crucial as customer reviews for an eCommerce store. Only in this case, you sell your show. Implement these five recommendations to make your material more discoverable on Google and podcast listening apps. And good luck with your podcasting!
This article was written and contributed by Kate Parish.
Kate Parish is the Chief Marketing Officer at Onilab, with 8+ years in Digital Marketing and eCommerce web development promotion. Kate constantly upgrades her knowledge and skillset to stay fit in the progressing online world. She always does exhaustive research in such spheres as SEO, Magento PWA development, and SMM, before sharing her expertise with a broad audience.
