Podcast SEO: How to grow your podcast with SEO

In today's episode, you'll learn how to grow your podcast with search engine optimization. Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, where we bring you the best tips and strategies to launch, grow, and monetize your show. This week's question comes from Krystal.

Hey there, it's Krystal from The Proffitt Podcast and I have a question about podcast SEO. So I know that Google recently started indexing all the podcasts and everything but my question is, what's the most important information to look at when you're deciding on keywords for your podcast Seo? Should we just pick topics that are really Nish and search for more focus longtail keywords? Or is it better to use broad topics that have higher search volumes and then try to niche down the topic with a great title? Thanks. I appreciate your feedback.

Thanks for your question, Krystal. Now search engine optimization is the art of getting websites like Google to send new listeners to your podcast for free. And in order to really make that happen, you have to convince these websites that your podcast is the answer to the thing that people are searching in the search bar. That's really how SEO search engine optimization works. And it's worked for blogging for decades. And you can absolutely use some of those same principles for your podcast. Now, SEO is certainly a more advanced marketing strategy. But if it's something you've been thinking about, if it's something you're curious about, then I'll dive into the exact steps that I would go through to fully optimize your podcasts to try and get as much free traffic and free marketing as you possibly can. So the first step in optimizing your podcast for search engines is to come up with a list of keywords or search terms that you want to rank for that you want your podcast episodes to show up. As a result, when Someone typed those words into Google. And so you want to think through your ideal listener, your target audience, what kinds of words what kind of topics are they not only interested in, but are looking for answers to that is step one. Now, the mistake that a lot of people make when they try and apply SEO principles to their podcast, is they create the episode they have the outline, they basically finished the entire thing. And then they think, Oh, well, what title should I put on this, so that Google will show it to people? But you really need to start earlier than that. Before you even get into crafting the outline for your podcast episode. You need to know what words what keywords, what search phrases you want to rank for in Google, and other search engines, and then craft the episode around that keyword. Now, using search engines like Google is is a pretty good place to start. Actually, if you've never done this before, just start poking around with different things that you know, people are interested in. So take maybe your top 10 performing episodes. Right now, and search your titles in Google and see what kind of other results you get and what topics people are covering what things people are talking about. And as you get into the weeds, you'll start finding these blogs and these websites, and you'll see what their best performing posts are. But if that sounds like super overwhelming, or if you don't have time for that, then you can use a website like Upwork, where you can hire freelancers to do that kind of research for you. So you can go on upwork.com say, I need someone to come up with the 50 top ranking keywords for my podcast subject and you pay someone who is an expert at Search Engine Optimization to create that list for you. So you're already like three steps down the road before you even get started. Now once you have that list of let's say 50 keywords or search terms that you're going to be targeting for your podcast episodes. Now it's time to do some research. So for every single one of those, you want to type that into Google and then you will see The top page, the front page of the search results, start clicking into every single one of those links that aren't a paid ad. And look at what they cover look at what the subheadings are, look what the main themes are of the answers and how they craft the answers for those questions. And the power of doing this is that Google is telling you what it thinks the best answer is to that question. So for instance, we've done several blog articles for the Buzzsprout blog. On microphones, it's very popular subject, and one that consistently gets mentioned in those blog posts. And in those videos, and in those podcast episodes, is the Blue Yeti, because it's very popular with streamers and Twitch gamers and stuff like that. And so a lot of podcasters get recommended that microphone. We're not huge fans of it, compared to some other microphones that you can get for that price point. But we know that Google wants us to at least mention the Blue Yeti. So we'll talk about the Blue Yeti and we'll say hey, this is pretty popular. A lot of people like it, but these are the reasons why we would encourage you to try something different. That's our opinion that's based on our own experimenting with different microphones and testing them out in different applications. But we know Google wants to know that we mentioned the word Blue Yeti, in that blog post in that podcast episode, in order for it to rank it above other possible results. And then the third thing that you need to do in order to implement SEO, into your podcast episodes is to create a complete answer to whatever that keyword or search term is. Because when Google is sending someone to your podcast, what they're also looking for is does that person come back to us and search the same thing? Again, because if somebody goes to your podcast episode, and let's say that you title it, how to optimize your podcast with SEO, and then you don't talk about podcast SEO in the episode, that same person is not going to go back to Google and search it again. And if that continuously happens, Google knows Those your podcast episode actually isn't answering that person's question. So we're going to send them to a different resource. So you want to make sure that whenever you are optimizing your episode when you're creating your episode, that you make it the most complete version of the answer you possibly can. Because what you want is for people to search something in Google one time, find your podcast and then never search for it again, that confirms to Google your podcast episode is exactly what people are looking for. The only fields that as of right now, directories like Apple podcasts and Spotify are using to populate their search results inside of their apps are the name of your podcast and the episode titles. So you want to make sure that your episode title captures the question that someone is asking when they are searching for that search results. So when people see it, they say, Oh, that's exactly what I want. And in addition to that, If you use the keyword or the search phrase, specifically in its entirety in your episode title, then when someone searches that in a podcast directory or on Google, it's gonna be much more likely to show up at the top of that search result list. Now, if you have a website for your podcast, like you've actually built your own website, then you'll also want to make sure you follow the standard blogging, SEO practices of tagging backlinks, all those kind of things. But if you just have a podcast and you're trying to still leverage SEO principles to grow within different podcast apps and directories, and also on Google, make sure you're listed in Google podcasts, and then make sure that all of your podcast episode titles really reflect the keyword of the search result that you were targeting for that particular episode. Thank you so much for sending us that question, Krystal. 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