Everyone talks about your search-engine optimization (SEO) with every platform on the web. But does SEO really matter if you host a podcast instead of blogging?
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This topic was suggested by Joshua C. Liston: “Does keyword-loading your show title/author field etc (SEO) really work long term?”
Challenging the Podcasting Assumptions
This is a special miniseries to challenge the ideas podcasters have accepted as truth for years. Some will stand up against the challenge while others crumble, and some will reveal new options you may have never considered.
- Are you really a “podcaster” and should you really be podcasting?
- Does your podcast NEED interaction or an email list?
- Is iTunes really THE place for podcasts? Do you NEED a mobile app?
- Does SEO really matter in podcasting?
- Do you REALLY need to edit your podcasts? What about authenticity?
- Do you REALLY need audio/visual branding or promos for your podcast?
- Should you launch your podcast with Episode 0? Does iTunes New and Noteworthy REALLY matter?
- Are Episode Numbers REALLY Necessary?
- Does audio/video quality ACTUALLY matter? Is a dynamic mic REALLY the best?
- Do you REALLY need passion? Is consistency THAT important?
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What is search-engine optimization (SEO)?
Simply put, SEO is about organizing written content so it will show up in searches.
Don't think of SEO as only a Google thing. There are several search engines you can consider leveraging for your podcast.
- YouTube
- Bing/Yahoo!
- iTunes
- Amazon.com
The core strategy of SEO is writing quality content that uses relevant keywords your potential audience would enter to find the stuff they want.
Search-engine algorithms are frequently tweaked and updated. These focus on improving search results by recognizing high-quality content, diminishing shady practices, and better indexing relevant and related content. Generally, search engines are becoming more human-like in how they prioritize content.
Here's the quick tip on killer SEO: write what humans will want, not what machines will want.
How can SEO help your podcast?
Optimizing your content for search engines is about making it easy for people to find. Showing up in relevant searches is a big way to grow your podcast audience. Each piece of content you produce can help or harm your “ranking” to searches.
Let's take a basic example: a tennis podcast. Not only would you want potential subscribers to find you by searching for tennis podcast, but you also want them to find you from your specific content. This could be “how to improve your game,” “tennis news,” “tennis gear reviews,” and more.
If you have content that shows up in these and other relevant searches, then you'll increase your reputation, which can pay off in far more ways than simply having more podcast subscribers.
Learn everything about SEO for Podcasters!
Good SEO practices in podcasting
We could spend hours talking about the best SEO strategies, and I have an upcoming webinar and training resource all about SEO for podcasters.
Here are some great ways to implement or improve your SEO for podcasting.
1. Write great titles
Titles are the most important text in SEO. Google, YouTube, iTunes, and every search engine will prioritize the title more than other text. Humans also use titles to decide whether the content interests them. Titles are also commonly used in social-network shares.
Consider three similar titles.
- “John Smith shares 10 tips for being awesome”—The most prominent information is “John Smith” because it is front-loaded (see #2). This is great if you have well-known guests.
- “10 ways to be awesome, with John Smith”—This still includes the name, but now the focus is on the highly-sharable “10 ways …” part.
- “How can you be more awesome?”—Dropping both the name and the shareable title, this focuses on what people may actually enter into search engines.
You can get more advanced with SEO plugins that allow you to change your “ tag so search engines and many social tools will see a different title than what you display on the blog post. For example, I simply strip the episode abbreviation (” – TAP179″) from my SEO titles.
2. Front-load content
“Front-loading” is where you put the most important, most interesting, most concise information first in titles, excerpts, and content. Look at any news article for great examples of this. Usually, you get the major parts of the story just from the first sentence. The more you read, the more details you get.
Look at your titles, written content, and recorded content and find where the most important stuff is. Move this stuff forward as much as possible. Podcast consumes will be quick to fall off if the content isn't interesting. Do you really want them to leave having only heard about your current weather?
3. Use images
Regardless of whether you podcast in audio or video, your show notes on your website should have at least one relevant image. (You have a website with great show notes, right?) Not only does this make your content more shareable on networks like Pinterest, Facebook, and even Twitter (if you use Twitter Cards).
For SEO, images give you two valuable opportunities to use more keywords or strengthen your usage.
- File name—Change the names of your images to match your content. For example,
how-to-be-awesome.jpgis better thanimage20452a.jpg. For WordPress, Media File Renamer and Media Rename are two free plugins that can rename your images after you upload them. alttag—HTML code for inserting images offers an additional tag to make your images accessible to the visually impaired. If your images don't havealttags, then a screen reader will say, “image” for every image you use. To make your site more friendly for humans, you should describe the image in thealttag. For example, “John Smith, the most-awesome person ever.” WordPress and most other content-management systems allow you to set thealttext when you embed or edit your image.
If you apply both of these techniques, your HTML would look like, <img src="images/how-to-be-awesome.jpg" alt="John Smith, the most-awesome person ever" />.
4. Make great content
Remember that search engines are becoming increasingly human-like. So whatever content you write should be high quality and not contain a lot of pointless “fluff.”
Popular searches do not yet search inside audio and video content, but there are some available (even Google had one for a while). Prepare for that day by making great content now and writing high-quality show notes for the text engines and humans.
5. Optimize your site and media for speed
Website search engines are starting to prioritize web pages that load quickly. This makes sense because humans prefer web pages that load quickly. (Check your site speed with GTmetrix or Pingdom.)
Caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache can help you speed up your sites. But you can also do simple things yourself, like removing unnecessary plugins, reducing the number of sidebar widgets, and shrinking your images or not using so many.
Your media speed won't matter as much because of the nature of podcast consumption. But it's still important to not push out more than your average audience can handle with their bandwidth. You may think you sound better at 384 kbps, but that's just wasting storage space, bandwidth, and the time it takes to download or stream the larger file. HD can also be a culprit if your video content doesn't have to be in full 720p or 1080p. (I release my video episodes at 640 × 360, but publish the full HD on YouTube.)
Learn more about SEO techniques in podcasting
Bad SEO practices in podcasting
SEO can be a shady business. There are many self-proclaimed experts who will advocate risky practices or ways to “hack” the system in order to appear higher in search results. Be careful with any of these because they're often the first victims of search-engine updates. They also don't matter much to humans.
Here are some of the SEO practices to avoid.
1. Keyword-stuffing
Don't try so hard to use your target keywords that your titles end up being unfriendly and spammy. For example, my popular episode “The best podcast hosting options” includes some great keywords and it now ranks very well for relevant searches. But I could have tried too hard and named it, “Best hosting servers for podcasts, bloggers, YouTubers, vloggers, video podcasters, audio podcasting, to grow your audience and make money by monetizing your podcast.”
Yes, I went over the top on that example to make the point. Some stuff in that example are redundant, some is completely irrelevant.
Also don't stuff your show notes or descriptions/excerpts.
Podcast hosting options can be confusing. But the best podcast hosting will work for audio podcasting, video podcasting, and even YouTuber vloggers. Learn these best podcast hosting options so you'll have the best hosting for your podcast.
2. Abusing the fields
iTunes currently displays your title, artist, and description for your podcast. Some podcasters will apply shady practices of replacing their artist name with their subtitle or stuffing their title with guest names. These fields are not designed for that. While it may look cute on one platform and in one context, it becomes impractical and annoying in other contexts.
It's fine to put a keyword with your name, like “Daniel J. Lewis, podcasting coach.” But don't get crazy!
3. Scarce or no show notes
Write more than a sentence of show notes. Include any lists, links, media, or resources you mention in your podcast. I recommend more than a mere bullet-point list of raw items. Learn how to write better show notes.
4. Spam/cross-posting for “backlinks”
“Backlinks” are links to previous content from other sources. Search engines see these as validating the authority of a particular post, but these engines are also getting good at detecting fake backlinks. The best way to get quality backlinks is to write great content and encourage and empower others to share it.
Conclusion: remember SEO, but focus on great content
Yes, search-engine optimization (SEO) is important for bringing in new listeners. It's not “If you build it, they will come.” SEO is about, “If you build what other people want and are looking for in a way that makes you findable, they will come.”
Your best SEO technique will be to focus on making high quality content that is easy for humans to consume—even if by reading instead of watching or listening. Think about what makes things easier for you (headlines, images, titles, concise paragraphs, etc.) and that can be a good starting point.
Click here for my complete SEO for Podcasters course!
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This post may contain links to products or services with which I have an affiliate relationship and may receive compensation from your actions through such links. However, I don't let that corrupt my perspective and I don't recommend only affiliates.
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Great episode DJL, because as many of you in the podcast space explain, podfading when you don’t stick to a consistent schedule is almost imminent. One thing with the podcasts I’ve hosted in the past were being consistent. In a news-based niche, trying to capitalize on the news can be great, until other things get in the way. With my current podcast, I’m setting consistent release times and I’m starting to see consistent numbers and some steady (slow, but steady) growth. I find I was initially doing the podcast (at first) the same day as a release and there was no rhyme or reason to it. Now that I’ve found a good MWF (two of the shows I produce and host myself) format, listeners are starting to become aware they are released on certain days and they’re already downloading the episodes before I even hit the social media blast on Twitter, Facebook and G+. This series has been fantastic. For some reason, I feel like I’m coming off as a fanboy with listening live and incessant commenting, but this series REALLY is helpful, even to those like me who think they’ve got some of the timing stuff figured out.
With a MWF schedule like that, what do you do when you travel?
I always travel with a computer in case news breaks. I’m generally internet connected when I need to be. But I’m starting to make sure I have content in the hopper ready to go. An example is this coming week. I’m going to North Carolina for a wedding for about 5 days. During that time, I’ll have two shows to release. They’re already done. Just plug them into wordpress and auto post when the time comes and hit social media the days they auto post. It’s something I actually did when I traveled on my old show long before I’d ever heard of the John Lee Dumas, who I’ve actually only listened to once.
So I have Friday (of this week), and Monday (of next) already loaded and ready. Wednesday is the only show that’s recorded and released the same day, but that’s actually another show within my podcast. We record that show from a radio station in Iowa as part of our podcast, so that’s the Wednesday show. The only problem that can come up there is little tech knowledge at the station, so I use Audio Hijack to get the audio off the live stream (which can be risky at times, no the studio doesn’t seem to want to record the show for us unless they absolutely have to).
I’m trying to build up non-timely shows (since my offseason is interview based) to have ready to drop in within a two week period and then have the ability to move shows based on relevance. On Monday, I’d already released a podcast and was waiting for Friday to release a big name interview. Then there was a hire at a Division I wrestling program (new head coach). So I’ve got that person as Friday and bumping the previous guest show to Monday. I don’t actually publish the show on blubrry until I know my order, so I’m not saying “Episode 61” when it’s actually 62 or 60.
I also have the Roland ready to roll if I need to do things on the road. I always travel with my computer, even though I might not turn it on.
Hi, I am new to podcasting and would like to launch at the end of the summer.
I am familiar with WP and would use it to create a website as a place to house my podcast episodes etc.
I am thinking of going with Buzzsprout as a podcast host and I know they have a plugin with WP. So that’s good.
So my question is: do I need a site that will host WP? And if yes, what might work?
Buzzsprout is a good host (in fact, you can get a handy bonus if you sign up through my link at https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/buzzsprout), but I’m not familiar enough with their WP plugin in order to know whether to recommend it.
My favorite way to manage your podcast through WordPress is with Blubrry (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/blubrry) and the free PowerPress plugin.
You could also look at Captivate (https://theaudacitytopodcast.com/captivate), where they also offer a good WordPress plugin that separates your podcast episodes from your blog posts, which some site owners prefer.
Hello Daniel!
Thanks for this great mini series. Are you aware that all these episodes (from 170 to 181) aren’t available via the rss feed” ?
Does this serie use it’s own feed?