How-to Expand Your Podcast Audience Through SEO

By now, everybody knows that it takes technical SEO, link-building and high-quality, readable and engaging content in order to be successful in any SEO strategy. Of course, there are other things that you need to pay attention to, but these three are the main components of a successful SEO campaign for sure. There are many ways you can tick off these three. When it comes to content, traditional content strategies call for articles, blog posts, images, and videos. Even now these media are great for driving traffic and supporting your SEO campaign. However, there are many others that deserve more attention. One of these underestimated media is podcasts. Podcasts can be really helpful in building up a brand and drive traffic but not many people use it to add rich content to their sites. It’s good to know that this is also an alternative you can use to support your link-building efforts and the rest of the SEO techniques you are trying to implement on your site.

When you do consider using a podcast as your medium in providing rich content, you must also know how to optimize your podcasts so that they would be SEO-friendly. Aside from that, you should invest some effort and time in making your podcast rank on the platforms for podcasts. Here’s how you can optimize your podcasts for search engines:

1. Slay From the Title

   If you want your podcast to be easily found on iTunes and Google Play, your title would be a good starting point to make that happen. When it comes to iTunes especially, it’s all about the title. There’s heavy emphasis on the title of the podcast, followed by several important factors such as your subscribers and reviews for the podcast. You will want to make your podcast title interesting and compelling. Avoid making titles that sound vague, your title should express what the podcast is all about. Make sure you include important keywords in the title as well. If your podcast is already doing great and the title is your brand, you can amplify it better by adding subtitles. Never try to stuff your titles with author tags, or else you will get a note from Apple telling you that what you’re doing is inappropriate. Keep your title clean and use keywords properly. When it comes to Google Play, you can also optimize the description area.

2. Optimize Your RSS Feed

   These days, users are not as attached to RSS feed as much as they were in the past, but you still need to optimize your RSS feed if you want your podcast to be successful. When you have a podcast, it’s actually your RSS feed that people subscribe to when they subscribe via iTunes or Google Play. Aside from that, your podcast information will appear on these platforms depending on what is in your RSS feed, that’s why it is important to optimize it. You can actually have the best SEO control over your podcast when you create your feed using free plugins like the PowerPress plugin for WordPress. Make sure your feed is compatible and is not too slow as well. You can use various websites to validate your RSS feed.

3. Optimizing Your Site
   
   

   Your podcasts may be audio files but you can still use it SEO-wise by optimizing your website and making it a good place for Google to direct traffic to. Everybody wants trusted links – and your podcast is an amazing ‘weapon’ to get all those juicy links. One way to do this is to show on your site where your content has been. For example, if your podcast has already been featured in a page of a site with authority, make sure your site visitors know of this fact. If a writer is considering creating a link to your podcast, it is likely that he or she will really do so when there is proof that your podcast has already been trusted by someone else with authority. You can also create supporting content for search engines to crawl easily. You can do this by optimizing your episode description, writing recaps, posting notes, providing transcripts, checklists and worksheets and many more.

4. Reusing Content Effectively

   It might come as a surprise, but you can always use existing old content, develop it further, make the necessary improvements and transforming it to an astounding piece to boost your authority and improve your site ranking. If you have many existing podcasts, you can also use these by transforming them into other types of content such as blog posts, infographics, articles, slideshows and even videos. If you do it right, you can get even better SEO value on your recycled content than the original one!

5. Don’t Forget YouTube
   
   

   YouTube is right on Google’s heels when it comes to search engines having the most traffic. YouTube serves more than a billion users, so it’s impossible to not consider YouTube when you have an SEO strategy and especially when you have podcast content. Make sure YouTube is part of your SEO strategy. Many might overlook this fact, but YouTube is a huge search engine on its own, not to mention the fact that it is directly tied to Google as well. This means you should take your podcast and turn it into a YouTube video! It’s fairly easy to do. You can use file converters and video editing programs that are free to use. When you have the intention of utilizing YouTube, you can also record a video at the same time you’re recording your podcast. If that is not possible, you can use various images such as ones about your brand to create a video slideshow that supports your podcast.

   With minimal effort, when you use SEO and podcasting together, you can come up with an enthusiastic community of supporters pretty easily. SEO techniques will help you grow your podcast audience and when your audience grows, you can reap SEO benefits. It’s a circle that goes on and on and you wouldn’t want to miss that! Podcasting is time-consuming and it takes a lot of effort, but when done right, it is an excellent investment.