Podcast SEO for Audience Growth

Podcast SEO is Critical for Audience Growth and Discoverability

Podcast SEO is critical to audience growth and discoverability. Podcasters need a basic understanding of SEO, or search engine optimization, so our podcasts can be discovered by new listeners. As Google is now serving up podcasts in search results, optimizing your podcast titles, descriptions, and show notes, is more critical than ever if you want to be discovered by new audiences.

How can podcasters capitalize on SEO to help new listeners find their podcasts?

Spoiler Alert: There is no magic bullet for SEO

Jennifer Denney, Digital Strategist and Owner of Elevated Marketing Solutions, breaks down what we need to understand about SEO for podcasters.

SEO is a long term strategy, made up of incremental tweaks combined to impact your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

What is the Ideal Length for Podcast Show Notes or Blog Posts?

Jennifer does a little myth busting here because I was under the impression that there was an ideal length for show notes. Turns out, this is not the case. People are going to Google to get questions answered. Which means Google is looking for you to completely cover the subject from beginning to end and do it better than anyone else.

How does Google determine who has the best answer? It’s all of those hundreds of little tweaks.

Formulating the Right Questions to Boost Your Podcast SEO

Think about how your listeners are phrasing questions when they are going to Google to look for answers. What words are they using? What questions are they asking? Get out of your own language box and how you say things. Ask your audience how they would search for an answer.

Recommended Tools for Keyword Research

• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush
• Keyword Tool
• Keywords Everywhere
• Answer The Public

Capitalizing on Titles, Show Notes, and Blog Posts for Podcast SEO

Episode titles, show notes and blog posts are the ideal to place to focuse your podcast SEO. This is why you want to be intentional with sturcture and keyword usage. Think about having your episode transcribed. (You can download this episode transcription here). This makes it easy to create detailed show notes and it gives your audience the ability to consume your content in their preferred format.

Pro Tip: Episode 1 is not a good podcast title

Jennifer has created a search optimization checklist to help optimize blog posts.

Don’t just describe what is in the episode in hopes that you will create enough interest to get someone to press play.  If your intention is to share information with your audience, give them the option of how they want to consume it. Listening to a podcast is not an option for everyone.

You can build your authority by using the episode description, blog post, or show notes to give detailed information that actually answers questions.

Additional SEO Optimization Recommendations

• Flow the Keywords into the content
• Write a title that is for the user
• Use a Title Tag
• Use sub headings
• Add internal and external links