Podcasts are growing at an alarming rate, hence the need for podcasters to be strategic to stay ahead of the competition. An effective way to do this is by investing in podcast SEO.
Suppose you’re a podcaster who aspires to become a household voice in your niche. In that case, you’ll need more than just hitting the upload button and wishing that audiences will find your podcast episode miraculously.
You need to be proactive in taking practical steps to grow your show.
And what better way to increase listeners than becoming more visible on the platforms where 49% of listeners discover new podcasters – search engines?
In this guide, we will cover why podcasters need to invest in SEO services and how it can transform your podcast from just a niche hobby to a profitable venture.
Let’s dive right in.
What’s SEO Services For Podcasters?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service for podcasters involves investing in SEO experts to optimize your podcast content to increase its visibility and discoverability on search engines and podcast directories like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc. The podcast SEO service focuses on various strategies and techniques that are tailored specifically for the podcast sphere. To understand better, here’s a breakdown of what SEO service for podcasters typically includes:
- Keyword research
- Optimized titles and descriptions
- Creating transcripts and show notes
- Leveraging backlinks
- Optimizing for podcast directories
- Optimizing for local SEO
- Voice search optimization
Even with an entry-level knowledge of podcast SEO, podcasters can increase their shows’ visibility, get more audiences from searches, and also solidify their position as an expert in their niche.
Why Should Podcasters Invest In SEO Services?
Here are important reasons why you should invest in SEO services for your podcast;
- SEO Increase Your Podcast Discoverability and Visibility:
Chances are there are thousands of people every day searching on Google for exactly what you’re talking about in your podcast. For example, there are about 1000 searches every month for the keyword “marketing podcasts.”
Those are searchers with the specific intent of finding podcasts that talk about marketing. Now, imagine if your podcast about marketing ranks for a keyword like that.
That’s a potential 1,000 new audiences who are ready to listen to your show every month.
Now, your niche might not be marketing but similarly, there are also many audiences and curious searchers who prefer listening to reading or watching and are searching on Google for what you’re currently doing with your podcast.
Not only this, podcast SEO influences your podcast more than just getting ranked on Google alone. Interestingly, it can also affect your discoverability on podcast directories like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.
For example, when an audience searches for something on Spotify, the Spotify algorithm will crawl all podcast episodes that are optimized for the searched keywords and display the most relevant results to the searcher.
If we search for “how to make money online,” the Spotify algorithm will crawl all podcast episodes optimized for that keyword and display relevant results that it thinks the audience (we) will love.
We can then proceed to click on any of the results, and according to Backlinko, the first 3 top results get about 54.4% of all clicks. Meaning, those optimized episodes will get the biggest clicks, and the less-optimized ones will only have a few people scrolling down to click on them.
Investing in SEO service and learning how it works could bring your podcast before these audiences and may make you more discoverable and visible.
- Passive Marketing With Sustainable Benefits
A subtle side of investing in SEO for your podcast is that you get a working pipeline for generating organic listeners without any active promotion. Unlike social media where your promotional content will be buried after a few days, SEO ensures you get listeners passively and can remain evergreen for a long time. You just need to put in an upfront effort and you can reap sustainable benefits without any continuous investment.
- You Also Get Enhanced Listeners Engagement
This is simple. The more audiences you have, the more engagement you’ll get. That’s why Tiago Ferreira, co-founder of Podsqueeze remarked “Everything in podcasts is downstream of audience generation.”
When you’ve audiences coming to listen to your show, you can have better engagement, increase how much you can charge for advertisements (more on this later), increase your CTR, and also gear you up in recommendations.
For example, YouTube has a recommendation feature where the more engagement you get on your video content, the more YouTube boosts the reach of that video to similar audiences – increasing your reach, visibility, engagement, and giving you more skin in the game.
By investing in SEO services, podcasters can enhance their understanding of podcast SEO strategies and effectively implement them to bring their show before engaging audiences.
- Affordable For Any Podcast Size
Some top podcasters have a big podcast team and several managers around them to manage their shows and implement their marketing. As a podcaster pondering the idea of investing in SEO service or not, you probably don’t have the budget to go that far against the big guys. The only equal playfield to compete is SEO, a cost-effective approach that doesn’t require a large budget (or sometimes, no budget at all) to work – making it accessible to all podcasters across different sizes.
SEO requires minimal financial investment, gives long-term benefits, has accessible implementation, scalable results, and also, an equal opportunity for both big and small podcasters.
- More Monetization Options
From just a niche hobby, podcasting has transitioned into one of the most lucrative media businesses in contemporary times. In fact, the projected revenue for podcasts is estimated to reach about $130 billion in 2030. That says a lot about how profitable podcasting can become if you can make many people listen to you.
You can make podcasting a full-time business if you have a big audience base who listens to you consistently and you’ll need SEO to effectively reach these audiences.
With increased discoverability, visibility, and engagement, you can attract more listeners which can make your podcast more appealing to advertisers – leading to more earning potential for you.
If you want to take this a step further, you can also plug in affiliate links for any product you’re using, tools you recommend, or anything you mentioned in your episodes that you think your listeners might benefit from if they buy
Here’s an example from the popular productivity expert, Ali Abdaal;
When your audiences buy from these affiliate links, you’ll earn some commission passively, and depending on the number of listeners you have (which you can always increase using SEO), affiliates can be a big source of revenue for you.
Key SEO Strategies For Podcasters
Here are important aspects of your podcast that search engines are looking for when deciding if your content is relevant to a search term or not.
- Keyword Research: Keyword research balances your podcast niche with what your audiences are interested in. It is the foundation on which other SEO strategies for podcasters are built. To find keywords specifically for your podcast, use Podsqueeze Topic Finder tool.
It’ll give you a comprehensive list of what is trending in your niche (up till the next six months), and an estimate of the searches you can get on Google and clicks on YouTube.
- Optimizing Your Titles and Descriptions: This is where you create compelling and keyword-rich titles and descriptions that not only attract the attention of the audiences but also improve search rankings. You can do this manually or let an AI podcast title generator do that for you.
- Transcripts and Show Notes: You should always provide full episode transcripts and detailed show notes – which can enhance the searchability of your show and make your content more accessible.
- Voice Search Optimization: A sizable proportion of your audiences listen to podcasts while multitasking and it is safe to conclude that a number of them tell Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa to “play a podcast about productivity.” By adapting your content for voice search, you can ensure it’s easily found through all the voice-activated devices and assistants.
Tools and Services For Podcast SEO
Having understood the need to invest in podcast SEO and how it can substantially yield more return than what will be invested, here are some tools that can help you track your podcast SEO, make the right choice, and get professionals to work on your podcast SEO for you (in case you want expert hands to help you).
- Sitemile SEO Package
Sitemile offers SEO services in packages that you can pick according to your budget and your podcast SEO needs, from getting backlinks, guest posts, SEO reporting, targeted keywords, targeting local listeners, topical maps, etc.
To work with this service, you need to have a website of your own and it’s easy using the right tool. WordPress, Wix, etc are good options for creating a podcast website but an easy alternative is Podpage.
Make sure your podcast website or landing page is optimized enough for podcasting with a clean and user-friendly design, including detailed show notes and episode transcripts, provide easy access to your podcast on every directory, include email marketing for capturing users’ email, and have an embed podcast player that allows users to listen to episodes directly from your website.
Note: If you want professionals to handle creating your podcast website for you, Sitemile can also help and in fact, this could mean a more streamlined way of integrating your website framework with podcast SEO.
- Podsqueeze Topic Finder
Podsqueeze developed this tool out of sheer passion to make podcasting as easy as it could. They brand this tool as a “Topic Finder for Podcasters” but its basic function is finding trendy topics, keywords, and predicting what podcast topic ideas will still be relevant until the next six months so that podcasters can have a head start ahead of the competition.
Additionally, to properly get optimized for SEO and be crawled as relevant content to searchers’ queries, you need more than just good keywords alone, you need detailed transcripts and show notes of your episodes.
This is where Podsqueeze comes to the rescue. With human-level accuracy, you can get your transcripts, show notes, and other written assets for your podcast at the click of a button.
- Podtrac
Podtrac is a podcast analytics tool that analyzes what metrics are moving the needle of your podcast. With it, you can get a detailed highlight of the episode that drives the most traffic, where your audiences come from, how they engage with your content, and their demographics – allowing you to tailor your content and metadata to target your primary audiences more effectively.
Additionally, you can use Podtrac’s rankers to see how your podcast stacks up against others in your category – ensuring you understand trends that can help you adapt your podcast strategy to stay competitive in this always-evolving podcast landscape.
Learn SEO Strategies Tailored To Your Podcasting Success
This guide has provided detailed insights into why SEO is important for your podcast and why learning SEO service can make a significant shift in the authority of your podcast, increase listenership, more discoverability, visibility, and engaged audiences which can lead to sweet monetization options.
At SEO Optimizer, we’re focused on making every creator and professional an adept SEO practitioner who can increase their discoverability and make them more authoritative, interesting, and visible to potential audiences who are ready to consume your content.