How to get a podcast to rank on Google? Podcast SEO tips

>> Nicholas: Hey, everyone, and welcome to the Headliner Podcast. We're your hosts, Nicholas and Elissa, and we're here to keep you in the loop on all of the things that you can do to promote your podcast. So, Elissa, what are we talking about today? >> Elissa: Today we're going to be talking about podcasting SEO. >> Nicholas: Okay, cool, cool. So for those of us in the call that might not know what SEO is. Not naming names, please enlighten me. I mean, whoever it is, us, plural.

>> Elissa: I was going to say the dog's here too. >> Nicholas: So yeah, it's for the dog. >> Elissa: Right, exactly. Coda. podcasting SEO. So it's very similar to any other type of SEO, but it's literally just the process of optimizing your podcast for search. So that's going to mean kind of looking at your actual content and everything that's in your metadata to ensure that it is optimized for SEO or search engine optimization. >> Nicholas: Ah, of course, Coda is very thankful

for that. Yeah. So basically it's just going through a file and making sure all of your ducks are in a row, to use a phrase that I just can't get enough of. to actually get picked up by like a search engine and have people actually find your podcast. It's like ground zero for promo. >> Elissa: Exactly. >> Nicholas: Okay, cool. That sounds very self explanatory. And, I guess I'd love to hear what can people do in terms of their SEO in order to get found on social.

>> Elissa: Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of things you can do. kind of the biggest thing, in my opinion is going to be thinking about keywords. And keywords are just really going to be kind of that backbone of the SEO. They are going to help, guide algorithms and search engines as they can't

necessarily index audio or video. So if you're uploading an audio file or a video podcast, these are going to be like the very same principles, but it's literally just making sure you've got relevant words in your, again, in your metadata. So thinking about your titles, descriptions, tags, or another word for keywords, and then also having, transcripts available within that. >> Nicholas: Okay, cool. And I almost feel like people can start with their SEO, like before they even record

necessarily. Like, they might maybe use some SEO information to help dictate how they do their podcast. Maybe. I don't know. >> Elissa: Yeah, I mean, we do. So, for instance, this very episode, it is how to get a podcast to rank on Google question mark. Podcast tip. Or excuse me, podcast SEO tip. So with that We've kind of got two things going on. So whenever you're thinking about keywords, there's going to

be two different types of keywords. So you're going to have your short tail keywords, and those are going to just be pretty broad in terms of what people might

be searching for. but because they're very broad, they normally have kind of higher search volume. So more people are going to be searching for them. But they can be a little bit more competitive because a lot of people might be trying to think about, oh, well, I service podcasting. I want to inform people about podcast SEO.

So looking at our title, the Podcast SEO, and then also a little bit more broad, the, podcast SEO tips, those are actually two keywords right there that we have in our title, but they're going to be short term. So if you Google podcast SEO, there's a pretty good chance you won't find this

podcast right off the bat. You might have to scroll through a couple of pages just because there are a lot of content from, a lot of very large companies and people that have been really thinking about podcast SEO for quite some time. So you're going to see kind of those pages rank and render a little bit more.

But kind of thinking about SEO, again, if you're getting a little bit more niche and you're like, oh, I really want to kind of match a very specific search or very specific intent, those are going to now move into your long term, excuse me, your long tail keywords. And so again, looking at our title, when we have how to get a podcast to rank on Google, and that is going to be a pretty specific search. So you're going to

see that being a lot more niche audience. So especially for us, we try and target a lot more podcasters. So there's a pretty good chance that a podcaster out there might be trying to Google that. the benefits of having a long tail keyword are they're way less competitive, it's a much more niche audience. So you kind of know exactly who's going to be searching for it whenever you're thinking about that. And again, they are a little bit more specific, so they're going to have lower search

volume. But arguably the quality of those searches is going to be a little bit better.

>> Nicholas: That makes a lot of sense to me. And I feel like there's, you really want to make sure you're covering both of those bases because you might be getting that long tail traffic, that hyper specific stuff, and then, yeah, you might get a new audience there, but because your audience is growing, because more eyes are going to your website or your podcast, your whatever, et cetera, you know, that'll probably help your short tail odds in the long run, won't it?

>> Elissa: Yeah, exactly. I mean having a, good balance is going, is going to always be super important. So definitely including both the long tail and the short tail is going to be really good in terms of actually developing your podcast SEO. >> Nicholas: Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. And also like, let's be real, even if you're doing the short tail stuff and you're putting it in hyper competitive fields, that's not to say that people won't

find you. I don't know about you, but I have this tendency to search by recency on Google lately just because I want to make sure like whatever I'm looking at is relatively modern information. I don't want, you know, stats from five years ago about something I want to know. Okay, in the past month has there been an update to this thing I'm looking into. So

you know, short tail is still very valuable. Even if you're like a smaller outlet, a smaller podcast, you're going to get people like me, the weirdos, on. >> Elissa: YouTube, actually I believe that they do kind of look at time. So YouTube doesn't necessarily always reward videos that have been around for years and years because again, a lot of that information might be out

of date. So especially if you're uploading a video podcast to YouTube, the Short Tail is going to be a little bit more, impactful than you would see like just on a broad search on Google or something. >> Nicholas: Mm, What else can people do in terms of their SEO to just kind of help besides just throwing in short tail and long tail words? >> Elissa: Yeah, so of course, for podcasts, very specifically looking at

your metadata. So that's going to be any of the fields that you're going to fill out when you're actually uploading your podcast. So thinking about your titles, your descriptions and then of course tags or those keywords, all of these elements are going to be really crucial into helping develop that SEO. And then also kind of more back to the keywords, the more you have it in a relevant way that's not just like a bunch of jargon is going to kind of help build that credibility and also

the authentication. So if you have your keyword appearing, I believe it's like five times in a, podcast metadata. So that's going to be your titles, your file names, your description Your tags. I mean, if you include one keyword right there, and they're. Especially if they're the same keyword. Now you're at four. That's honestly pretty strong. You don't want to just load a bunch of keywords in there that don't make any sense. So it wouldn't, it looks a little bit spammy, and it looks a

little bit like, oh, gosh. And if somebody reads a sentence and they're like, what's going on? An algorithm is going to do the same thing. So if you see podcast SEO, podcast keywords, podcast search, like that does as an episode title, that's going to be a little bit like, whoa. And you'll probably get some red flags raised, not only in terms of your actual audience, but in terms of the actual things that are trying to find your content to push to people.

>> Nicholas: It's also just very 2008 YouTube core. I don't know if you were, like, on YouTube back then, but people would, like, upload videos and they'd have, like, on their description, they'd have an area called additional tags, and it would be like a Wikipedia article of just random words, different spellings of the same word. You know, sometimes you might hide like a message in there, like, if you're reading this, please stop reading this.

>> Elissa: Yeah, exactly. yeah, I mean, that's good for, like, if you're building a website or something. Thinking about, especially about those, misspellings. Well, I mean, there's software that you can, like, pay to, like, buy keywords and stuff like that for. But yeah, if you're, like, writing content now in 2024 on, don't necessarily go back to the 2008 strategies of just writing anything that you can, make sure it's relevant and it's readable.

>> Nicholas: That's important. Readability is important. Okay, let me just jot that down. >> Elissa: Make it make sense. >> Nicholas: Yeah, make it make sense. Okay, cool, cool. And like, what tools? What you were just talking about, like, tools to help with SEO a little bit, right? What are they? >> Elissa: Well, I would be remiss if I didn't plug Headliner. You know, this is the Headliner podcast. >> Nicholas: Wasn't setting you up for a layup there, by the way. That wasn't what that was said.

>> Elissa: I don't think either one of us are good at basketball here, but, you know, we are headliners. >> Nicholas: I actually love basketball, but that is off, Mike. >> Elissa: All. right. Well, I rode the bench, so good for you. But anyways, Headliner, we do have, a very Powerful SEO tool. It's called Eddy by Headliner. And what it does is it's, it started out Eddy as a free transcript based editor, but it's quickly evolved kind of into a lot more podcast optimization and podcast SEO

things. So it's not only going to give you those keywords, but it's also going to help you kind of write a bunch of different things that sound like a human would have wrote them. More specifically, you as a human would have wrote them. As it does, look at your RSS feed and kind of see, okay, this is what they typically write. Let's try and use that as inspo to write like them. And it's also going to ensure that there are those keywords in there again in a relevant way.

It's not just going to spaz out, start slapping in a thousand different keywords that just are like, what is going on here? >> Nicholas: And believe me, I've tried, I've tried to make it do it. >> Elissa: It has. We'll whisper into the mic, you know, just, oh, podcast, podcast marketing. And just. No, it really does a good job. but of course there are other tools out there,

external to Headliner. So if you're thinking more specifically about SEO tools, Google AdWords, specifically the keyword planner tool, I use that all the time to help write content and to find all sorts of SEO things. So thinking about our keywords, I mean, I used it to help actually write this title. So again, that's a free tool at your disposal if you have a Google account. Let me rephrase, then

it's a free tool at your disposal. So you need a Google account, but it'll help you to forecast and kind of plan all those keywords and discover new ones. So if you just type in something like podcasting SEO, it'll give you, I think like seven different, hey, you might want to look at these so you can see kind of what the intent might be. So if people are looking for tools, if they're just trying to learn, you'll get to get insights like that. And then of course, you'll get to see

the actual search volume. So you'll see how many people roughly per month are actually searching for something. So that'll kind of again help to inform. Okay, is there, a lot going on here? Is this going to be valuable to a lot of people? Is this going to be valued to a more niche audience? So free tools like the Google Adwords as well are going to help you to plan those keywords. the more advanced you get of Course you can pay for better tools. So there's going to be

semrush, all sorts of things. I'm pretty sure if you just Google literally, keyword planning or keyword planning, SEO, something to that effect, you'll find like a thousand different tools. >> Nicholas: I'm going to position a curve. Crazy idea. If you end up searching for this stuff, the companies providing that service will have good enough SEO to get to you. >> Elissa: That's true. >> Nicholas: Crazy idea, but, you know, no. And to that

end, like, look, there are a bunch of free tools. You already Talked about Google AdWords. Obviously we're talking about podcasters and we're pretty heavy on promoting YouTube for podcasting because it is the biggest platform for podcast consumption. so Even as a YouTuber, they do have a lot of kind of SEO ish tools. Like you can actually see what your subscribers look up on YouTube

and you can see the traffic of certain ideas. So you can actually use those tools if you want to be focused on your podcast game on YouTube. And it's the same basic idea as Google AdWords. It's really, what is search volume here? How many of my viewers are looking at this specific thing and you can do something that's going to make your existing listenership happy on top of bringing in, you know, new people to your channel, to your podcast, et cetera.

>> Elissa: Yeah, exactly. Lots of free tools out there. So there's, there's no excuse to not think about SEO.

>> Nicholas: Exactly. And Elissa, I guess like perhaps stepping away from SEO, unless there's other things tied to it. As we wrap things up, what are some like best practices for people that work in conjunction with strong SEO game? Because I'm sure like, hey, having all of the keywords is worth a lot, but it's probably only part of like a well rounded diet, so to speak. >> Elissa: So being consistent is going to be another thing.

So especially the kind of like those search bots, they're going to wait how often you post with stuff. So it doesn't mean that you have to post something every day and you have to be very mindful of it. It'll just kind of see like, okay, is this person posting weekly, are they posting monthly? So that actually contributes more to kind of your

authority. So authority that does play into SEO, but kind of the longer you've been around and the longer you are more intentfully working towards kind of one of those keyword targets or something to that effect, then these algorithms are going to recognize, okay, this is a credible source, this is somebody that knows what they're talking about. So over time, especially the more consistent you are, then you'll really start to see, kind of more benefits and more traffic

being driven to your show. Making sure that your content's engaging. So making content's great, obviously, but making great content is better. So having high quality stuff that people actually listen to and stick with, that's going to be really good in terms of actually building

like that credibility once again. And then also whenever you are kind of crafting your content or in your descriptions, having clickable links that go to your own content, so maybe you have a relevant episode or you have a blog post or something written by it or written about it, then having a link going to either of those that, it's kind of this idea of backlinking a little bit. So it is going to allow you to continue to drive traffic, but it also kind of

builds on your SEO. So whatever you're targeting for whatever specific piece of content you're putting out there or episode, then it's also going to kind of work in tangent with what you already have. So that's a really cool idea. just around having engaging content and then of course just monitoring your performance. So you could, again, YouTube has tools. So within YouTube, Studio or hosts offer a lot of analytics.

>> Nicholas: Sure. >> Elissa: So you can start to kind of dive in on your side as a creator and just see, okay, like, what's working, what's not. So you can start to see maybe, one topic was really interesting. Now you want to get a little bit more niche and kind of continue to build on that idea of the SEO. So maybe you went a little bit broad with like podcast SEO and now you want to work down the funnel and think, okay,

maybe break it up by platform. Podcast SEO on listening apps, podcast SEO on YouTube. So you could really try and kind of branch out there in terms of your authority once again. >> Nicholas: And I think it's worth mentioning, like a lot of this feels cumulative. You know, if you're monitoring performance and you're weeding out what works and what doesn't work, you know, you're separating them, you're building off of what does, et cetera. You're iterating on what

doesn't. Until it does, your content's going to get better. If your content gets better, there's a good chance you're perhaps going to research your topics a little more or you're going to, cut some of the fat from your episodes, so to speak, whatever things you might do. And when you do that, because You've done that research because you were having a more focused episode on your hands. It's going to

be easier to find your SEO keywords. And if you find your SEO keywords, your audience is going to grow, so you're going to keep monitoring your performance, et cetera, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, I think this is a lot of. This feels like stuff people know, but it's worth reviewing and being reminded of. It's almost like, so surface level obvious at points that you almost need to be told it. Right. >> Elissa: Makes it. I mean, reminders are always good. Like, I

do Marketing. That's my job, literally. So the more I think about, I'm like, oh, gosh. Like, I just get ideas, and I'm like, maybe I didn't do a very good job doing that. And I look back at stuff and I'm like, oh, gosh, no. So then it. I mean, it does improve your content, because now you're thinking about your SEO even more intently reviewing stuff. which only helps you, of course. >> Nicholas: Exactly. It's the classic thing in art. It's cognitive distance.

You want to work on a book for a year, go ahead, work on a book, but put it down for two or three months at some point so that you can come back to it with fresh eyes and go, what was I doing exactly? Not. Not speaking from experience at all. Yeah, okay. That sounds fantastic. And, thank you for sharing that all with our listeners. Elissa, this sounds like really helpful stuff. I can see now that we do a lot of this stuff. Suddenly things I just

overhear in meetings, it's. They're all coming into focus. I mean, for. For Coda, not for me, because I knew what. I knew what SEO was, obviously, but. >> Elissa: Right. Coda. He's like, oh, his ears are parked. >> Nicholas: Like, oh, yeah, yeah, his ears are parked. He's just like, okay, cool. Market synergy. Got it.

>> Elissa: Exactly. and before we go, just kind of one last thing that literally anybody can do is going to just add a transcription to your actual show. Of course, I think we briefly mentioned at the beginning, but just kind of rehashing on it. having a transcript on your podcast is going to naturally add in all sorts of keywords and all sorts of things to your show and just

add even more context. So again, the search algorithms, YouTube, stuff like that, they can't crawl the audio file itself, but they can look at your transcript and see, like, oh, my gosh, this person said podcast, SEO, podcast marketing, podcast discovery, like, a thousand times. >> Nicholas: Keep posting a few more for our sake, really quick. >> Elissa: No, I would never do that. I don't know what you're talking about.

>> Nicholas: How to grow your podcast on Google. How to grow your podcast on YouTube. Yep. Continue. >> Elissa: Exactly. Eddy, listen, put this in our keywords. But anyways, so it'll start to recognize those and see that. And again, it'll just kind of build your authority and say, like, okay, yeah, this. This appears a lot. And it appears in a natural way as well. That makes sense. It's not spammy. Maybe if somebody's searching for this, we'll.

We'll throw them a bone and just give them the Headliner podcast. >> Nicholas: Exactly. And if all else fails, you just add in one very deliberate keyword to your transcript. Elissa. How to grow your podcast on the Internet, comma, without being spammy. >> Elissa: Exactly. >> Nicholas: There you go. Nailed it. Anyway, I think that's about it for today. Unless people want me to continue listing hyper specific keywords. I don't think they do.

>> Elissa: We will at the end of the show. Don't worry. Back to 2008. >> Nicholas: Yeah. If this was like a sitcom or something on TV from 10 years ago, the credits would roll and instead of music, it would just be us listing keywords. >> Elissa: Exactly. >> Nicholas: But no. Thank you for sharing all of that, Elissa, and thank you

to everyone for listening. We're going to be back with a new episode soon, talking about more ways you can grow your podcast organically on the Internet without spamming people. All right, bye.