The Hard Truth About Podcast SEO

much about SEO. For Podcasting you do, though, you know a lot about SEO, I've learned and picked up a couple things from you, but I still wouldn't call myself an expert on the topic. I know it is not an easy topic to dive into and know about, but you've got some points that you want to bring up and share with the audience. So I give you the floor item. Give us the hard truth. Well,

engine optimization? I do know what the SES I know now that I've been told that the part I'm sorry your episode title, it plays a big part in your ranking and Google searches and things like that, and your podcast name is also important for visibility, also ranking in and specifically like podcast apps, which was a big reason why I added, or made sure to add, a comic book podcast in the name of my show, the short box a

comic book talk show. I feel like I should know one other thing to round this out, but those are the two main things. Oh, and then, maybe this is a little outdated, but I was, I

think I got around to learning about, like, transcriptions, you know, having like that long form text on your podcast web page or website also goes a long way into maybe with your SEO ranking and Google finding, you know, finding you and things like that. How am I out of those three things, like, is at least one of them still true? Or am I completely off kilter? Okay, so God started this hard truth is too much, right? This is way too hard truth.

God, I don't even know Yahoo, I guess still has a search engine. I think it might actually be powered by Google Now. So yeah, Google still can cut controls 90% of the search engine market. A big part of that market for them is YouTube. And so with the changing and the evolution of how people are searching for things online, has created a situation where Google is now, well, historically, has had started to show even more ads.

So typically, the way it works is you have a platform like Instagram is a perfect example. When Instagram first launched, it was all of your friends content. It was everybody that you really wanted to see, that you followed, that you saw, show up in your feed. Then they started introducing ads, where an ad would appear after every 10 posts, or after every 20 posts. Then they started introducing where an ad appears

after three or four posts. If you are in your stories and you're watching a story from someone before it automatically shifts to someone else, they add an ad in there. And so typically, the reason why companies do that is that they're always looking for ways to monetize their product even more. An additional layer to that, particularly what is affecting Google is that search has changed in a very dramatic way in the last four or five

years. More and more people are going to set Instagram are going to Tiktok are going to. Using chatgpt, Claude, all of these different tools, because they are giving better answers than what Google has been giving. For a lot of SEOs out there, you have what's called the search liaison. He's a very popular follow that's on Twitter slash x, and he has released, over the years, all of his findings on what is a ranking factor and

what isn't a ranking factor. So a lot of these SEOs have built their entire content websites. They have some of them have a portfolio of dozens of websites that are all SEO optimized, and you have to do it in a specific way, with your headings and with your schema setup. And you know, there's all of these different technical aspects, but then there's also the content itself, where search started to mess up.

Is where think of like a recipe blog, where you're searching for the recipe of something, and God forbid you go to Google to do it, because you're going to end up on some recipe blog website, and sort of the meme around it or the joke around it, just got to read someone's entire life story before you get to the goddamn recipe that has and that type of behavior has, over time, forced people to use Google less and less as a publicly traded

company. What happens when people start using your product less and less is that you still have to show you're making money. And so in order to make money, you have to induce more at or introduce more ads. And so what happens is, like this slow progression into more ads than the content that you're there to see. And so that's the environment that we live in right now, where we have chatgpt Taking away market share from

Google. We have Tiktok, we have Instagram, all of these different platforms are taking away and chipping away at Google's dominance and their moneymaker that they've had for a long time. Very recently,

there was a Google leak, and the leak revealed that a lot of the things that search liaison and other SEO experts have been spouting off for years is false, and so for a lot of people who have spent the time to try in SEO their way to podcasting success. Frankly, there is no proof that this works for in podcasting, no proof unless you take the mindset up, because you have to also consider with Apple or with Spotify, they don't release how their search algorithm functions, they don't

release any of that. So all it is right now is just a theory. Your theory of putting a comic book podcast in your show title is likely correct, and it is likely the only source that Apple and Spotify are looking at, because the way that search

works is that you have these crawlers, you have these thoughts that crawl your content, that scans your content, so it's scanning the headline, ideally, it's scanning the show notes, the description and the transcript. We have no evidence whatsoever that the description, that the show notes and that the transcripts are being searched,

blog post, things like that. So when they're scanning they can't scan an audio file, they can't scan a video feed. What they can scan is your transcript. So with that being said, the search engine, whether it's apple, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Google, has to be searching their crawlers have to be searching that transcript or that show description for you to stand a chance. There is no confirmation whatsoever from any of these companies that they are actually scanning that

information. So for me in particular, I auto import my transcripts into my website. I have seen zero to no impact on adding the transcript to my podcast. I have tinkered with this. There are a couple different ideas that I think I'm going to tweak. For example, the transcript is such a terrible

reading experience, but. If you take that transcript and you turn it into a blog post, then that will theoretically significantly impact your SEO rankings, because Google knows how to scan a blog post, their bots don't necessarily know how to read a transcript, and the reason because they can't read between the two, is a transcript. Is a block of text. It takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of resources for those bots to scan that content.

And so what Google, from an SEO perspective, from a bot perspective, has done is they read the article, they read the headline of the article, and then they also read headlines in the blog post itself.

episodes on it. I have another landing page with one episode on it. Those episodes do very well because, in my theory, is that Google knows how to read the blog posts, but they're not reading the transcripts all of the other 400 episodes that are on my website. If I don't have a blog post that links to it, it doesn't register, as far as search engines are concerned.

Then there's the added layer of the technical setup, and I don't have the time or the desire to go through all of the technical qualifications that your website needs in order to register with search engines. But there is the technical component which is often overlooked and missed from the majority of people who are talking about SEO for podcasting. If I was looking before the show of who is actually doing SEO write for their podcast. What are sort of

the tips out there? And the only tips I could find are website tips. So make sure you have a website, make sure you write a blog post, make sure you have an h1 heading as your title, and then you go through the post and all of your other headings are either h2 h3 h4 this is only going to make sense for the folks who understand what the

verbiage that I'm talking about, but there is a technical component that is almost more important than the content itself. And because of the added layer of AI, there's so much of this content that can be created like that. And so Google is having a tremendous time trying to sort through, what's the good content that's going to keep users coming back and keep users to use their platform and not go to all these other places, versus what is the low quality

content? Because content can be created at such a rapid pace right now, you have a situation, I believe it was a few months ago where Tiananmen Square a famous photo of the, you know, the guy standing up to, you know, politically standing up and, you know, stands in the middle of the street while a male military profession is that what it's called profession, Not profession procession. Military procession is going through the streets. He stands in front of the tank very defiantly.

Unfortunately, a lot of people know what happened after that, but that image should be one of the top ranked images whenever you search for Tiananmen Square, but if you go and you search for it, AI photos show up. And so this signals that Google has no idea how to differentiate between AI focused content and content that is high quality. And so the hard truth is that nobody knows what the hell is going on. We're experimenting. We can try. But I think for the majority of podcasters, you try

to focus on the title. You add your podcast to YouTube and hope for the best. That is really the only way right now, as far as a clear path forward, if you are worried about SEO for your podcast, is to, frankly, not really worry about it all that much. Focus on making good content and then sharing it with your audience on social media, email newsletters, even adding your podcast to YouTube, because there's also the formula of I'll give a few SEO tips later on to focus on the headline and what

keywords you should use. And things like that. That is the big picture of what's going on in the world of SEO, where you have a lot of people who are talking online about how to SEO your podcast, they frankly do not know, because these platforms do not know, or these platforms do not release, what is involved in the metrics behind the SEO for their particular platform. So SEO as a whole, the 90% dominance that Google has enjoyed for the last

15 years, is non existent. It's going to continue to be chipped away, because they don't know how to differentiate from a robot perspective of how to make the good content, you know, come to the surface and bury the other content that is low quality and low value. And so there are a handful of ways that you can try to combat this and try to combat against you know, a lot of the AI engines that are just pumping out 15,000 word articles just to crush you from

an SEO perspective. But I guess the comfort in this is just knowing that there are still some ways that you can optimize for SEO, but being able to have sort of, I think the heyday of SEO traffic, it's evolved so much that folks really don't know which way to go. And I feel like that's hopefully this is maybe more comforting to podcasters who are worried that they have to learn this additional, you know, mechanism

for marketing. My advice is, if you're worried about SEO, just make sure your most important keywords, and I can go into that in just a second, but make sure those keywords are in the title, and then make sure that title is also on YouTube, because YouTube is the second largest search engine for now, but if you have the video component, then in the search engine rankings, where Google is now still playing with the search results page, where, if you go to Google right now,

you type in an answer, they're trying to give you, like the AI overview answers, and they're getting a little bit better about it. But then you get into sort of the layout of the page itself, where it's the AI overview, then it's the sponsored post, and then you get into the top, you know, 12345, and now they don't even have, you know, sort of the second page, or the third page, and so on and so forth. It's just an

endless scroll. So there's all of these different ways that Google is trying to combat this, but I think for a lot of podcasters, Do not stress yourself out about a medium that is in in flux, and that there is really no true path, because the path that we thought we knew is not there anymore. It is

disappeared. And maybe it wasn't there ever to begin with, because Google was caught lying about their you know what mattered in search, and so it's it's a tough medium, but don't stress yourself out about learning this additional one. Just focus on making good content.

followership. Complex problem you brought up with a bunch of complex doesn't even sound like answers just yet, but no a lot of complexity

technical setup. In order to make it your show and your brand discoverable, you have to be, at minimum, discoverable and fixing something, fixing your SEO on, say, like Squarespace or Wix, there's no telling that they even know from their own sort of setup. Well, maybe Squarespace, because Squarespace did buy Google domains. But that's that's neither here nor there. Make sure you have a website, the website that you get from

podcast hosts. You can't really customize it, so that's, it's a good, sort of, you know, band aid on a broken arm in the meantime. But what's really, if you are worried about, you know, sort of, I guess, longevity, I would still suggest getting a very basic like, three to five page website that we. You look more real in the eyes of your audience, which is a big thing. You want to be trustworthy in the eyes of your audience, if

they do a search for you. You want to show up and you want to control that experience, and the website is the only way you can control that experience. Now for individual episodes, what I like to teach people is called the ABC method. So open up Google on a private browser, go to the search bar and think about the episode that you want to create, type in the first keywords that come to mind when you think about that particular topic, one

or two words, that's it. Then hit the space bar and type the letter A and see what automatically fills if any of those are relative to the episode you want to create. That's the topic that I I would choose, and that's probably the framing that I would choose to I don't know if you want me to share my screen and like show an example of this, but you're

going to do this. It's called the ABC method, because you're going to use that same phrase, spacebar a, spacebar B, spacebar C, and so on and so forth. You're going to go through the whole alphabet in order to find that keyword topic that is going to resonate. Because what that tells you that autofill tells you, is that Google has seen that search traffic enough for that particular autofill phrase that they're going to list it in

the autofill. So that is a signal from Google that that search engine keyword has enough traffic to justify putting it in the autofill. So click on that page and see what search results come up. See what other YouTubers or people on YouTube or other podcasters have created. Are there blog posts out there covering this topic?

And you're going to do that throughout the alphabet, and then you're going to use that keyword phrase that you find that is the most similar to the topic that you want to talk about. You're going to put those keyword phrases at the start of your title, whether it's on YouTube or whether it's in your podcast player. Those first few words are the first words that show up in your title. Because we talked earlier that we know that they have the capabilities or the bandwidth to scan your

titles. But what they're probably not doing is they're not spending unnecessary dollars, Cloud Storage, computing capabilities, things like that. They're not spending those extra dollars to scan your transcript. It's just not happening. I would argue that you still need to include your transcript for ADA purposes, Americans with Disability Act because you want to make your podcast accessible to the widest audience. And I just think it's kind of like the right thing to

do. The better way to do it, though, is to take that transcript and turn it into a blog post. So that's sort of my spiel, is that use the ABC if you're really worried about it. Use the ABC method to come up with those keywords and then use those keywords at the very beginning of your episode title. Bonus points if you can send it to YouTube, because YouTube is a very good search engine. Not so much.

the next one. And if that is still the case, there are other areas of content, because Google wants to point you in the right direction to find the content you're looking for. And so they will suggest other top people also asked people also searched for look in those sections and click on those sections, and then you can check out the competition that is ranking for those keywords. And so it's a good indicator of is this shitty content ranking for this keyword phrase, oh, I can make it

better. And that's the mindset that you should have. And it goes back to making better content, but at least this way, you can kind of see what the the level playing field is. Use this same tactic on social media as well. Tiktok in particular, has a very good search. I don't think Instagram and Facebook are very good with their searches. That might change in the future,

but Tik. Talk is very good with search, and also we don't know, yeah, I was going to get into a little bit of like, optimizing your content for AI, but we just frankly don't know enough yet to even give you any kind of tips. So use the ABC autofill method. Create a blog post from your transcript to get a website. Those are probably my top three tips. Oh, and send that. Send your your show to YouTube. If you're here, we go

podcasting? Do you have any tips and tricks to add to to the list? Do you have any questions that maybe we can make a future episode about or address in a future episode? Let us know in the comments, if you're watching on YouTube, and if you are listening to the podcast version, send us some fan mail. We got a link in the show notes where you could send us a direct text message. We would love to get some feedback, some questions, some thoughts, some

uh, whatever. Let us know what you think about this episode. And lastly,

covered very well. That's an open door for you to know that Google thinks of this phrase very highly, that they're going to put it in auto fill, and all of this other content on this page sucks. So I can make it better, and I hopefully can have people discover my content through those mechanisms. There we