6 SIMPLE WAYS TO GROW YOUR PODCAST AUDIENCE WITH SEO

Together with technical links and SEO, one of the three significant pillars of a successful SEO plan is interesting, high-quality, and captivating content.

Traditional content strategies engage articles, blog posts, images, and even video as the main sources of content. Though these can be good for helping your SEO efforts and boosting traffic, podcasts have always been an overlooked and misjudged medium. Engaging the podcast medium will not only build your brand and shoot up one-way traffic, but it will also add rich and captivating content to your site and help improve your efforts of link-building.

Admittedly, not only do you need to understand how to manipulate your podcasts for SEO, you must also know how to position yourself well on the platforms specifically meant for podcasts. Whether you’re a beginner or an already established podcaster, read on for specific tips on how to optimize your podcast.

1. It’s all in the title

What’s the main factor that determines whether your podcast is “FOUND” on iTunes and Google Play? It’s the “TITLE”. The ranking calculation of iTunes for podcasts emphasizes greatly on the podcast title, in addition to other factors like the overall number of subscribers and the overall number of podcast reviews.

Keep it neat and free, use the right keywords where necessary, and this would help you to show up for significant search queries. On Google Play, your show’s description (not individual episode descriptions) can be looked up as well, so ensure you make the most of it, while still maintaining an engaging and compelling copy. (And talking about keeping things clean, if your show has offensive words and as such, labeled as explicit on iTunes, then your podcast will not be penetrating the really huge Indian market.)

2. Optimizing your RSS feed

Although people don’t use RSS as much as before, your RSS feed controls your podcast on iTunes, Google Play Music and several other podcast platforms everywhere. Basically, what people subscribe to is your RSS feed when they subscribe to your podcast on any of such platforms.

Your feed is what provides all the information about your podcast to these platforms. So whenever you want to update the title or description of your show, you have to do so in your RSS feed. This may take a day for any of the fields to be updated on iTunes or any other platforms.

In order to gain the best SEO control over your podcast, you should create your RSS feed using the one you were provided by Libsyn or the one gotten from the PowerPress plugin for WordPress (a free plugin).

3. Leveraging your website

Despite the fact, that your podcast is an audio file, you can still score SEO points when you leverage your website and make it a destination worth the traffic Google sends. As SEO practitioners, we are always making efforts to draw more trusted links to our sites. A great podcast just happens to be another type of content you can engage to pull those links.

4. Recycling content

Transforming old content into something new is another excellent way to manipulate existing resources to improve your authority and shoot up your ranking on certain topics. You can gather contents from your podcast and transform them into infographics, blog posts, articles, videos, slide presentations, and lots more to gain more SEO value from the reused content.

5. That ‘other’ search engine: YouTube

YouTube, as you may possibly know, is the second most visited site on the web following closely to Google, with over a billion users. When thinking of any SEO technique, especially with podcast content, you should always try to include YouTube in your plan. YouTube is not just a heavy search engine in its own right, but contents of YouTube frequently pops up in the main body of Google search results as well.

6. Podcasting for link building

Another way podcasting can be of good advantage to your total search engine optimization efforts is via links attraction.  If the content of your podcast is entertaining, interesting useful, captivating and so on, then it may as well attract links independently, but there are definitely other links that you can aim for.

One other easy way to do this may be getting a podcast guest speaker to help promote the podcast on their own site. If someone agrees to be interviewed for your podcast, it’s quite possible that they would want people to hear that episode of the podcast. By hosting that episode of the podcast on your own site, in addition to releasing it out on popular media and podcast platforms, you can also offer your guests a general place to link to on your site.

One sure way to increase your odds is to scout for podcast guests with an exceptional interest in promoting the episode because the increased exposure will also benefit their business. These can include an author launching a new book, a company’s release of a new product, or someone who is just starting their own podcast. Particularly, authors are an excellent target, because generally when people just recently release a book, they look for every possible source of promotion.

In summary

Conclusively, with a little effort, podcasting and SEO can cooperatively help you gather that zealous chain of supporters that Kevin Kelly described as “1,000 true fans.” SEO actions can help grow the audience of your podcast; and in reciprocation, as your podcast popularity increases, it can bring search engine optimization benefits back to your site. And this creates some sort of “virtuous circle.”

Podcasting can help you establish yourself as an authority in your field, but you must know that this really involves a lot of time and effort. However, when the right podcast is done well, it is worth the investment. Optimize that investment by following these tips, and watch how your audience increases!

Reference: http://searchengineland.com/6-ways-grow-podcast-audience-seo-268734