Podcast 101: How to Use Podcasting as Part of Your SEO Strategy

Happy National Podcast Day! To celebrate, we’ve decided to share our experience, and the tips and tricks we’ve picked up on a recent podcasting project.

Over the last quarter, we’ve worked with Seaspray Private and Seaspray Financial to develop their online podcast. As part of the larger project, our Creative and Web teams were brought in to design and develop their digital assets. This included but wasn’t limited to digital assets such as the podcast imagery, website development and podcast integration. 

So why not share our experience and knowledge with you!?

Introduction

Podcasting is an amazing way to have genuine in-depth conversations, build relationships, and then share those meaningful conversations with your audience. Above all, podcasting is about sharing ideas, passions, and driving social change through conversation.

When SEO and marketing professionals talk about quality content creation as an essential piece to SEO and digital marketing, podcasts fit perfectly into this category of “quality content.” 

Why? Because real people are setting aside precious time to meet and discuss what’s important to them and their audience. 

Not surprisingly, podcasting can be a huge driver of organic growth as a stand-alone channel. But when you combine your podcast with other SEO strategies, they can work together as an efficient and effective way to drive traffic to your website and increase inbound leads.

With the right podcast link building strategy, you can use podcasting as a way to expand your link building (and improve your rankings in search results), while simultaneously generating more search traffic to the podcast itself.

There are many reasons to start a podcast, including entertainment, education, and pure personal interest, but in this guide, we’ll be looking at the utility of podcasts as an SEO strategy (and link building by extension).

Podcasting Fundamentals

For a podcast to benefit your SEO strategy, link building strategy, and brand reputation, you need to adhere to these important podcasting fundamentals:

• Speak as an expert
  People want a podcast host who has a natural interest and knows what they’re talking about. Make sure you come across as an expert, in whatever field you’re trying to cover. If you’re not, make sure you do adequate research, reading, and planning before the episode so you’re not caught off-guard.
• Invest in quality equipment
  Your podcast is only going to be listenable if you invest in decent equipment. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy the most expensive microphone on the market, but you should at least strive for mid-range territory. Make sure you’re recording in a location that’s acoustically favourable, and monitor yourself with good headphones. It shouldn’t cost you more than a few hundred dollars to get started with the basics.
• Differentiate from the competition
  The topic of your podcast needs to be something that stands out. There are already a million podcasts about general education, politics, comedy, and marketing—so what makes yours different? You can differentiate yourself by appealing to a different demographic, covering a specific niche topic, or by podcasting in a different format (like very long or very short episodes). Use this uniqueness as the focal point of your marketing strategies in the future.
• Market and support your work
  Even the best podcast would fail to generate an audience without ample support. It’s critical to market your podcast to new audiences, and go out of your way to get attention for it. Social media distribution and paid ads work wonders, but as you might have guessed, our top recommendation is link building.
• Engage
  People like to listen to podcasts because it makes them feel like they’re a part of something. To do this, you have to engage with them. Depending on your strategy, this could mean starting discussion threads with your listeners after the episode is over, conducting surveys to discover what people want to hear next, or even occasionally featuring listeners on the podcast itself. Just like in social media, the more engaging you are, the more loyal your followers will be.

Expanding Your Link Building Strategy With Podcasting

Ultimately, podcasting is best utilised as a feedback loop for SEO; not only will you use SEO to fuel the visibility and popularity of your podcast, you’ll also use podcasting to attract more links to your website. Some of this will happen organically, but you can expand your link building strategy through podcasting in the following ways:

• Build links for recursive growth. 
  Make sure to spend time building links to your podcast page, and pages for individual episodes. Take advantage of the recursive nature of podcasting and SEO. As your podcast becomes more popular, you’ll earn more links, and you can use links to fuel your podcast’s popularity. The hardest stage of your podcasting strategy will be the beginning, when you don’t have much authority or followers to work with. Link building is one of the best ways to generate that much-needed initial attention, since it’s both relatively inexpensive and completely under your control.

Podcasts are experiencing an impressive golden age, but SEO will always be important. If you’re not seeing results from your link building company, or if you need help perfecting your content strategy, contact SEO.co for a free analysis, or check out our new podcast to get a first-hand perspective on how it works! We’re an SEO company that loves to help our clients outwrite and outrank their competition!

5 SEO Benefits of Podcasting

1. Podcasting for Link Building

If you own a podcast, and the content is entertaining or interesting enough that people really get value out of it, it could very well attract links all on its own. But, to really use your podcast as a part of a larger search engine optimisation and backlink strategy, there are other things you can do to get maximum results.

Podcasting is a great way to get links. Podcast conversations can be a starting point that carries over to social media, and many guests will promote their appearance on your show through their own social channels or even on their site. 

In order to get the link going back to your site, you’ll need to make a dedicated landing page on your site for each episode. A best practice for landing pages is to include a summary of the episode, an introduction to the guest, and some key highlights. 

One way to confirm the link is to talk about it with your guest when you meet in-person. Your guest has already agreed to begin a relationship with you. And you are helping them out by giving them exposure to your audience. Simply asking the guest to help promote the episode will increase your chances of getting a link back to your site.  

You likely will have your podcast show on various audio platforms (Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.). So, you’ll want to make sure that your guests know that the best place to link to — both for you, and their audience — is the dedicated landing page on your site.

2. Podcast Guest Appearances as a Backlink Strategy

You don’t have to own a podcast to build links. Appearing as a guest on other people’s podcasts is a great way to get links going back to your site. 

After the podcast episode is published, the host will almost always include a link going back to your site in whatever form of show notes they have. As mentioned above, it is a best practice to have a dedicated landing page on your website for each podcast episode with a summary and highlights. 

This is your opportunity to combine SEO strategy and backlink outreach efforts with the network you’ve built through podcasts.

Here’s how: 

• Have someone from your team be in charge of podcast outreach
• Create a list of relevant content that exists on your site, where listeners of the podcast could find more information on topics discussed. 
• Look through the show notes page to identify keywords that you want to rank for. 
• Use these keywords as anchor texts to a relevant page on your site that will add value to the host’s audience. 
• Send an email to the host thanking them for having you or someone from your company on their podcast. Ask them to link back to specific pages on your site with the anchor texts you identify. 
• Make sure to offer value in return, and end by saying something along the lines of “thank you for your consideration either way!” 

3. More content for your website

Whether you run your own podcast, or often appear as a guest on other podcasts, podcast episodes can be converted into crawlable content for your site and boost your SEO. 

Yep, you guessed it! I’m telling you to make a dedicated landing page for every podcast episode with a summary, a short guest bio, and bulleted highlights from the show. But I’m also telling you to go beyond that. 

The goal is to create more content for search engine bots to crawl and index from your website. To make each podcast episode as accessible to search engines as possible, you’ll want to have a full time-stamped transcript on your site underneath the more skimmable list of the show’s highlights. 

Here, you can also find places in the transcript to include internal links to other key pages on your website, and you are setting your content up to be more easily repurposed onto other pages or channels. 

Google has talked about making audio searchable several times over the past few years. 

But for now, transcriptions seem to be the primary method of picking out parts of an episode to match a search query.

Bonus SEO Tip: Include timestamps in your podcast transcription and add a table of contents in order to make the article easier for Google to find and rank you for relevant questions and keywords. This will also improve your website user experience at the same time.

4. Increased Organic Keyword Ranking

This point goes hand-in-hand with creating more crawlable content for your website. Keyword research and keyword-based content creation is a key part of SEO. 

By simply posting the full-transcription of a podcast episode, you’re doubling down on work you’ve already done. We’ve found that by creating unique landing pages for each podcast episode and providing the key information in a transcript, your organic ranking keywords will begin to steadily increase as the search engine crawls these pages. 

Of course, like all things SEO, we didn’t start to actually rank for these keywords until a few months after we created the landing pages. So you’ll want to be patient as you track the results.  But by tracking this information, you will get a better idea of which keywords you are organically linking for, and other keywords that you could possibly target in future. 

5. Recycle podcast content for other marketing channels

Last but not least, all podcast content can be recycled. Repurposing it into a blog or split into micro-content for social media. You can also integrate your content as quotes on various other pages on your website. 

Here’s how you do it: 

• Create the podcast episode and distribute it to various podcast channels (Apple Podcasts, Spotify etc.)
• Video record the interview, and post on YouTube.
• Create a show notes landing page on your site
• Provide the time stamped transcription
• Pull out key quotes and highlights from the episode 
• Post video snippets, audio snippets, key quotes, and highlights to social media channels. 

Experts in their field

Below we’ve highlighted some Podcasting experts. Each one has its own angle making it a podcasting success in its field. Not sure where to start? Find an angle that works for you!

• History: You’re Wrong About
  Each episode examines a new commonly held collective opinion, debunking myths and applying journalist skills to discover the truth. 
• Technology: Ctrl Alt Delete
  The Ctrl Alt Delete show is a critique of the digital media landscape. Speaking with well-known actors, writers and other creative people to find out how an online network can impact offline lifestyle.
• Financial Services: Seaspray Making Waves Podcast
  A quarterly in-depth discussion on investment markets, delivering our expert insight and creating investment solutions for clients.
• Science: Houston, We Have a Podcast
  The official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. The show offers expert interviews and plenty of interesting information, covering everything from astronaut training to space food manufacturing.
• Relationships: Sh**ged. Married. Annoyed.
  Every side-splittingly funny and honest episode features real-life married couple. Chris and Rosie Ramsey, chatting about life, relationships, annoyances, parenting, growing up and everything in between.
• Entertainment: Entertainment Tonight
  Like its popular US TV counterpart, this podcast covers all things pop culture related. From breaking celebrity news to in-depth interviews with Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Summary

Podcasting is a great way to build genuine relationships and collaborate on quality content.

If you aren’t leveraging podcasts for your marketing and SEO strategy, it’s not too late to begin now.

Happy Podcasting!