Recent numbers suggest over 55% of the US population have had a chance to listen to Podcasts. The weekly active listeners’ count is over 155 million. Around twenty-four percent of the listeners have access to multiple podcasts. 49% of the listeners belong to the age group of 25-44 years.
These numbers are hard to miss, and if you are also planning to ride on the tide, this is the perfect read for you. If you haven’t planned for the inclusion of the podcast in your strategy, then you must do it right away.
Unlike a blog with a dedicated space for them, these are present across the various podcast directories or third-party streaming services. These platforms have thousands of other podcasts apart from your one. What do you do to stand out?
The answer is podcast SEO. Let us look at how SEO features can work for this non-traditional medium.
The Persona
The rapid growth of the podcast space suggests that creating a space for your brand is possible. It also means the creation of content that caters to the needs of a particular set of audiences. You can not plan to target anyone and everyone.
Having a podcast persona helps chart the content that is ideal for your subscribers. It also helps sketch an image of their beliefs, goals, and lifestyle. Your content strategy may help you design content that is in line with your brand persona. It will help you to sync your podcast with the brand target audience for whom your products are apt.
It helps you better optimize the content as per the search terms of your audience. For example, if your listeners show interest in Hawaiian Food. You may have a podcast episode title as ‘How to cook Hawaiian food at home.’
The Platform
Loading speed and uptime are crucial factors in technical SEO. A slow-loading website will rank lower on the SERP or search engine result pages.
Podcasts may have the same phenomenon too. If the platform takes time to load, the podcast ranking may get affected. Less optimal performance means less number of people subscribing to the podcasts.
You can learn about the various podcast hosting platforms that give precedence to site performance for hosting. Your subscriber may face issues with the audio or slow site performance because of the absence of a well-optimized web host. However, the growth of the podcast space is promoting more web hosts to optimize for a seamless user experience.
Podcast sites like Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pandora, Audible, .etc. , are gaining a lot of traction. You may check them while finalizing the apt platform for your content.
Incorporation in Other Spaces
It is often seen that some of the podcasts host their episodes as exclusive pages on websites. Why not start tagging your podcast episodes to SEO-favorable blogs?
There is an ongoing transformation of the results that pop up on the SERP of Google. They are working to include multimedia results from YouTube videos as well as podcasts. But till now, they give back results containing blog articles to search queries.
Firstly what you need is the creation of a blog post around your podcast episode. After the podcast content is ready, dub it as a high-value blog, and with the help of best SEO practices, optimize it.
Say considering the to tap the target audience we spoke of earlier. Your audience searches for ‘Hawaiian food’ in Honolulu. You are a Hawaain food specialty restaurant based out of Honolulu. You may add an exclusive page on your website with a podcast episode title as ‘Chef’s take on Hawaiin main courses’ along with a blog post.
Then you can optimize the page for SEO. You can look for local Hawaii SEO agencies like Shane Perry Marketing to help you get a free SEO analysis done. The content, user interface, and technical analysis may help you optimize your page to get a better Page Authority Score.
Alternatively, you may also choose to evaluate the existing blogs and try to add podcasts to the same. It tactfully utilizes your blog’s on-page SEO. Thereby, helping you to increase your potential subscriber base.
Teasing people with content is another way to generate interest for your podcasts. You can do it via questions or by putting in context what to expect. Make it a point to mention relevant keywords to make the most of on-page SEO.
The use of basic podcast SEO tools can ensure your podcasts have the audience pool to garner a decent subscriber base. The above tips can help you create content in a space that is fast growing. It also allows you to connect to your target audience.