The popularity of podcasts as a content source has been growing significantly over the last few years.
Online marketers are also using podcasts as a medium to deliver content, improve brand awareness, and increase engagement. And like with any other piece of content, there are ways to optimise podcasts for search engines and gain organic traffic.
Here are a few tips on how to optimise podcasts for search engines.
1. Create a new web page for each podcast episode
You do not necessarily need a website to start and run your podcast. However, by having a website and dedicating a new blog post to each episode, you can increase your podcast’s SEO friendliness and make it easier for search engines to find each new episode.
Many professional podcasters publish a new blog post each time they release a new episode. This technique serves a few purposes:
- First, it is a great way to create new content — especially for your podcast listeners.
- Second, creating text-based content for each podcast episode will allow you to use more keywords that could drive organic traffic to your website.
- Lastly, you can create links from your blog page to other blog pages as well as other podcast episodes, which would help keep the engagement rate high.
2. Optimise the content
While you won’t be spending a lot of time and effort in optimising the content you create to power your podcast episode, there are a few things you should do.
- Use at least one or two H2 heading tags and try to include the main keyword in one of them.
- Sprinkle LSI keywords into your content as naturally as possible.
- Insert an image — without proper keyword-rich alt text — so search engines can understand the image.
- Make sure the content is of an adequate length. For example, a blog post with less than 300 words would likely not rank on the first search engine result page.
- The content should be easily readable and navigable. Excellent user experience should be one of your core focuses.
3. Include transcripts of the episode
Earlier this year, Google announced that podcasts will show up in search results. Listeners can search for a podcast and find relevant podcast episodes on the SERPs that they can consume directly.
But since that system hasn’t been perfected yet, it could be a good idea to include the transcript of your episode. This can improve the discoverability of each episode and enable you to include more keywords to drive extra organic traffic.
This can be a time-consuming process, however, and you should decide if it’s something you can comfortably take on.
4. Select keywords for each episode
Optimising podcasts isn’t that different from optimising a blog post. The fundamentals remain the same.
One of those basic SEO concepts is to include important keywords in hot places. The title of the episode is one of the most important places you can include the main keyword that you are optimising for.
As always, a long-tail keyword might bring better results and more targeted traffic to your podcasts. When including keywords into the titles of your podcasts episodes, make sure they don’t stick out unnaturally. Contextual inclusion of keywords should be your number one priority.
5. Don’t forget to include structured data
As podcasters, you can include special Podcast Structured Data to give your podcast a much better chance to rank higher in the search engine results pages.
With structured data, you help Google discover and understand your podcast. According to Google, “You can enable your podcast to appear in Google Search results and Google Podcasts, along with individual episode descriptions and an embedded player for each.”
Learn more about structured data here.
6. Leverage Google Podcasts
Because of Google’s growing focus on podcasts, Google Podcast is becoming more important than ever. Make sure to add your podcast to Google Podcasts. It will allow you to improve your SEO presence, gain more readers, and monitor your rankings.
Conclusion
Over the next few years, podcasts will continue to grow as a popular content medium. Google is also paying a lot more attention to it — which is a testament to the future popularity of podcasts. By following the tips mentioned in this article, and by improving the overall quality of your podcasts, you will likely gain better search engine rankings and more traffic.