🥜 SEO Strategy for Podcasts: Rank Higher in Search Results

Imagine if your ideal listener found your show at the perfect time, every time. Ranking in search can turn this into a reality.

It’s not sexy but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can make or break a podcast. Ranking in the right places can allow you to predictably grow your audience, influence and income to the point where you can go full-time on your show or multiply its impact on your business.

Today we are going to teach you the 80/20 rule when it comes to SEO for podcasts. You will learn the 20% of effort that brings 80% of results to start ranking your episodes. This instalment is more technical than most, so take notes and keep an eye on our YouTube channel for a video summary of this content dropping in 2 weeks. Let’s get Nutty.

In Today’s Email

• Podcast SEO 101

• How to be featured in future Newsletters

Podcast SEO 101

Having good SEO means that your content ranks within search engines when people type in specific words or phrases, also known as “keywords”. This is a critical skill podcasters need that can even help in making better decisions for future content and maximizing the lifespan of your episodes. By finding the right keywords and creating content that ranks, you can have your ideal listeners/customers find you at the time when they are most primed to consume what you have to offer. Over a long period, this can be transformative for your show. I am going to turn you into an SEO expert but first, it all starts with Keywords…

WTF is a “Keyword”?!

Good SEO starts with understanding Keywords and how to find them. Keywords are specific words or phrases that people type into search engines. The more generic the keyword, like “podcasting” the more competitive it is to rank at the top. But when you dive deeper and become more specific using long-tail keywords, it becomes a lot easier to rank and the traffic becomes more valuable. For Podcast Nut, an example of a great keyword for us would be “How To Grow Your Podcast” It’s far more specific than “podcasting” and more likely to bring us our ideal customer, a podcaster looking to grow their show. Every show has keywords that their ideal listeners consistently search to find content that solves their problems. By understanding keywords and your audience, you can deliberately make content to show up when people search for certain things.

How to find Keywords

Finding the right keywords is where the real magic happens. To get good at this you must understand your audience. We want to get into the mind of your ideal listener/customer and think of the typical journey they go through when looking for content like yours. There are a few resources I recommend using when finding keywords to target.

• YouTube Search Bar - When you start typing something in YouTube’s search bar, they start suggesting searches based on what you have typed so far. This is a goldmine for potential keywords to target. YouTube is only showing you these suggestions because people who have started typing what you have, ended up searching for their suggestions.

  

• VidIQ - The YouTube search bar is a great free place to start but it doesn’t come with any data. That’s where VidIQ comes in. You can use their keyword inspector tool to see estimates of how often a keyword is being searched per month. This helps you prioritize the biggest potential wins.

  

• FAQs - Are there popular websites or brands within your niche? Use the Frequently Asked Questions section on their website to see what they are being asked and make content to answer these questions.

• Reddit - Be active in the Reddit communities where your target audience hangs out. What are the topics you see being brought up often or sparking a lot of engagement?

• Be Your Viewer - Chances are you create content for who you once were. Earlier in your development, what were the questions, concerns or problems you had along the way and how did you find the answers?

Use these tools and any others you can think of to help you create a list of keywords/phrases that could bring you highly valuable traffic. The better you understand your audience, the easier all of this becomes.

YouTube SEO

YouTube SEO is amazing. It’s way easier to rank than it is on Google and can bring targeted traffic to your show for years from the same video. YouTube SEO strategy will depend largely on the keyword you are going after.

Competitive Keywords - the more generic or popular a keyword is, the more data YouTube has to understand the viewer intent behind typing in that keyword or phrase. To rank in highly competitive places you want to focus your efforts on the intent of the viewer typing that in. What is the video they are hoping to find by typing this in? If you create that video, your chances of ranking (even on competitive terms) go way up. This is why you will often see videos ranking for very competitive keywords, even without using the word in the title of the video. YouTube scrapes through your video to determine what it’s about. They then use their user data based on previous viewing sessions after typing in that keyword to determine the intent of that search. When they have enough data to know this with confidence, this is the primary ranking factor. How long you stay ranking high will depend on how your video performs when in a high-ranking position.

Less Competitive Keywords - For less competitive keywords, YouTube operates like it used to before using tracking viewer intent & using AI to scrape through videos. When they don’t have the data necessary to make these educated guesses, they go back to more of an “exact match” approach to the metadata associated with the video. There are 4 different sources of metadata that YouTube will use to determine a ranking

Title - What keywords are used in the title / do people click it when it appears in search?

Thumbnail - Do people click it when it appears in search?

Description - Does the description include the target keyword / other relevant keywords?

Tags - Does the video use tags strongly associated with the keyword?

Podcast Audio SEO

Podcast directories are still fairly primitive in handling search within their platforms. This is good news for you because ranking isn’t difficult and most of your competition isn’t even trying to.

Podcast directories operate a lot like less competitive YouTube keywords. They sort through the metadata to determine initial ranking and then use listener feedback to determine how long something ranks. When targeting keywords within the podcast platforms, be mindful of including your target keyword(s) in the title, description and tags on the platforms that allow them.

You will get better at SEO through studying and practice. To get better quickly, go look at the content currently ranking for terms in your niche and outside, to see what they are doing to rank there. Lastly, don’t keyword stuff. Keyword stuffing is robotically spamming keywords or attempting to gain traffic through riding unrelated trends. Only target keywords that are related to the content and write understanding a real person will read it. 

There is nuance to all of this which is too in-depth to cover in this newsletter but if you would like me to go deeper, just reply to this email with “Teach me SEO” and if enough people do I will make a newsletter & YouTube video.

HIT & MISS

This newsletter was long, so we removed the HIT & MISS for this week, but that will be returning next instalment!

P.S If you would like us to keep an eye on your content and potentially give you feedback in the HIT & MISS of the week, reply with the name of your show and the link to it on YouTube!

Happy Podcasting.

See you next week.

-Ben