31. What is Podcast SEO? Podcasting Tips to Get Your Show Discovered Faster!

Have you ever wondered how new listeners find your podcast? Or how to make sure your show pops up in the player's search results? In this episode, I dive into the world of podcast search engine optimization (SEO) and give you 3 essential steps to ensure that your show gets discovered!

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Transcript

Hey. Hey. And welcome back. In my quest to become a certified podcast growth coach, I've been diving deep into how new listeners find a podcast, and there are really only 2 ways. The first way is that they hear about your show from someone or somewhere. This is the marketing side of the equation, focusing on social posts, emails, ads, and so on. The other way is that they search for a topic in their podcast player and your show comes up. This is the search engine optimization side of the equation, and it's the focus of today's episode.

Search engine optimization or SEO for short is also sometimes known as organic discoverability. It focuses on strategically using keywords and phrases to increase the chances that your content shows up near the top of the search results. Now most SEO articles, websites, courses, etcetera, focus on web SEO. Web SEO is entirely different than podcast SEO. So if you know anything about web SEO, I want you to take your imaginary eraser and wipe the slate clean. Forget everything that you know. And if you don't know anything about Web SEO, you're in a great spot to learn about podcast SEO. Just know that if you do go on to learn about web SEO at a later time, that it's an entirely different beast.

Okay. So your first step is to identify your keywords and or phrases. FYI, I'm going to use the term keyword even when referring to phrases with a few words for the sake of simplicity so that I don't have to say keywords and or phrases every time. So podcast SEO focuses on short and sweet keywords. They're also usually pretty broad. I want you to make a list of up to 10 words that immediately come to mind when thinking about your topic. Aim for single words or very short phrases whenever possible. You can also think about what you would search in a podcast player to find a show about your topic.

Don't overthink this. If you need to set a timer to make this list for 1 minute and write down however many words you can think of for your topic in that one minute. So I'll share an example from one of my clients who recently went through this exercise with me. My client, Lisa, her topic is weight loss and surprise, surprise, her first keyword is weight loss. Moving forward, we also came up with diet, exercise, fitness, nutrition, lose weight, mindset, wellness, longevity, and healthy eating. Notice that all of these are single words or very short phrases, and that they're very general. I'll also add that they are the things that she focuses on through her particular approach to weight loss. We could have come up with keywords like intermittent fasting or low carb, if those were part of her approach.

If you're struggling with this, consider asking others what they would search if they were looking for your type of content. So step 2 in this process is out of your list, pick 1 to be your primary keyword. This is the word or phrase that first pops into your mind, the one that encompasses your topic the best. For Lisa, her number one is weight loss. For me, it's podcasting. For my biz bestie and podcast Startup Academy student, Robin, it's online courses. See how these are super simple and all encompassing? The rest of the keywords on your list are secondary keywords, which you can incorporate when appropriate, but they're not the priority. Step 3 is where you incorporate your primary keyword in specific places.

We want to put it into the fields that are being searched. So when you type something into your podcast player search bar, what's happening in the background is that the computer is basically looking for matches. If you put in weight loss, it's looking for the phrase weight loss in the podcast records. Of course, the algorithm is way more sophisticated than that, but in very simple terms, that's what's happening. So where is the computer looking for matches? In Apple Podcasts, which is the most popular podcast player, The search is checking for matches in the show title field, the artist field, and the episode title field. That's it. Literally just those three places. I'm hopeful that as podcasting becomes more popular and the players catch up with the volume and demand for content, that they will look for matches in more fields, but that's what we're working with as of now.

Apple Podcasts is the most popular, but it's not the only podcast player. So I'll also mention that some players search the show description field and episode description field as well. So let's take a look at the 3 fields that Apple Podcasts searches. Show title, artist, and episode title. First, your show title. I highly, highly, highly encourage you to include your primary keyword in your show's title. By the way, if you're just in the beginning stages of your podcast and you would like some more info and support with things like choosing a search engine optimized title, I invite you to register for my free podcasting 101 workshop. If you're listening to this at the time of release, the next one starts on June 24, 2024, and we have a whole day dedicated to choosing your title.

Head to the podcast teacher.com/workshop to register. I run this workshop several times a year. So if you're listening to this in the future, you can still head to the podcast teacher.com/workshop to get details on the next event. Okay. So you want to include your primary keyword in the show title whenever possible. Then you want to see if you can add it into the artist field. This field is not as important, so don't stress it if it doesn't naturally fit. When possible, I like to put the person's name and then add a title after it.

So for my client, Lisa, we put her name, Lisa Olsen, followed by her credentials because she's an MD, and then we added weight loss coach at the end to get that keyword in. On mine, it says Julia Levine, the podcast teacher, and then in parenthesis, I put podcasting coach. I wanted to make sure and get that podcasting with the ing in there in the artist field because I'm special, and I have a podcast about podcasting. And so if you search podcast in your podcast player, you get 50,000,000,000 results because half of the show titles out there include the word podcast, which is not best practice, by the way. But a lot of people put it in there. So if you search podcast, it's a hot mess. But if you search podcasting, you get more accurate results. And so I want to be sure to show up for people who are searching podcasting because I have no hope of showing up for people who search podcast because there's 50,000,000,000 people who have that in their title.

Okay. So with that story out of the way, moving right along to the episode titles. Whenever possible, include your primary keyword in your episode title. When it's not possible, try to include one of your secondary keywords. And so when I say if it's not possible, of course, it's always possible to put it in there. But remember that you're also writing your titles for humans, not just for search engine optimization. And so sometimes it can be a little repetitive or a little stale if you're always starting your episode titles with the same word or the same phrase. And so, you know, maybe out of every 10 episodes, you have 8 that include your primary keyword, and then 2, you sprinkle in some secondary keywords instead.

But repetition is the key here. Putting your primary keyword into your title once isn't going to do a whole lot for you. But when you have 50 or 100 episodes and the majority of them contain your primary keyword, that is going to really boost you up in the search results. It's important to note here that if you already have an existing podcast, that you can always go back and change your titles to optimize them for search. They're not carved in stone. You can go back and change them. This is not something that you need to do tomorrow. But if you think your show could benefit from going back and optimizing some of your episode titles, maybe you redo 1 or 2 a week until you get through them all.

When you have the capacity, I do recommend including your primary and secondary keywords in your show description. That's the paragraph that describes your podcast show as a whole. As I mentioned previously, some podcast players search this field even though Apple currently doesn't. So that's podcast SEO in a nutshell. Here's your crash course. So remember to think simple, short, and general keywords, Choose one to focus on as your primary keyword and put it in your show title plus as many episode titles as possible. That's it for today. Until next week, happy podcasting.