How To Do Podcast SEO Research To Plan Your Episodes
Podcasts have become one
of the most effective forms of audio SEO, and it's one of the most efficient ways to grow your podcast
and get more listeners. In this video, I'll give you some podcast
SEO tips and walk you through how to plan your episodes based on search
engine optimization. Before we get into it, make sure to like this video and subscribe
to the Riverside YouTube channel. Let's start with what is SEO? This means optimizing certain online
content like web pages, blog posts, YouTube videos to get free organic traffic
from search engines like Google and YouTube.
Let's search
how to start a podcast on Google. All of these results specifically have
how to start a podcast in the title. So Google knows that they have content
related to that search query. The better you optimize your content,
the more likely search engines will display it
higher on search results. This makes your content more discoverable
for people searching for related subjects, also known as your target
audience. SEO is becoming just as important for audio podcasts as it has been
for websites and blogs before it. In 2019, Google began displaying podcasts
on their search engine results pages. Google uses their speech
to text feature to transcribe and analyze the contents of a podcast episode,
and it highlights it as a search result.
This means that anything you say
in your podcast episode or write in your podcast description
has the opportunity to be indexed. Your podcast episode titles will also be indexed by Google
and could show up in search results. You'll see here that the podcast episodes
that show up have content relating to how to start a podcast. This one doesn't have any “how to start a podcast”
in any of the written content.
So it must be a topic point
in the audio file. This one features
a similar sentence in the title. You can also see that all of these shows that are displayed
are displayed from Google Podcasts. So you want to make sure
that your show is on the platform. SEO is one of the reasons
that having a specific niche is important. You don't want there
to be much competition with other pieces of content online so
that you're more likely to show up first. Make sure you know your niche
and use niche specific keywords with low competition
and high search volume. We'll talk about this in a second. Build each episode
around a specific niche related keyword. This way your podcast transcripts
will already be optimized for SEO. Add these transcripts
to your podcast web page. Some hosting providers will give you
the option to add a transcript to your audio file
as well in addition to your transcript.
Include optimized written content
for each episode by giving Google some written content to read to complement
the audio content there's a better chance of ranking higher. Have your podcast on as many places
as it can be. All podcast platforms and YouTube. This gives more opportunity
for search engines and podcast platforms to crawl
and index your audio content. Let's walk through how to do SEO research
to plan your podcast episodes. First, brainstorm a bunch of episode
topics based on your niche. Let's say you're starting a podcast
focusing on freelancing write down all of the episode ideas
that you have in your head. These can be as broad
and as niche as you want. Here are a few tips to gather ideas.
Use Reddit. Find a couple of subreddits
relevant to your podcast topic and look at the kinds of things
that people are posting about. Check out other podcasts
related to your topic and see what they have made episodes on. Search your topic on Google and analyze
the first few results that come up. These results have probably already done
keyword research, so the topics that they cover are great ones to tackle
or get more specific with. Now you want to use keyword
research tools to get started.
The tool that I found that's free and has the most functionality for
this part of the process is Wordstream. You want to search
all of those episode ideas one by one. Say you want to make an episode
on photography freelancing. Search that term. Here you want to make sure that your term
has a low competition, but high search volume meaning that
lots of people are searching for the term, but there isn't too much information on it
online. Based on the volume and the competition ratio. This is a great keyword to use. You can move on to your next step with it. Now it's time to get more specific. In your episode, you want to see
what questions people are asking. So take that keyword and inserted into a site like answer
the public or AHREFS keyword generator. You will get a list of all of the questions
that people are asking about that keyword so you can plan out the content within your episode
and the questions that you want to answer.
You want to find highly searched topics
which you can decipher based on the key indicators legend here. A great tip for the introduction of your
episode is to state. “In this episode
we will be answering questions like” and state of the questions
word for word. This will allow the full search phrase
to be included Word for word
at the beginning of your episode. Don't forget to repurpose this episode
into a blog post and put it on YouTube
to get the most out of your hard work. If you liked this video,
make sure to hit that thumbs up button. And before you go, subscribe
to our channel and press the bell icon so you never miss another video
from Riverside. We have videos all about podcasting
equipment, advanced techniques for podcasting, beginner techniques
for podcasting, and more.
So make sure to check out our channel
and we'll see you in our next video..
