“Optimize your content so that it’s searchable, and the glue that ties this all together is consistency.”
Start to rank within Google and other search engines like YouTube, as well as podcasting platforms, by focusing on what you can to affect your rankings.
Do your keyword research to understand what your ideal listeners are actively searching for. Optimize your content so that it’s searchable, and the glue that ties this all together is consistency. Consistency from production to launching and everything in between.
The three steps to ranking are:
Do Your Keyword Research
Understand what those main topics are, what your main core buckets are, what the subtopics are that you can talk about, and find out what people are actually searching for, and then develop content that is still true to you but speaks to those people and answers those questions.
Optimize Your Website and Your Content
You wanna make sure that your website, which is hosting your podcast and is distributing your podcast, is optimized and that it’s able to be found when people are actually doing searches that have to do with you or are close to you.
But if your website isn’t even indexed, no one’s ever going to find it.
In that sense, I think about having this giant, incredible house in the middle of the forest that nobody knows about. (That might sound like heaven to you, but in this sense, you want people to find you!)
So, you want to make sure that people actually know how to get to you and that you can start to be found. So you need to optimize the content so that the search engines can start to actually rank you.
Be Consistent With Everything
If you take anything from this message, please take “being consistent”. If you have a hiccup here and there, where you don’t release an episode every once in a while, or even in the beginning of your podcasting days, things may be a little weird, and that’s totally fine. You can pick it up, and you can keep being consistent from the next moment.
Consistency can look a little different than just recording or editing on a specific day. Yes, making sure that you’re putting out content consistently is important, too. However, it’s the greater picture you need to see through the eyes of consistency. Being really consistent in all that you do is the best approach, but please, show yourself some grace as you move along your path.
I’ll give you an example…
My first one hundred episodes came out every single week. Then I had one that didn’t come out on the same day as all the rest of them, and it drove me a little crazy.
There was an issue with the episode.
There was an issue with the person who was doing the production for me at the time.
And by the time I got it back, and it went live, it was on a Saturday, not a Thursday morning at 5:30 in the morning. (Like every single other one before it.)
I don’t know if there’s anybody who really, really caught that, and maybe somebody pulled it up, and they were like, “Oh, there’s not a new podcast episode. It’s Thursday morning.” But when they pulled it up next time, there was another podcast episode.
I may have also lost a lot of people with that. I don’t know.
At that point, life happened, and that’s ok.
For the next 60 to 70 episodes, I was consistent, every single week. And since then, I actually changed to bi-weekly episode releases. And that’s been consistent.
There are these big chunks of time where there’s a length of consistency, and then you make a change to it. Now, when it comes to actually doing your podcast episodes and the recordings themselves, you can have a little bit more flexibility in that, but still be consistent.
If you watch my podcast episodes or listen to them and kind of go a hundred-foot view out, what I’ve been doing for a long time at this point is a hot clip up front, my bumper, and then the episode, and then an outro piece. There’s consistency within that. And then there’s consistency within the conversation because of the keyword research, the topics that I talk about, and being able to make sure that I’m consistent in the messaging and consistently showing up that way.
And all of that will really help you start to rank within Google, other search engines like YouTube, as well as the podcasting platforms.
Whether you’re 5 or 500 episodes in, SEO for your podcast will ultimately help you in the long run. Yes, it can take some time to be able to do the work, as well as time to see the results from it. But you’re in a much better spot, being able to rank where people are searching for things that they can actually find you, especially over something like social media, where somebody’s really just waiting in line, or they’re bored, or they’re just killing time before their next appointment or whatever.
So in the long run, you really want to rank, and you need to optimize your show, show notes, and everything else that goes along with it to be able to do so.
Frequently Asked Questions About Getting Your Podcast To Rank Online
Question: What are the key factors that affect a podcast’s search engine ranking?
Answer:
Categorically, we have media and text. As for media, you want to have a video and an audio component for your podcast that is associated with your text component.
The text component is primarily your episode’s show notes, and in those show notes, you want to make sure that you focus on relevant keywords and high-quality content that is structured in a way to speak to both humans and the search engine crawlers.
Some key things to look at are optimizing your title, pointing out some key takeaways and insights from the episode, as well as things like optimizing the back end of each episode’s page with proper metadata and optimized file names.
Question: How can I optimize my podcast website for search engines?
Answer:
At the basic level, using relevant keywords in high-quality content and ensuring that your website is indexed by the search engines, you will inevitably start to see some rankings at some point.
To really enhance your site and speed up the process, you want to develop thought leadership pieces that really tackle the core topics you talk about in depth and incorporate various podcast episodes to support that.
Additionally, things like page speed, image compression, and the use of heading tags will greatly increase your rankings.
Question: What is the importance of consistency in podcasting for search engine ranking?
Answer:
Consistency is important in a few different areas. From an optimization and ranking point, consistency shows that there is new information coming out from your website in somewhat of a pattern and will help your website grow in its domain authority.
From a podcast-specific point, consistency shows your audience that you are here for the Long Haul and that they can count on new episodes coming out and therefore new information they can learn that shows somewhat of a pattern to them.
A prime example of this is if you have a podcast that launches new episodes weekly and you suddenly shift to monthly, that could be jarring, and you could potentially lose some people. However, making a subtle shift from weekly to bi-weekly can cut down on the loss of listeners and potentially give you space in other areas to be able to grow the podcast.
Learn How Podcast Mentorship Can Help You
If you want to learn more and dive deeper into how to set your podcast up to rank on Google searches as well as in podcast databases and directories, reach out to me or schedule a FREE Podcast Strategy Session to get started.
