Search Engine Optimization for Your Podcast with Rebecca Gill

Learn how you can effectively boost your search engine optimization for your podcast using WordPress

In episode 4 of our podcast, I am joined by Rebecca Gill, SEO Consultant and Digital Strategy Executive.

I’ve known Rebecca for some time and she is one of a handful of SEO experts that I truly trust. She has a deep understanding of both search engine optimization and WordPress. And more good stuff about Rebecca: she runs her own podcast.

Podcasters often don’t think of the SEO issues. They are too fixated on downloads and other stats. The huge benefit of having your podcast on WordPress is its built-in SEO and all the tools and options you have to further benefit via search. Rebecca shares some great tips on how you can get the most out of your search engine optimization efforts.

Rebecca shares great SEO tips for podcasting, such as:

How podcasting platforms such as Apple Podcasts, etc. benefit your podcast on your WordPress site.The elements in the podcast file that help with SEO.Using both title and meta descriptions for your podcast episodes.The benefits of show notes and transcriptions.Taking advantage of a blog on your podcast site.Repurposing your audio podcast on YouTube.Using schema for your podcasts.

And Rebecca’s insights on:

Podcasting Platforms

WordPress as your homepage for your podcast is nice because it has a lot of inherent capabilities for SEO. But the external services where you share your podcast also provide value.

They help support Google’s EAT, which is expertise, authority and trustworthiness. And it helps Google understand the who, why, and what.

Often they have links back to your main podcast page, which creates a backlink both for referrals and for SEO. So they help with referral traffic and getting yourself out there. Again, also backlinks and supporting the EAT for Google as a core part of SEO.

File Data and SEO

What I input into those fields, putting in a title and intro text, and categories, are going to feed over to the various services through its RSS feed and that can influence the SEO that you have on those services.

Google has always understood that all of that data that you add to those files link back to your own site. So that can actually influence SEO. But it’s going to vary based on the service that you use and what it pushes out through the RSS feed.

Titles and Meta Descriptions

When you are creating your meta title and your description and even your show notes, it’s very similar to writing a blog post. Right? You want your title and if you have a keyword focus, you want that to be within the URL and your title and your intro copy. For your show notes, you want it in your meta description.

I always make sure I say podcast episode because I want everyone including the search engines to understand that this is a podcast and this is an individual episode of that podcast.

Transcripts and Show Notes

I think both the show notes and the transcripts are super important. Both of them are going to help the humans who are listening and referencing them as well as the search engines.

They may have listened to the episode and been like, oh yeah, I feel like I didn’t fully grasp what she said in this section of the episode. And they can go look to see if it’s in the podcast notes. And they also like go look at the transcript and read through it to make it more tangible and memorable.

I think people don’t expect podcast transcripts to be perfect grammatically, because we don’t speak that way.

Podcasts and Your Blog Posts

The one thing I caution is we want to make sure that we don’t have duplicate content. If you’re going to have the show notes and transcripts, you don’t want your blog post to be exactly the same. You’re right, it has to be different.

Both provide opportunities for SEO, for interlinking to keep assets. And they apply and appeal to two different types of users. You know, cause some people listen to podcasts, some people like to read blog posts.

Repurposing Audio on YouTube

If you want your stuff to show up in search within YouTube, you really need to cater to the YouTube algorithm. And that has some of the same things as traditional Google, but it has a whole lot of other different things on it. Make sure that you are hitting all of the necessary things for YouTube specifically.

Schema and Podcasts

It’s a way for you to communicate with the search engines using their own language. And it’s something that helps put you ahead of your competition because not everybody’s doing it.

There is podcasts schema. It’s called on demand event, but podcast episodes apply to this and there’s a whole set of schema that’s associated with it that you can use and bring up.

You’re giving ’em information about the duration of it, the start time, the end time. There’s a bunch of different informational points that you can add in when you’re building up the schema and you don’t have to have everything there, but you do want to have enough so that it gives Google a good understanding of what this content is and the nuances of it.

Where to find Rebecca

RebeccaGill.com

On Twitter @rebeccagill

Resources

SEOBits Podcast

Podcast Schema

Screenshot of File Info on Euphonies