The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization. Many podcasters focus more on creating amazing podcast content for their listeners but neglect the SEO aspect for their content. The problem is that they are often missing out on reaching a greater audience for their awesome content because they are neglecting their SEO. Are you tired of missing out on the potential for your podcast SEO? Here is a basic rundown of what SEO is, why it’s problematic that your podcast doesn’t optimize for it, and how to overcome the SEO hurdle for search engines with your audio content.
SEO Basics
Even if you’ve never thought about SEO basics before, you’ve probably seen them in action. You need a plumber for your home because there’s been a leak under your sink. You bring up the Google search bar and enter in a search along the lines of plumber near me. Then, you get a list of possible plumbers that are ready to come and fix your leak. Most people stick with a result that’s on the first page of their search. Those companies that show up in the first results for your plumber search are leading the charge with the best SEO possible.
Search engines like Google are designed to continually crawl different items on the internet to discover what’s available. This information is gathered to help it determine the proper placement for these items when a user enters a search into the search bar. There is a lot of behind the scenes analysis for what makes one website’s content reach higher than another site. Google is often publishing new rules that websites and content creators have to follow, such as making a website mobile-accessible. When new guidelines are established, content publishers race to meet them to protect their SEO.
The keys to good SEO, no matter the new rules, are somewhat simple. Create great content that offers value to the person who is searching for it and use keywords that help them find your content. Creating content that is full of keywords without being helpful is something to avoid. It’s considered very closely to spam content and could have your content downgraded in the search engine. Users that do find your content can often be put off by what it lacks, so it won’t help you garner new users.
Google and other search engines evaluate items like pictures, text, graphics, infographics, and other content that has textual information available. These crawlers for search engines are unable to assess items that are missing text, such as the audio for your podcast. There currently is no way to rank audio for SEO without text. It boils down to your podcast missing out on ranking on the search engine, making it hard for new listeners to find you. Having an RSS feed and submitting audio content to iTunes, Spotify, Google, and other streaming platforms is simply not enough to fully actualize SEO potential.
The key to your efforts of getting an SEO ranking to allow interested parties a chance in finding your podcast is to add text. Not moving forward with this effort can result in your listener audience to stagnant. It may seem like your podcast is performing well, but it may not be at your full potential. Evaluating your podcast SEO can make a difference.
Neglecting Podcast SEO Can Harm Your Podcasting Potential
As a podcast is an audio format, the search engines that people use to find new content won’t be able to rank it unless there is a written portion. Your podcast episodes may be excelling with your current audience of listeners who have subscribed to learn when your next new episode will air. Still, you could be missing out on a large number of listeners that aren’t aware of your podcast as a search engine won’t find audio-only content. Rather than depend on word-of-mouth as a traffic generator, get found by taking advantage of your great content. It will allow you to increase podcast rank in search engines.
One of the things that often stops some from taking advantage of SEO is that creating content takes time. It can be a daunting thought to create an exciting podcast as well as promote that podcast across social media and other digital marketing channels, but to have to make up a text, or show notes, to help attract more listeners on top of that can seem exhausting. You can take advantage of your already created content without having to make a new text for your SEO purposes. You can add a transcription to your podcast that covers what was discussed without needing to create something new.
How to Create Text Without Transcribing Your Podcast
One of the options you have to create text for every episode of your podcast to capitalize on your content for SEO purposes is to create a transcript of the podcast. This effort is often accomplished by either you going back in and physically creating the text or spending the money on a transcription service which can become an expensive endeavor, especially if you have longer material with several speakers.
There is another option that doesn’t require you to spend a great deal of your own time or money on transcription services. Enter in Backtracks Podcast Player. It provides interactive podcast transcripts and SEO available content to help search engines like Google and Bing find your podcast to help rank it to bring in new listeners without any hassle on your part.
It’s guaranteed to be 99% accurate, which is an impressive feat for most transcription. Bad transcription can be almost as problematic as no written content. Someone that does on the off-chance finds your podcast may be put-off by a large number of errors in the script. Again, this achieves the opposite of the effect you’re looking to have on your SEO.
Plus, Backtracks Podcast Player does more than just create a plain transcript. It can create a table of contents for your podcast episodes, including timestamps. You can have episode titles and chapter titles, as well as link to specific areas of audio through the linked timestamps when sharing across social media or any other distribution channel. It makes it easier to share small snippets of your podcast to help reel in more listeners and reach a broader audience. There are plenty of features to help your podcast grow and increase audio rank in search engines.
[00:00:00] This could be any text that you want.
[00:00:05] The Backtracks player has time-synchronized and interactive transcripts to allow audio content to be accessible and readable by people as well as search engines. [00:00:13.51] Make your audio content and podcasts accessible, interactive, and usable with Backtracks. [00:00:19] Learn more at backtracks.fm.
Other Benefits of Adding Textual Equivalents to Your Podcast Episodes
Some additional benefits come from adding a textual equivalent to your podcast content, especially regarding accessibility. Your audience may currently only be those that can clearly hear your podcast and everything that’s said, but there are a large number of individuals with hearing problems in the world. It’s estimated that about 5 percent of the world population has some form of hearing loss. These individuals could be connecting with your content if you add the text equivalents.
Depending on your content and your audience, it’s also possible that your listeners may feel the need to read your podcast script. Perhaps you have a true-crime podcast, and a listener wants to read the facts you’ve listed at a particular spot to help them make a point to a friend. Adding a podcast transcript and table of contents with timestamps can make it easier for that person to go back in and read it over for themselves. Plus, you may earn some word of mouth credit through this type of sharing.
