If you have made a podcast for your business, all you want is to get more subscribers for your future episodes. Different from traditional blogging, a podcast allows your listeners to access the podcast through a third-party streaming service. These services carry hundreds of thousands of other podcasts into their network.
So how could you get the podcast discovered by the right prospective customers? Just use podcast SEO to do so. It is not only blog posts that benefit from these SEO optimization techniques. Your podcast can get more subscribers if you do some off-page SEO tactics and some other practices.
Still thinking about how to start and promote your podcast the right way? Don’t worry. Here are seven podcast SEO tips that help you gather more subscribers and gain visibility.
Get Your Episodes Discovered By These Podcast SEO Tips
1. Having An Audience Persona Is Helpful
Since 2020, more than 68 million people listen to a weekly podcast. Every year, this audience count increases, which means you are going to get a dedicated audience in such a large market. The growing number of listeners also means that the number of podcasts is on a rise. To make a place for yourself, you must target a particular niche of listeners instead of trying to impress everyone.
This is why having a defined audience persona is so useful. This persona shows what kind of content your subscribers would love to see. Apart from that, it will also show their lifestyle, goals and beliefs. When you get a clear idea of all the above, you can modify your podcast as a whole. You can also change each episode as per the search terms the subscribers are looking for.
For example, if the people who are listening to your podcast want more sales then use the keywords that show the search they made. You can prepare episode titles like “How to train the sales team” or “ How to help your sales team master video sales calls.”
2. Uptime And Loading Speeds Are Two Important Factors
In technical SEO, uptime and loading speeds are two important factors to rank your website. In case your website is slow to load the page, your site will rank lower on the search rankings. The same rule applies to your podcast, as its ranking is influenced by how quickly the platform loads. Slower the speed, lesser subscribers it is going to get.
Many podcasters decide to host the episodes on their own website instead of creating a dedicated episode page for each. If you plan to do so, you have to ensure that the speed of your platform is top notch.
You should educate yourself on the different podcast hosting platforms that will prioritize the site performance for hosting your podcast. It is not necessary that every web host is optimized for the podcasts and some of them might cause the site to become slow or face issues in loading audio files. Nowadays, the podcasting industry is growing and more and more web hosts are adding seamless support to the podcast episodes.
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3. Invite Influencers In Your Niche Onto Your Show
One way in which you can make your audience notice you and get more subscribers is to invite thought leaders and influencers related to your niche into the show. They will have supporters and followers who will listen to your podcast because they know a trustworthy source considers you credible. Just by having these guests, you can make sure that the subscriber takes the first step. They will find your podcast and subscribe to it for more information.
However, if you have a small podcast then you will have to work hard before you can contact the leaders. You can still ask experts with smaller following to join your podcast. Show off your interviewing skills and add to your subscriber list before you can add the big names of the industry.
4. Combine Your Blog And Podcast Efforts
We have already talked about how some podcasters host their episodes as dedicated pages on the website. You can increase your podcast SEO if you attach these episodes to your SEO-compliant blogs. Though Google has added options to include multimedia results on a search, truth is that the end result of most of the queries is still blog posts and website pages.
To stay ahead of the competitors, combine your blog and podcast. You can do so in multiple ways. Either create a blog post related to a podcast episode. After you have recorded your episode, you can change it into a high value blog post that you can make SEO compliant.
You can also do an audit of all your blog posts and add the podcast episodes into each of them. This helps you make the maximum of blogs on-page SEO and portray your podcast for visitors and other subscribers. To motivate people to listen to the episode, you can attract them by adding questions or just highlight what you should expect. Add key phrases and SEO-based search terms and take advantage of on-page SEO tactics.
5. Get Yourself Listed In Top Podcast Directories Online
Another tactic to get more podcast subscribers is to get yourself listed in top podcast directories online. However, getting an entry in these directories is not simple, especially, if the podcast is already operational on one platform.
You can submit your podcast to directories like Spotify and Apple Podcasts one at a time. Or you could sign up with Anchor.fm and submit the podcasts to various directories at one time.
ALSO READ: Top 10 Podcast Editing Software For Various Levels Of Podcasters
The directories are places where your listeners would go to look for new podcasts. If you use this tactic the chance of getting more subscribers is going to increase many times. There are many options available but you can choose the best performing apps and services and then go to the rest of the apps later on.
Also, know that there are new players emerging in this podcast app industry trying to gain an advantage. It is also possible that there are niche podcast directories that only cater to your kind of audience. These are a great way to reach out to your audience without getting any competition to disturb you.
6. Answer Your Visitors’ Queries
If your business already has a podcast that makes small, high-value episodes that tell people about your product or service and answer any kind of queries they may have why you don’t add these episodes into your customer support knowledge base?
Your audience may have many questions about the product or app. In your FAQ pages and knowledge base, you can add these episodes in the relevant pages so that your customers’ queries are answered. By doing this, you can also personalize your email ticketing system. Many email ticket support software allow the team to upload files that they have to send to customers. Why don’t you send these podcast episodes to answer your users’ doubts and concerns? Make sure that the links you send to the customers are actually relevant to their doubts else your effort will go wasted
7. Repurpose Your Episodes
Repurposing your episodes will go a long way in boosting your podcast SEO efforts. You can start with turning your podcasts into micro-content, and share them across other platforms.
Identify a topic under one minute that you can then post on your Instagram feed. From a long podcast episode, identify the part that could attract more listeners. Cut them and post the excerpt on Facebook or YouTube.
What is good about this tactic is so many good episodes can be created from just a single podcast episode. This way, you will be able to make endless content for social media.
You can also use soundbites as excerpts. Pick quotes from the episode and turn them into graphic-based posts for social media. You can also create infographics that are based on the main topics of a particular episode.
Final Thought
Getting more podcast subscribers requires consistent efforts. Promotion strategy and content creation strategy always go hand in hand. Through Podcast SEO, you can ensure that your podcast is discovered by the people who’d love to follow your podcast the most.
