How Much Does SEO Matter for Growing Your Podcast?

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am your podcast coach and today I want to talk about SEO. Now many podcasters are familiar with the idea that SEO can be a great way to grow your podcast and in fact if you Google how to grow my podcast or if you ask anybody who claims to be a podcast expert how to grow your podcast SEO often comes up and it comes up even more when people are asking me questions about how they can grow their podcast. So today I'm going to explain to you how SEO is not as important as you think. In fact if you don't have thousands of listeners already my recommendation at the end of this episode is going to be that you don't think about SEO at all unless you haven't launched yet. All right so before we dive into what SEO means for you and how you should think about it in growing your podcast first I want to explain how SEO works right so there are tons of folks out here trying to do SEO who actually don't know the fundamentals of search engine optimization. So for our purposes as podcasters there are two types of SEO. There is web SEO right so web search engine optimization basically Google SEO and that's the SEO that you need to consider for your website and then there's podcast SEO podcast search engine optimization which refers to searching for podcasts within podcast apps. Now these two things are fundamentally the same but they're a little bit different and you want to treat them differently. So if you want to understand how SEO works first let's talk about web SEO right so website SEO using Google to be found. There are three components that make up how web SEO works so to have great web SEO you need three things. Number one your website must have really high credibility with the search engine which means that Google sees your website and it has a bunch of what are called back links. Back links are simply other websites that link to your website. So if you have a website that's www.yourpodcast.com and not a single other website in existence has a link to yours then your credibility is zero right so Google sees that and they say okay nobody's linking to this website so it's probably not very trustworthy. On the flip side if your website has lots of links from many different websites especially from other trusted websites Google is going to be like this website has tons of people linking to it it probably is trustworthy and that is why when you search for anything on Google usually the first result is Wikipedia because Wikipedia is probably I'm guessing the most linked to website around so it always shows up first even if the term that you searched for isn't exactly what the Wikipedia article is Google says well Wikipedia is the most trusted thing there is so let's show that one first so that's number one credibility number two is what everyone thinks SEO is which is the relevant words and phrases right so the phrases that people use to search including those phrases in your title of your page in the title of your content or in the actual content of the content that one pretty much people have a pretty good understanding of and the third one is page speed how fast does your page load I believe this is the most impactful for how your website is shown when people search on Google and it's the one that most folks completely overlook so those are the three components that make up your SEO ranking so if you want your website to show up when people search for stuff on Google yes you do need to have how to blah blah blah blah blah and have search terms that people are searching for but if you have that and your website is slow and no other websites link to your website that it doesn't matter you could have the most relevant keyword research term ever but your website is still not going to show up when people search for it okay so I've been talking about web SEO for a while how does that relate to podcasting well number one everyone seems to think that podcasters should spend a lot of time and energy on SEO optimization for their content and usually people do that in the form of SEO optimized show notes or publishing a full transcript of the podcast episode and so I got questions all the time should I be publishing a transcript which I'll ask why why do you think you should be publishing a transcript people say oh well it's good for SEO yes it kind of is maybe but not nearly as much as you think and unless you're going to spend a lot of energy increasing the credibility of your website and getting other websites to link to you and making your website super fast then it literally doesn't matter what your content is it's still not going to show up and all of that energy you put into transcripts will be wasted now if your reason for creating transcripts is for an accessibility concern where you want folks that are hearing impaired to be able to consume your content awesome then yes create a transcript but for SEO purposes if you're just starting out and your website does not have any credibility and it's not fast then taking all the time and money to create a transcript which is very expensive to do both in times of money is going to get you virtually little gain so I say steer clear of it right even if you nail it completely your website is probably not trusted enough for you to get tons and tons of people to discover your podcast via your web SEO the other thing is that let's say you do nail it let's say your podcast website has a great blog post and a really really in-depth transcript to go with your podcast episode and your website has high trust with Google and fast page speed even if you nail it which takes tons of time and energy and money to do well even if you do that right think about the experience of somebody stumbling across your podcast via SEO they're sitting at their laptop they Google something your page comes up they read through it they get the information that they want and they see oh there's a podcast episode about this I don't know about you but that's actually happening me before and never once have I listened to the podcast episode that was on the page right when I'm searching Google I want information immediately I do not want to listen to somebody talk a stranger talk for 45 minutes about the information that I want yesterday so even if you do nail the web SEO it's not going to get you podcast listeners let's say they are interested in listening to you for 45 minutes and they're like oh well this is some good information and there's a podcast I think I'll check that out the listener is not going to sit there and check out your show right then and because they are not currently listening to podcasts it's a part of their regular routine whether they're commuting or working out or going for a walk or something like that so in order for your web SEO to actually convert strangers who stumble upon you via Google into listeners they have to find the transcript that you poured tons of time and energy into read it get good information out of it notice that there's a podcast to go with it then leave their computer and later tonight or even later next week when they go to listen to podcasts they have to remember that they came across your show remember the name of it search for it press play and listen too many steps never going to happen so it's not something that you should be focusing on right now all the other growth strategies that we teach here at Grow the Show are way more effective and efficient for you to find your super hyper targeted audience now some of you do have bigger shows some of you do have websites that are trusted right that have been around for a while that Google will show and so if you are in that case then yes I do recommend if you have the ability to spend the time or money on it and everything else is rocking and rolling your show is growing you know your audience is and your show is fully monetized then totally when you have the resources you can put resources into SEO because you will get good stuff from that once you get to that point but the thing about SEO benefits is that it's kind of like investing actually it's kind of like how people who are already rich and wealthy have access to the best investment opportunities to get even more rich and wealthy that's true with SEO for podcasters is really the shows that already have a following already have tons of listeners that are going to get the best benefit from SEO it's it sucks but it's a fact of life so for you I don't recommend you focus on web SEO right now until you have a show that's grown that's monetized you're killing it you have a team then you can worry about it I this is arguable by the way but I don't think about SEO at all right now for the growth of the show podcast now that is web SEO podcast SEO is a little bit of a different story podcast SEO is optimizing the podcast search engines aka the podcasting apps like Apple podcasts and Spotify now for podcast SEO the same thing is true that the bigger your show is the more listener your shows already has the more benefit you're going to get from SEO and getting new listeners because your show will be trusted by those apps those apps will see wow this show has tons of traffic tons of listenership we should show it to more people when people search for certain terms okay so if that's you then sure you can totally you know just YouTube SEO fundamentals to learn how to write your podcast titles and descriptions for SEO purposes because the vast majority of people listening to me right now I think should steer clear of this and take your energy and put it elsewhere into things that will get you a higher return of listenership I'm not going to go into that right now but there is one group of people there is one SEO strategy pre show success that I do think can help an early stage podcaster and I've actually seen clients and other podcasts really skyrocket their listenership because of this one SEO decision that they made early on and it is this the title of your show there have been several grow the show podcasters who have come to me and said my show is growing so much I don't understand why the TTE is going well but it's really really really growing like crazy and I look at their show and their show title is extremely self explanatory and their show title is something that people will search for that's naturally going to get you good SEO because the title of your podcast is the thing that people are searching for just think of your show's topic right so if your show is about crypto investing right search crypto investing in any podcast app and look at the first shows that come up it's probably going to be something like the crypto investing podcast pretty simple so what does that mean for you well if you're early on and you haven't launched yet or if you've already launched it and it's pretty early on and you don't you're not absolutely in love with the name of your show consider renaming your show to something that is more SEO friendly that requires less explaining and that's the other quick tip the more your show title is self explanatory where they just get it by the by the title of the show somebody knows what it is the better off you will be the less work you will have to do to get people to understand what the show offers now I know we're artists here and we want to get real creative and cute with our show name but the more clever you are the more you're going to have to explain what it means the less likely someone is going to quickly understand what the show is about and whether or not they will like it so that is unfortunately a reality if your show name is something if it's your name if it's something that isn't immediately understandable and self explanatory then you're going to have a harder time growing it than somebody who does have a really self explanatory name I'm not telling you you have to change the name of the show what I am telling you is that if your show name is not self explanatory you are going to have to work harder to grow your show and so you need to be at peace with that so that is today's quick hit episode about SEO what it means for you and whether or not you should be focusing on SEO right now the short answer is probably not I don't think so having said that there are people who fight me on this there are podcasters who literally above all the other things that I say this is the one where I get the most pushback I think it's because number one there's just so much deep rooted quote-unquote conventional wisdom about how to grow a podcast that in my opinion is totally wrong but it's deeply held in most podcasters belief which is why they're struggling to grow and monetize their show but either way they fight me on that and there are people who have gotten SEO benefits with their podcast where it does work yeah SEO does work I'm not saying it doesn't work I'm saying it's way harder to get it to work than all the other stuff that you could do to grow and monetize your podcast so I don't think you should be focusing your time on that right now so that is it for today's quick hit episode if you have any questions or if you want to be one of the people that fights me about SEO I invite you into the Grow the Show Facebook group to do that make a post tag me tell me why I'm wrong and we can go at it in the comments all in good fun so thank you so much for tuning in and stay tuned for next week's episode of Grow the Show see you