SEO for podcasts: why you need a show and how to grow EP. 135

Do you have a podcast that's not growing? Are you thinking about launching a podcast but afraid it won't grow? A podcast can be an excellent nurturing tool for your business and can help your audience in so many ways, if you know how to help people find you in the podcast apps. Learn how podcast SEO can help your show be found and grow. And, if you don't yet have a podcast, find out why you should consider starting one to help your business. 

Transcript

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Hi, and welcome back. So today I wanna talk about your podcast and why it's not growing, and if you don't have a podcast yet, I'm gonna just ask the question, why not? You're here, you're learning about SEO, you have a website, you have a blog, or you're building your website. A podcast is the natural next step because my friend, you already have the content. If you have a blog, you have. Content because all it is is you talking to your ideal customer and sharing the same information that's in your blog so that they can consume it in whatever format they prefer. Some people prefer to, some people prefer to listen. So if you don't have a podcast yet, I kind of am wondering why not? Because it is one of the best ways that you can connect with your audience. And nurture them and help them get to know you and build that. And it can be an amazing way for you, my friend, to grow your business because people connect. They start listening to you. They start to look to you as a resource, and they want to then buy from you. I can't tell you how often I get inquiries to the website or new students signing up for my programs because they listen to the podcast and I love. Podcast for you. I hope that you look forward to it each week. It lights my heart up when you tell me, Rachel, I've binged, I've listened to every episode. I'm waiting for the next one. The next one is always on Tuesday, Tuesday morning. So if you don't have one yet, go ahead and get signed up for Simple podcast SEO, because I will walk you through exactly how to do it step by step by step. That page is on the website. You can find it at et marketing.com/enroll. It also has a best practices bonus, which will walk you through how to actually set your podcast up, what to do as far as like how I host it, where I record it. Um, it gives you all of that information along with some affiliate, got some discounts for the things that you'll need, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway. Now we're gonna pretend you're here and you've got a podcast and your podcast is not growing because that's a really common issue that I see. Most people I talk to really kinda struggle with that, especially in the beginning. I did too. I've been very honest about that. When I first started my podcast, it really didn't do a lot the. Month that I went live and I recorded, I had 121 downloads. It's not bad, but it's not great, and 121 downloads isn't really going to change the world for a business but reality, realistically, it's around average. The average podcast that's more than like a month old gets 37 ish downloads per episode, meaning around 140 a month. Average. So if you are at that point where you're getting a hundred, 150 downloads a month on your podcast, congratulations, you are in the top 50% of all podcasters. If you've gotten past like episode number 10, you are in the top, in the majority, in the top. What is it like 20%? So many podcasts burn out. Really quickly because they haven't done SEO, they haven't optimized it. They're not growing. So if you're going to launch one or you have one, or maybe you had one and you haven't really prioritized it, I know I've. Got a couple of friends that are in that position where it's like, gosh, I have it. And I would record it, and then it wasn't taking off. And then I didn't do it. I didn't prioritize it. And then my buzzsprout bill would come in and I was embarrassed because I hadn't released an episode and I had a bill to pay. And it just reminded me that I hadn't, and then it felt guilty. Forget all that. Okay, just commit to. I better start releasing my podcast again, and I'm going to learn SEO so that my podcast will grow. So when you are optimizing a podcast. It is easier than Google optimization. It works faster. And the thing that's really nice is that the key words, I believe, are easier to find and figure out than they are for Google, because there's less competition in the podcast app than there is on the website. And we can rank for different terms in a podcast app than we can in Google or even in AI search now. So. When you're optimizing your show, I mean, you already know with Google, there are specific places where you use your keyword to help Google understand, excuse me, what that page is about so they know who to show it to, et cetera, et cetera. It's exactly the same with a podcast. There are certain places that the podcast apps are going to look for information as to what your show is about. So those are gonna be your show title. So when you are choosing a title for your show, think simple, straightforward. Um, not cute or clever. You really want your person to be able to understand exactly what that show is about. So my show is called Simple, SEO, and I give simple, easy to use, actionable SEO tips each week if my show was labeled like, get Your Business Found or The Don't Be Invisible Podcast. That would not actually tell anybody what it was about. Now, the Don't Be Invisible podcast could actually be about SEO, but nobody searching to learn how to get website traffic or how to build their business is probably searching. Don't be invisible because that could be about 9 million different things. So we really wanna be very straightforward. SEO friendly. Ideally, we wanna use a keyword in our show name. In our podcast title name, just because that's going to make it even easier to rank. The next place that you can do it is in your name, so when you are in your Buzzsprout account or whoever your host is, and you are putting your name in there. Use a key word, do it the same way that we do like on Instagram, where we're optimizing our profile and we're using whatever term we wanna go after. SEO coach, um, small business owner, small business coach, whatever it is. Put it there as well, because that's another place that they look for information as to what this show is about, who it's from, all of that. Then in your show description, you're going to want to also use your keywords because that's going to help you to be more visible because now they understand your content and they, it makes it easier for them to understand what your show is about. Then when we get to your actual. Podcast episodes. We also want to optimize those. Now, we may use the same keyword that we've used, like to optimize your show name in episode titles, but we also can use secondary keywords. So this is where, like for me, SEO is one of my core keywords. It's everywhere. But I also do episodes like this on podcast, SEO. So this. Episode is optimized for podcast SEO. If I do one on email marketing, it's optimized for email marketing, or it's optimized for. Find marketing. So I really want you to think about who are you trying to attract? What words would they be using? And I want you to go ahead and use those words in your episode titles and your episode descriptions for each episode. The more content you create that has the key words, the bigger your foothold is, the bigger that the podcast apps see you and they realize that, oh, you really are about this, and then you have a better chance of moving up. What I found when I started doing this. I had my, like I told you, I had my podcast for a few months. It was growing, but it was not growing as quickly as I wanted and it was giving me a lot of college radio vibes. So, you know, I went to Cronkite school at a SU and I studied broadcast journalism and I worked at the student radio station. And there aren't a lot of people who listen to student radio AM radio, even though it was the late nineties, like AM radio in the dorms. A SU. It really, we didn't have the biggest listenership, and so I would be there and I was a news anchor and I would do the news updates one night a week, and then I was a DJ and I would DJ like on, I don't even remember if it was like Sunday afternoons or something. It was not a primetime slot, but it was college radio. There were no primetime slots. But I would be there and I'd be recording in the studio and I'd be doing the news, flirting with the cute boy. I'm gonna be really honest. There was a really cute boy that was on the radio station with me, and we did a lot of flirting and it was very, very fun. Anyway, I digress. We all have those moments, those memories from college, right? But we'd be there and we'd be recording and you kind of wondered, is anybody out there? Is anybody listening? And once in a while you might hear from somebody, but it really gave you that feel of, I am out here, I'm doing this. I don't know if anyone's listening. So in the early days, podcasting felt that way because I was getting, like I said, 30, 40, 50 downloads per episode, which, yes, people were downloading it, but it was such a small number. It didn't feel like it was really growing. Having been in SEO for so many years. I, it was just like, there has got to be a way to optimize this thing. Like there has to be a way. So I dug in, I figured out what the best practices were and I started doing it and within 90 days my show downloads were five times what they had been. I. Like they just started to spike and then it continued and another like five x above that. And I have continued to grow. Now my show passed the two year mark, um, in February, so we're about three, four months into the third year. I. And my downloads continue to grow each month, every week I see more and more people coming in. I have new listeners. I have, you know, looking at all the engagement metrics that I teach you to look at in simple podcast, SEO. Everything is there. Everything's trending the right way. But the other thing that I know is that a lot of you who listen to the podcast, join the course. You reach out and you ask me about business coaching.'cause I am, I don't know if I've told you, but I am doing just a little bit of business coaching, taking on a handful of clients at a time, working with you one-on-one over a course of 12 weeks, really helping you to figure out what you are doing with your business. So if you wanna launch a course, but you're not sure how to do it or you're not sure how to put a marketing plan together, you don't really know who your ideal customer is. You really just wish you had. The budget to hire a marketing director or A-C-M-O-I am offering that, but like I said, very small, very select group of people. I'm not really advertising it on the website, but it's for you people in my world who listen to the podcast, et cetera, because we have a better relationship. I love you and I love getting to know you and know more about your businesses, so I love it. When you tell me, I listen to this podcast all the time and it's so helpful, and that's what a podcast can do for you, for your business as well. So if you are ready to work on your podcast, you want to launch one, you want someone to help you and walk you through the process of launching a podcast, we can do that. You want to learn how to do it and take the course. Simple podcast. SEO is there for you. We can get this going whether you have one now or not. We can get this going and growing and turn it into one of the best marketing and nurture channels for your business. It is amazing the difference that a good podcast can make. I wanna thank you for being here again this week, and I will see you next week. Bye for now.