It’s clear to see that podcasting is having a moment. In April, Apple unveiled a new podcast subscriptions service, inviting podcast creators to make money from posting audio content. Then, only a week later, Spotify followed suit – except that it pledged to take a smaller cut from podcasters’ financial takings.
Given these emerging opportunities, it seems a very promising time to be a podcaster – especially as, if you own a website as well, your podcasting efforts could positively affect its SEO.
You can foster strong engagement from podcast listeners
According to the Statista Research Department, over 15 million people in the UK were podcast listeners in 2020 – and that figure is forecast to approach 20 million by 2024. Many of these listeners are also likely to be young, educated and affluent – people you should be especially eager to target with your marketing.
You could find it relatively straightforward to engage these people with podcast content, too, given how easily audiences can listen to it while busy with other activities, like cleaning or working out.
Choose podcast-friendly keywords for your web copy
Since 2019, Google has inserted podcast listings into organic search results – meaning that, if you have a podcast yourself, you could benefit from putting keywords on your website to promote that podcast.
Let’s assume you run a bookshop that has its own podcast. Good keywords for you to use would include “books podcast” and “literary podcasts”, but you also shouldn’t be afraid to use the name of your brand or podcast as a keyword in itself.
Dedicate individual pages of your website to specific podcast episodes
Another significant boon of podcasting is that, as you build out your podcast’s library of content, you will get more opportunities to strengthen your website’s SEO.
Here’s a good case in point: every time you release a new podcast episode, you could set up a new webpage dedicated to it. This strategy would enable you to populate each page with keywords faithfully reflecting that specific episode’s content, in turn helping the page and episode to surface in relevant Google results.
Post a transcription of each podcast episode
You might not have realised that Google can automatically transcribe podcast episodes to help itself determine their content. However, as Google’s transcription technology can still throw up a few textual errors, you should also provide your own transcription of each episode you record.
By posting to this transcription to your website, you can really help Google out by giving it a faultless copy of the content for the search engine to crawl.
Give your website internal links pointing to relevant podcast material
If your podcast will augment your brand’s existing offer rather than simply act as its own means of generating revenue, you should make sure your company’s website refers to a lot more than the podcast.
We can provide you with a design for that website if it doesn’t yet exist. Then, services pages on that site could link to other webpages of yours dedicated to relevant podcast episodes.