Ep 107: 5 Ways to Boost Your Podcast's Google Ranking

Verity: 00:00:00

Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting with Me, Verity. If you are new to the podcast, it is great to have you here.

If you haven't subscribed yet, make sure that you hit that subscribe button on whichever platform you are listening on, be it a podcast, directory, YouTube, et cetera. If you are a longtime listener of the show. Hi, welcome back to you.

It's great to have everybody here, regardless of if this is your first time listening to the podcast or not. In today's episode we are going to be talking about how you rank your podcast episodes on Google.

Now I want to preface this by saying that it really irritates me when so many people, podcasters, YouTubers, et cetera are all like, oh, how to get yourself ranked on Google. Because technically, even if you're on like the 300th page of Google search results for a certain keyword, you're still ranked on Google.

So what I mean when I say ranking on Google, I mean getting yourself in the top few pages of search results for a certain keyword, if not on the first page.

And stick around to the end of this episode because I'm going to be giving you five tips for making sure that your content is ranking as highly in Google as possible. My podcasting content regularly ranks on the first or even second page of Google for many for many keywords.

Now, second page isn't amazing because we know that for many, many searchers, if you are not in the first few results on the first page of Google, when somebody is searching for a certain keyword or for a certain topic, your content is not going to be looked at. They're just going to overlook it because people don't have time to be scrolling through pages and pages and pages of Google.

And if you haven't listened to episode 104, why SEO is so Important in Podcasting, I would recommend listening to that episode.

After this one, I'll have a link in the Show Notes down below for you to go straight to that episode to listen to it, because it's got loads and loads of goodness about explaining exactly why you need to be concentrating on SEO for your podcast. But just as a very quick recap, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

And one of the ways that you can make sure that your content is ranking highly in Google is by using SEO Rich Keywords. SEO Rich keywords are really specific words or phrases that people type into search engines to find content like yours.

And we call these keywords rich because they're highly relevant to the topic and your topic that you're putting content out about and have that potential to drive traffic to said content content. So, for example, instead of using the word podcasting, your SEO rich keyword might be how to start a podcast for free.

It's much more specific and your content is more likely to rank for a more specific keyword than it is for a really generalized keyword. So how are you going to research the SEO rich keywords that you're going to use to help people find your content?

Because what you've got to remember is that a lot of people don't know that your content exists. They don't know that your episodes exist. How are you going to help these people find them? So, first of all, use free keyword research tools.

You've got things like Google Keyword Plan, you've got Ubersuggest answer the public answer the public. Ubers suggest you've got free and paid for versions. Google Keyword Planner is free.

You can use these tools to show the search volume of a particular keyword. So this is how often a keyword is searched for and the competition. So basically how hard it is to rank for a certain term and any related terms.

The next thing I'd recommend is checking out Google suggestions. So this is when you type into Google a certain keyword, it comes up with different questions that people are asking.

If you go all the way down to the bottom, there's also gray buttons that you can press on, and those gray buttons have all got different keywords within them. And these are real search queries that people are using. So that is another great way of finding keywords. Analyze your competitors as well.

Have a look at which keywords other podcasts or blogs similar to yours are using. Another thing you can do, which I highly recommend, is focusing on long tail keywords.

So as I said, rather than just focusing on the term podcasting, focus instead on keywords such as how to start a podcast for free. And I know that it's really deceptive because a keyword isn't just a word, it could be a phrase.

So again, rather than just typing in podcast microphone and trying to go for that keyword, go for best podcast microphone under $100, for example, because these more specific keywords tend to have less competition and be more targeted and more likely therefore, for your content to be found.

So I'm talking about using these different keywords, but you probably are thinking to yourself, well, how am I going to include these keywords to get my content found? And the answer is using your keywords in your metadata.

If you think of your metadata as being the information that describes your content to search engines and potential listeners of your podcast or readers if you've got a blog as well.

So for podcasts, this includes your title, your description, episode keywords, and for blog posts, it involves the title tag, meta description, and other structured data that helps Google understand the context of your content. Now, I'm talking about blog posts, and you might be thinking, well, Verity, this is about podcasts.

But I do strongly advocate that for any podcast episodes you put out, there is an accompanying blog post on your website somewhere. And to cover that in more depth, you can go Back to episode 26, how to repurpose a podcast episode into a blog post.

And I'll have that link down in the show notes as well.

And the reason that I advocate this is because it's easier to rank on Google on any kind of search engine for a blog post than it is for a podcast episode. And then what you can do is within that blog post is you can have an embed of your podcast episode that people can then listen to.

I'm going to give you some examples here of how to include good metadata for better rankings. So first of all, write a description and engaging titles.

So think about your podcast title, think about your podcast episode titles, think about your show notes as well.

And also think about that little description when you're writing a blog post, that little description that comes up on Google, this is often called a snippet. You want to be making sure that you are using your keyword, that people are looking for all variations of that keyword.

You want to avoid anything clickbaity.

You also want to avoid anything where there's too many keywords, because search engines pick up on that and they can sense that you are overly desperate in some ways and that the content might not be as good. Once you've got people, this leads on to second point of using keywords naturally.

Research those keywords, as I've already mentioned, and incorporate them naturally into your metadata. Don't be repeating the keyword all the time, because that's not how we would talk naturally. So avoid keyword stuffing.

This is where you're just overly using the keyword or other keywords because it looks really spammy. And search engines pick up on this kind of thing. You want to optimize your meta descriptions.

So this is when you're having a blog post, that little excerpt that gets shown on Google before you actually go into the content. It's almost like a Little summary. Your meta description should summarize your content in around 150 to 160 characters.

As I said, that is relevant to a blog post and in that you want to be including relevant keyword or keywords to that content that you know people are searching for. There is nothing wrong with updating your metadata.

So if you find that there's a variation of your keyword that is actually easier to rank for or you know people are searching for, then you can go back and adjust the metadata for your blog post, for your episode, for your podcast. I update the description for Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting about twice a year.

I go in and I check that it's still got relevant keywords to my audience. I go in and I double check that they're the keywords that I want to be ranking for. There's nothing wrong with changing your metadata.

Just because you have inputted your podcast description or your blog post description once doesn't mean that you can't go back and change it. If you are thinking to yourself, well, how can I rank better for my podcast blog posts?

Then I'm going to give you three tools if you're using WordPress for your blog that you could potentially use. All of these that I'm about to mention have all got free and paid for versions.

In my opinion, as an indie podcaster, there is no need to be paying for the paid for versions. You've got Yoast SEO. There is Rank Math, which is the one that I personally use on my podcast website.

And then you've also got all in One SEO, which is abbreviated to aio.

All of these plugins enable you to optimize your keywords that you are aiming to rank for on your different blog posts, and they will give you different sections where you can enter different types of metadata. It's important to remember though that these are just tools to help you rank higher for a certain keyword.

They're not a guarantee that you will rank highly if you do all of their things on their checklist, but it is a tool that can help support you.

I promised you some actionable tips at the end of this episode as to how to help your podcast episodes and blog posts associated with your episodes rank more highly in Google. So first of all, take advantage of free SEO tools. I've already mentioned Google Search Console.

There are also free versions of Answer the Public and also ubersuggest, which can be super helpful to help you find keywords. But use Google as a starting point.

And this again is where I'm going to refer you Back to episode 104 where I talk keywords and doing good keyword research using just Google Focus on using keywords in your titles. So these are going to be the title of your podcast, the episode titles as well, and also your blog post titles.

So rather than using something really generic, so I wouldn't necessarily use an SEO keyword such as podcasting tips, I would probably use something much more specific such as how to start a podcast on a budget because people are more likely to be searching for that keyword than just podcasting tips. Make sure you're using Click Worthy Meta description.

So in those summaries on your blog posts in particular and but also in your show notes for your podcast episode, make sure that you are using good keywords, that you are using information that is answering somebody's problem or solving their problem or solving them. And also use a tool such as Google Search Console. I love to Google Search Console.

I would say that I check it probably three, four times a month, probably weekly. Really probably more than I should do to see which different keywords I am ranking for for both the website and also the podcast.

And I do go back and I do review different episodes, I do review show notes every so often and as I said, I definitely review the description for the podcast to make sure that I am including different keywords within my different descriptions to sure that my content is being found by the target audience that I have for Lazy Girl's Guide to Podcasting.

And I know that it works as well because I know from the analytics, through looking at both Google Search Console and looking at Google Analytics, I know that people are being bought in to the podcast via SEO. If you have been a long term listener of the show, you will notice that I don't really advertise the podcast.

In fact, I rarely advertise the podcast on social media anymore because I was personally finding that it was not an effective way of getting new listeners or getting my current listeners into the podcast. I found that SEO. Yes, it's a long game, but it was a much stronger strategy as ever. I hope that this episode has been useful to you.

If you have got a podcasting bestie or anyone that you know in podcasting, I'd love it if you could share this episode with them as well so that they can also pick up some tips about using metadata to help rank their content higher in search engines. Otherwise, it's been great having you here for this episode. Happy podcasting and I'll see you next time.