Podcast SEO: How to Get Better Search Engine Rankings For Your Podcast Episodes

So you may be trying to get more search engine rankings for the episodes of your podcast. Perhaps you might have a website and have very good search engine rankings on Google, but your podcast and its episodes are not getting much search results. In this blog post, we’re going to help you learn how to get better search engine rankings for your individual podcast episodes.

What is the best way to get high search engine rankings for your podcast episodes?

The best way is to use the same effective search engine optimization strategies that you would use for any web page. The best suggestion is to optimize your show notes for podcast episodes in the space provided by your podcast hosting provider. Learn good search engine optimization strategies acceptable to the major search engines and apply them to each episode you release. However, it’s important to stress that when you’re writing your podcast show notes and at the same time plan on having a blog post for each and every episode, do not duplicate the content between each. Your podcast blog page or individual web page should have separate content from your show notes. This is to avoid having duplicate pages and content since Google does not index multiple pages with the same content.

How can my podcast get better episodes rankings on Google with a blog post?

What a lot of podcasts are doing is to have a blog for the entire podcast. Each blog post is an episode. With the blog content management system such as WordPress or Blogger, you can write as much about your podcast episode as you like. It’s important to include as many relevant keywords that describe not only your podcast, but your hosts and any guests that you have invited onto your show. Make sure those keywords pertain to your episode and provide the solution to the problem, so your episode solves the issue of your listeners when they look on the search engines for a solution to their problem. When podcasts first became popular in 2005, social media websites were not around. There were no social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or even Twitter. You couldn’t share an episode the way you can today on social media. What they did in 2005 and the early days of podcasting was to have a blog post for each episode. Today, podcasters don’t seem to do that as much as they used to. However, having a blog post for each and every episode is still very important today and it gives you a lot more than the limits of the podcasting hosting platforms. Those platforms only give you 4,000 characters on average. That is plenty of content that you can add to those platforms. However, those characters are still not enough when it is calculated word by word. Your blog post will allow you to write a lot more and include rich media including images and videos, where some of the platforms that host podcasts might not. Also, having an individual website or blog for your podcast allows you to optimize your podcast for Google and other search edges, whereas podcast hosting platforms might not give you that ability. Practicing basic search and optimization strategies accepted by Google’s policy still works today. Let’s go over them.

What are some search engine optimization strategies for my podcast?

Make sure your blog post does not duplicate what you put on your hosting platform show notes. That’s frowned upon by Google. Your blog post should be completely unique and have different content than what’s in your show notes.
Make sure the content for your episode is relevant. Having relevant content on your blog post is important as your episode might solve the problem of somebody who’s searching for the same solution on the search engines. It would be nice if your podcast episode provided a solution that somebody else was looking for as a web page on Google. With this result, having relevant content is very important.
Include content about not only your podcast but your guests and also a problem and solution that might be solved by your episode.
Do not stuff your blog post with keywords that are irrelevant. This is also against most search engines’ spam policies and can get your web page removed from their index.
Submit an XML site map for each and every episode. An XML sitemap tells Google to find your episodes and how often to frequent your podcast site. If you have a sitemap, it’s also likely that the search engines will pick up your episodes anyway.
Link development is also important for a certain optimization. Make sure you put a link to your episode in every single show note of every episode on your podcast hosting platform.
Is there a specific event In the news that’s related to your podcast episode? Talk about the current event in your episode, whether audio or video. Then make sure it’s also not only in your show notes but also your blog post. This will also help your episode come up with people searching.
Make sure each blog post for your episode has a unique description meta tag that describes the episode.

What are the Current Search Engine Optimization Techniques to Use on Your Podcast Episodes?

Description Meta Tags

Most website owners who care about high search engine rankings or getting on the first page know about meta tags. The description meta tag is the most popular one since it provides an answer about the link people will click when they visit your episode. This meta tag displays underneath the hyperlink on Google search results. The average character width is 155 characters so make sure it describes your podcast’s episode idea, guests, host, and anything else you want your listeners to know. Also, include a short description of your podcast.

Link Development

This is equivalent to word of mouth advertising. The more authoritative websites link to your episode, the better rankings your podcast episode will receive. While traditional word of mouth advertising is impossible, you can ask other websites to link to your episode, as long as it is relevant to that website.

A Good Title Tag that is the Title of the Podcast Episode

Title tags appear on most web pages at the top. You can easily add this with the HTML title tag or just the title if you use a WordPress blog. These titles wll display on search engine rankings usually as the link text which people click.

Submitting an XML Sitemap

This is a more advanced topic for those people who understand how XML works as well as the Google Search Console.

Connecting Podcasts with Listeners & Subscribers From All Over the World!