How Can Podcast Content Help with Traditional SEO?

Podcasting is here to stay and will only grow as audio and voice continue to spread in our society. In a world of vanity metrics (impressions, clicks and downloads), starting a podcast will feel like starting from square one, which you basically are. And like search engine optimization (SEO), building up a podcast audience will take time, so patience and persistence will be the key as you embark on this journey.

As you work to record great content and build up an audience, there are some tactics you can use to help with your traditional SEO.

1. Transcribe your podcast audio. When you launch an episode, create a post or a page on your website by including a media player of your podcast (most podcast hosting services have something you can use) as well as the transcription of your audio. Why should you do this? By including the full transcription, you are offering a huge asset to your audience and the search engines. You are building a massive page of content for search engines to crawl that will inevitably lead to keyword growth for whatever your episode topic was. Transcribing your audio will also make it easier to pull high-quality quotes to share on social media. Temi is a good transcription service and only costs $0.10/minute. It takes a bit of editing based on the quality of your recording, but I usually get approximately 95% accuracy even with low quality recording. And Temi will automatically remove ums, ahs and other filler words
2. Rewrite your transcription into a Q&A page or a topical blog post. Now let’s take transcription a step further. If you are a copy editor, you’re going to love this part! If your podcast is more of a Q&A-style recording, then this will be easy. Just rewrite the spoken word transcription into a more formal-style writing. Cut down any extended questions and answers into their basic form to allow readers to easily get answers to top questions in your industry. PRO TIP: Add schema markup to your Q&As in hopes that Google will feature your content as the rich result. You can also add “speakable” schema markup to content that is especially appropriate for text-to-speech. *Remember. Voice search will only continue to grow, so get ahead of the game now by marking up your website for voice search.
3. Pull audio and text quotes from your podcast and share on social media. Social signals still play a role in SEO ranking, so utilize your podcast content on social media platforms to drive users back to your website. This can push users to 1) listen to your full podcast or 2) read your podcast-based blog post or Q&A page. I’ve recently been using the Wavve program to share snippets of audio in a visual format on social media. The metrics of these rich content posts have increased both social engagement as well as traffic back to the website over standard text links or image formats that I was previously using.

There is obviously a lot more you can do to increase traditional SEO rankings with your podcast content, but these 3 tasks are fast, fairly inexpensive and have shown great results for me so far.