Melanie Gorman from Crownsville Media breaks down two ways to boost podcast SEO: the piggyback approach, where you optimize episode titles around guest names to capture search traffic, and the keyword-focused approach, targeting industry terms your audience searches for. Convert transcripts into structured articles on your website to rank higher.
Here's what you want to know about SEO and podcasting. I'm Melanie Gorman. I'm the founder of Crownsville Media. We're an SEO and content creation company. We do websites, we do social media, all that good stuff. And many people come to me asking about what they should do to connect their SEO and their podcast together. So the first thing you want to think about with a podcast is the name of your podcast. You can name it anything. If there's an opportunity for your podcast to have an SEO-focused name, it's better. Most people name their podcast something conversational, and they usually want to have some kind of a hook to it. So something that's going to get people to remember it. It's usually short, and there's a ton of different things out there in your industry to look at to see who's doing it well, who's got an audience, who's getting views, and who's getting subscribers. What you really want to think about is you want to think about, is your name memorable? And if you can in any way, shape, or form have a short name that also has SEO to it that's connected to your business and your brand, that is ideal. Thinking through the name of your podcast is the starting point, the same way thinking about your domain name is the starting point for building a website. So assuming you've decided on the podcast name, The next thing you really want to think about is what are you talking about on each episode? And there's different strategies for how you want to do your podcast. Do you want to have an interview podcast? If you do that, then you're really the Barbara Walters of podcasting. And what you're doing is being a fantastic interviewer for other people in your industry. And you're sort of someone to know. You're bringing information. You're bringing details and data to people, and you're introducing them to other people in the field that they really would be amiss if they didn't know about or learn about. So as the Barbara Walters of podcasting, your SEO strategy is called a piggyback strategy. A piggyback strategy is when I am building my SEO campaigns and all of my topics for my podcast around the name of my guests. So if I was doing that and I was interviewing different people on my podcast, the URL, the H1 tag, the heading tags inside of your show notes, everything that you're going to produce is going to be in reference to the person's name. Because what you're really trying to do is scoop traffic for that person. So if I was interviewing Barack Obama, I would want my podcast to be optimized on his name. And my hope would be that when someone Googled Barack Obama on a podcast, that somehow my show came up. Now, if you want to do your podcast based on topics and you want to be known for specific industry terms, like let's say you're a mental health therapist and you want to do a therapist podcast talking to other therapists about therapy techniques. Your audience is clinicians. You know that you're talking to people who are educated or people who are being educated about this topic. So for you, in that instance, you can use tons of jargon. You can talk about industry terms. You don't have to teach people what, like, trauma is. You can just talk about trauma. Your SEO is going to be targeted on keywords that are industry-specific that professionals would look up. Now, let's say you're talking to a less educated audience. An audience that's just learning about it, or an audience that's coming from the perspective of, I think I might have trauma, what's going on with me? Then you really do have to explain industry terms clearly and concisely so your listeners understand what you're talking about. Now, your SEO in that case is all about the terms you want to rank for, and you have to be thoughtful, and ideally, you know what you want to talk about from the beginning. So both of these strategies, the piggyback strategy or the keyword strategy, you want to know as a podcaster what you're going to talk about before you sit down to film. So the last thing I'll say is this. You want to think about not just putting out online a transcript. You want to think about translating the transcript into an article. Make it into something people could read without having to know Melanie was speaking and then the guest was speaking. And then Melanie was speaking and a guest was speaking. Articles are looked at more positively than just a transcript. People don't always love reading a transcript, and there are ways that you can think about the transcript and translate it into an article. It might take you an hour. It's not going to take you anywhere the time it would have taken you to write that long of a piece of content. So you can translate it into a proper article and then publish it on your website. And last thought. If you are someone that's done, you know, 300 podcasts in the past, the next logical question is, can you go backwards in time and execute this strategy on your old podcast? Absolutely you can. And I have a resource for you that can help you. So in the comments below, there'll be a link to schedule a consultation with me if you would like to talk about it. I'll also give you a free gift to help you out, and you can sign up for my newsletter. So thanks for watching. I really hope this was helpful for learning more about how to optimize your podcast to get more out of them online.
