How To Find And Book More Search Engine Worthy Guests

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to feed you'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we're going to talk about how to find and book more search engine worthy guests. Now, I want to run down the road because I geek out on SEO and I want to talk about all those good things, but I know Tracy's going to try and reel me back here into something a little less techie. So I don't bore you all. But I'll tell you, Tracy, I want to start with just sharing a little fact and then I'm going to turn it over to you because I know you have a specific agenda here. But we learned very early on in our podcasting journey because we were creating a blog post for every episode that when we did that, and it was a high quality episode and a high quality blog post in alignment with Google, that our posts and those of our customers, they often outrank their own guests for even their names and their business names. So there's a lot of power in being found through search engines for your guest. Even people who don't know you but they search on the guest can find you.

But that assumes that you're doing all the good SEO things to begin with. And by SEO, we're talking search engine optimization. The geeky term is SEO. And I hope you know that if you're playing in the digital realm at all, I hope you know that already. But for search engine optimization to be effective, it means that it has two types of rankings. One is basically it shows up in the first page of Google, if you want to think of it like that, right? It shows up first in search results. And remember, there are different search engines. There are search engines that are your podcast player. There's the search engine that is your browser that you use. Whether you use a Chrome browser or whatever, you have to use search somewhere in there, and it's likely using Bing or Google or. I don't, I don't even know what else still really exists. Those are probably the two biggest, right?

No, I mean Safari will use a browser people use, but a lot of times People still search in Google. I mean, you can search in whatever search engine you want. Yes, you mentioned Bing, Google. Of course, Yahoo is still one that's out there. And of course, yes, each of the listening apps is in some ways its own search engine, although much more limited.

Much more limited. Right. So, but what we're talking about is two different kinds of rankings that go into that optimization. And one is basically how often are you appearing on the first page for whatever it is that you're searching for. So if your podcast topic is in real estate passive income, you want to make sure that that person is showing up for real estate passive income as an authority and on the first page of Google and not just for their name. So that's the difference here is we want to make sure that we're showing up for your keywords, your value, that your podcast, your category, your niche, your type of show that you're doing. You want to make sure the two things are aligned and then that person has authority within that category. That's what you're looking for. Now, sometimes you might want to have an expert who's an expert in TikTok in social media, TikTok advice or something like that. So you may want them for why they are an expert for what they are, an expertise they have expertise in. And you want to add that to your show. So you may want to have an expand your expertise that you talk about. So that may be also something. So be thinking about. It is that has to be not just someone's name that is ranking highly, but they're ranking highly within the keyword area that you care about.

And so what's the best way to learn if they do? Tracy, isn't it just to do a little Googling at first and see what they come up for?

Yeah. So usually you want to type in something like experts in or authority authority as well, because it works just in those are names that work. And then whatever the category is, whatever the expertise area you're looking for. So if you're looking for somebody who's an expert in something, then search for them that way. The other thing is, if you're just looking for someone who's an expert in your own category, start looking at that as well. So, you know, look from there and then see who else is posting, sharing, doing things on it. And what you want is someone who has a. I would say their core name is showing up or their core business is showing up because their business name matters too. Right. So any of those two things. So I say Google them I don't say being them, I Google them. That is the number one way. So this is something I learned when I worked for Inc. Magazine writing my column is that if I was going to write about someone, I needed to check them. And the first thing that I was told to do was to Google them. If they show up somewhere on the first page of Google, then they're good. I can go to the second page of Google because there's lots of paid results and now there's some AI that shows up at the top and other things like that. But you really do want to see what the AI has to say here. And I'm going to talk about the AI at the end, but I do want you to pay attention. If you're. You've got generative AI turned on on your Google search, use it. When you type in experts in passive income real estate, you want to see who's showing up and what the AI is saying is an expert, that's really important or who they're citing over there. Those are really important because they have a high authority and ranking value. The next thing we want to do is check out the website. So once you Google them, you got to click through that and figure out where it's going, what it's going to you do.

And if they really have a lousy website, a lousy destination, you know, that would be a concern. Now, hopefully if they're ranking very high on Google search for some of these things you're, you're putting in as search terms, there's actually a quality piece of content that is a website that is that destination. And the thing is, you know, their name is important. Their business name is also important. And just can't emphasize this enough. There are so many really good businesses that do a poor job of this that we see our podcasters ranking higher than they do or their business names do on that first page of Google. Now that can be good for you because even if as long as they're well known and they you rank for their name or their business name, your post, your website's going to come up on that first page of Google search for their business name or their individual name, and that'll drive more traffic to you, so there is still value there even if they don't come up by themselves.

So I always look at it as depending on my goal in my business. So when I first start a podcast and maybe a website, I'm looking for more website links and website rankings. So I really won't choose anyone has a guest on my show, who doesn't have a good value website and is not going to provide a link back. So if they're a guest on podcasts and they never put it in their website, then I'm going to not invite them on my show at that stage. I might invite them later if they have good social media following, which is my next step for the very first stage, when I'm really trying to build up traffic to my podcast in the early days, especially in the first 50 episodes. So in the first year of podcasting, I really need their site to bring me a link back. I need them to drive traffic back to me so that I can build up my authority. So my purpose is slightly different. So in that respect, if their website's not ranking highly, and so that link that's going out from the Google search isn't going to a website, it's going to some other article written about them or some other thing about them, I'm not going to invite that person. I'm going to go on down until I find someone whose website is ranking on that. And I might have to go into the second and third page of Google for that. And when I get to their website, I want to make sure that they are linking back to other people through their site, through their press page, or through their own blogs or through something like that. I want to make sure that they're updating their website. So if their website's from 2009, it's not good enough. It needs to be current. And a red flag for me is if the website's not WordPress, it usually has low rank, low value, but I'm going to check it out just in case. So if I'm on the fence about it, I might go to something like an SEMrush or some other ranking site and check out the traffic on their site and see how good it is. That's just an alternative way. It's a little deeper dive and a bit more geeky if you want to get into it. But I want to make sure that they do proper link back and traffic is going to their site and other things like that. Otherwise it's really not worth it inviting them on the show. If they're not even going to like post and link back to me, it's not going to help me. So that's what I'm looking for when I look in their website.

One other thing I'd like to add to that about evaluating a website, go look at their blog. If they don't have one, that's A huge red flag. Most have a blog. So let's say they have a blog, but then go look at the date the most recent blog was published. That's a bigger red flag. Because people, a lot of times, they get all excited, they build their website, get the new website out. They have a bunch of blogs they put out initially, and the last time they blogged was nine months ago, a year and a half ago, several years ago. That's a big concern for me.

When they don't update their blog, that's one quick, easy way to check on it. The second way I check on it is I go just right down to the copyright at the bottom of the pa. If they're not well managed, if they don't have someone helping them with their website or they're not updating their own website, the copyright will be way out of date. Now, it's okay if it's 2023 and they didn't quite get 2022 in the early part of the year, they didn't get it updated over there. I don't really question that. But if it's like 2023 now and it they still haven't updated it since 2018 on their copyright line, they have a problem. They don't know what they're doing on their website. And that concerns me in terms of whether or not there's value in inviting them. So this is the way. Now, keep in mind, this is the way we're evaluating guests. We don't know if we know they already provide value. I'm not looking at any of this. I don't care. So if you're freaking out because you're a guest and you're thinking, oh, my God, they're going to check all those things, you should fix them. You should absolutely fix them. But establishing relationship with me in a different way and a personal connection supersedes all of this. This is for checking out someone I don't know, usually someone served up to me by a PR firm or for when I'm searching for someone who's an expert in something that I want to fill in the gaps in my own podcast, in my own content, in my own keyword areas that I'm working on, in my own search engine optimization for my podcast and my website. So the next place, Tom, is social media. Once I find someone, I've checked out their website and I say, okay, that's good enough. I want to check out their social media.

Okay, so I'm very interested to hear what you have to say about this, because in Our experience, or I'll just say in my experience, sometimes the people with the most followers are the worst at sharing anything about your show. So are we caring more about how big their following is, or are we caring about seeing that they're actively posting things for others? They've maybe been a guest on their show.

Yeah, so both. Okay, so what we want to see is that the primary social media that they put out typically ends up in order. So if you see the icons up at the top of their website or at the bottom of their website, or somewhere in the middle of their website, Right. They've got the icons, their social media icons. Typically, just because it's human nature and we read from left to right, we typically put the most important ones to the left, so they'll be the first two in it. And so if I do not value TikTok at all, and TikTok's the first one, I'm going to go check the second one. And if the second one's Instagram, I'm going to go check it out. So I have to align it with my social media strategy as well. So for me, I predominantly want to post my own content and link to someone on LinkedIn and Instagram. And I'm just making this up as an example. Like, those are the two most important platforms. The other ones are bonuses. They get more traffic and more views. They're great. But if there's no connection on LinkedIn and Instagram, I have trouble collaborating with them, I have trouble tagging, tagging them and getting them to respond in and getting it to drive value to my social media, to the social media that I'm predominantly using. So that's important. So whether it's Facebook or TikTok or Instagram, wherever you're most important, that's the first one you're going to want to check out. Because if they're not even present there, it's not going to have a collaborative view to the place you've built your most value so far. It doesn't mean that I don't want someone who has, who can extend me and grow me in Instagram. If I already have a large LinkedIn following and I have a rich engagement going on over there. I want someone who's going to add value where I already am, because that is going to give me more and more visibility and boost where it's harder, because I've already built up a following. So I need to kind of. I need to grow that. So this is a primary, the primary area where you play in Social media, that's the first place you want to check. And then the primary area you want to grow in social media is the second place you want to check. You don't need to check everywhere. You can if you want, but those are the only two platforms. Platforms I check. So if my priority right now is LinkedIn and Instagram, I'm going to just check those two. Now when I check them, what I'm looking for, Tom, and just to your point, is the engagement and what they're sharing their content. So do they make story shares, do they do collabs? Are they mentioning other people? Or are they only putting up ads for their own stuff in their content? So they're constantly pushing their own webinars, their own stuff, and it's pushy sales. That's a red flag for me. And usually that's what I see when a PR firm is hired. There's usually a social media firm hired and they tend to not have a content focus, they tend to have a push sales focus. I'm looking for that. That's a red flag that I'm not going to invite them on my show. They're not going to be givers, they're going to be takers. And I really want to be careful with that. So that's what I'm looking for. I also want to look for a large mismatch between the comments and engagement of their posts and the number of followers they claim they have or that show up on their site. So if they claim to have a hundred thousand Instagram followers, but they don't even get 5 likes per post, that says that they bought their followers to me. And so I'm really, really careful about anyone who's like that. They don't have what I consider to be a sustainable strategy and a sustainable base of followers that is going to be valuable to me. They did it so that they could put in their guests application, hey, I have a hundred thousand followers on Instagram. That's why you should put me on your show. But those hundred thousand followers are going to do nothing for you when they post about it. If there's 0 likes, 0 engagement, 0 comments going on.

Not only that, I often find for some of our podcasters, when, even when they do have a very large Instagram following, let's just say that gets them their podcast content. Any guests who connect with them there, get them a lot of engagement within Instagram. That doesn't necessarily translate into engagement over elsewhere. Getting people to your website, getting them to actually come and listen to your Podcast doesn't always translate.

That's why you need to look at what they're posting, Tom. That's exactly why you want to check out the content. Because if they're comfortable driving people out to things, then it's working for them or they wouldn't be doing that. But if all they're doing is posting up what they had for lunch and like all about them and little videos of them and there's nothing that's helping them mention outside of it, unless it's a paid spot, like so unless they're being a paid influencer for someone else, it's really not going to work for you. You're not going to drive any listeners from that. It's not going to grow your audience if there's a mismatch also. So let's say we were going back to our example of passive income real estate. And everything that they post on social media is about fitness and health and it's misaligned to what they're really what you thought they were an authority in. So their web authority and their social authority don't match, then that's not going to help you as well. So making sure that what they're posting about, what they seem to be an authority in, is a match to what you were initially looking for, we want to make sure that that's there as well. So the social check is harder. You actually have to dive into it. Look at their hashtags, look at their likes and comments, look at their follower numbers, look at their big profile. Just check all of that out. It takes a little bit of time. And that's why I say only do the two that matter. The one that matters to you, that's your biggest strength and the one that you want to grow in. That way you don't waste your time checking out every social media platform. Now, if you hire someone to do this, tell them to check everywhere you want them to be thorough. Now, the last place that I check is YouTube, so that's the last physical place that I check.

I'm GLAD you mentioned YouTube, because when you were talking about search engines, it's.

Not a social media platform.

No. And when you mentioned search engines, though, that one actually should have been included in that list because it is a very popular search engine, although still a very, very, very distant second to Google, but worthwhile nonetheless.

So if you don't want to search in YouTube and you don't want to do it as a separate thing, when you type into Google, your search engine criteria, right when we said I want an expert in passive income real estate. Up at the top, it's giving me my text choices. If I click and click over to where it says videos underneath that, it will serve me up YouTube videos there. So that's a quick and easy way for you to just take from the search you were already doing and go flipping over and checking what's on YouTube without going into YouTube yet. Then when you see some videos options and things that it's giving you, and you can also look at that generative AI, it does pop up video options for you as well. So you can go check that. It will link you out to YouTube and you can now go into YouTube and you can kind of do a little dive into them. I'd like to check out their channel. Channel. I like to check out the number of subscribers versus their views. It's a ratio. So if I see 10,000 subscribers on their channel, I'm excited. That sounds great. But if I see 100 views or less on every video, wow, that's not so good. It means that those subscribers are not really following them, are not really watching. They were maybe paid subscribers, maybe they're mismatched subscribers. They're really not a match to what they're posting, posting and viewing on. Now, 100 views might be perfectly great to you, but I guarantee you that you're probably going to see like five views, seven views, two views, right. Of the videos. That's what you're going to really see usually when there's a big mismatch in the number of subscribers to views. So we really want to make sure that what they're posting on is matched to you.

Right.

Make sure it's what you typed in as your criteria. And when they're posting about those things that they're getting decent view numbers on them. That's what we want. I don't really go in and deep dive into the comments and engagement. I would say that our expert in this, Fran Asaro, who was our previous episode, she would very much say you probably do want to check the engagement. But I don't worry about it as much right now because it's not as rich over in YouTube in terms of engagement level as a translation into are you getting a lot of value from it? So I want to see that they're sharing my videos and doing things. So the next section that I'm going to check out is their shorts, because their shorts is the way that they're probably going to promote that they were on your show, not necessarily in a lengthy video. That video is an indicator that they have a good rich YouTube. They use YouTube well. But it is the shorts that I'm going to care about because that's promotion opportunity. Now, typically, I would say if you're not seeing around 200 to 400 somewhere in that range views on a short, they're doing something wrong in their YouTube shorts. They should be able to get hundreds, a couple hundred views of a YouTube short without working very hard right now. So that is pretty easy for you to be able to check and say, hey, is that happening? On average, they're going to have a dud now and again and they're going to have one that does thousands of views. So like, that's okay. But on average, are they doing about a couple hundred per short? If they are, then they're doing something really right. They know what they're doing. They have a short strategy. You want to make sure they're hashtagging, you want to make sure they're titling. You want to make sure that that short looks compelling and is linking to some other piece of content. So it's, you know, sending you on, it has a call to action of some kind. If it's doing all those things, they are definitely someone you want to invite on the show. And right now, I'd say anyone who's posting a YouTube short should be of great value to you as long as you also have a YouTube channel that you're linking and sending them to. So there's going to be a YouTube video from your podcast. If there's no YouTube video of your podcast, then there's. There's no value for you right now because going out of the platform is not a great strategy.

And of course you want to make sure those YouTube shorts are again, current, that there are recent ones. Right. Not just older ones. Again, that still applies in YouTube, right? In terms of.

Yeah, I mean, it. YouTube shorts is a relatively new thing. Like when the last year to some people haven't had them for 18 months because they were in the beta program before, qualified before. But for most of us, we weren't able to get access to it until the last year. So some people are new to it. That's perfectly okay. If you're new to it, that's great strategy because it means it's a part of their current strategy. And that's really great for you to be able to check it out and make sure you're on their boost of new promotions and new things that they're doing. So I don't mind if they're not if they're new, but like Tom said, if they did one or two a year ago and then have done any, that means that they abandoned it.

Yeah. And they're just not likely to continue to promote yours there or to take what you give them. If you give them a short for them to post on YouTube to make them look good, which if you're recording video, you all should be doing, by the way, you know, you want to make it easy for them to post content and create all those assets for them. But obviously that's after they've made the cut, which you're eliminating for us, Tracy, as to who is worthy and who is not. Right?

Yeah. So we just to recap, Google them, check out their website, check out their social media and the social media that matters the most to you in terms of growth and the one that you're currently doing and check out their YouTube. Right, check out their YouTube and specifically within their YouTube shorts or anything that they do on YouTube that is promotion of other people's content, of other people's stuff, stuff of clips that they were in or anything like that. Any kind of press promotions and things that they do there. So those are the things you want to check. And I mentioned earlier that we would double back to the AI. So here's the thing. Once you know where you're looking for the expertise in, right? Once you know what those keywords are, what that expert I want, I want an expert in this. Once you know that, go ahead and ask the AI to generate that for you. I highly recommend Google Bard because it's an expert in SEO and Google Bard is based on much more web based content than chat GPT is. So I highly recommend you go and ask it to build you a list of great guests for your podcasts in this particular category. It's really easy to use. Ask it to do it. And then as it does it, you say, hey, you know, so ask it to list to generate a list of 10 people to start. Don't do a list of 100 immediately because you want to refine it. So do a list of 10 people in passive income who are experts in passive income real estate. Ask it to do that. When it does that, now go back in and say if I were to add more, another 10 to this list, can you add 10 more that have high social media value? Can you add 10 more that have high YouTube value? Then can I add more that have high authority ranking and search engine optimization ranking? Ask it for those things and ask it to be specific. And that's how you might grow 10, 10, 10 until you get a list of 50 that would give you an entire year's worth of value. Now, I don't go bigger than that because if you go bigger than a year, they're not going to be current by the time you get a chance to interview them. If you're only posting one episode a week, if you're going to do a blitz or something and you're going to do one a day for a month or something like that, you can build a bigger list. But if you're only posting one a week, do not go too far out and too deep into this. Just make it a like every three months, go back in and ask it again because its current value might be different three months from now than it is today. So you're going to get too far out and you're not going to have value that will be that same value in three months.

Yeah, I agree. You don't want to go too far out because, well, let's say you got all 50 to be on your show. Some of them aren't going to get that exposure value for a year. However, practical reality and experience tells us that not all 50 are going to say yes. You're going to have a list of 50 and you're going to get 15 or 20 of them probably to agree.

I know about that. I think if you went out and you reached out to him and you said in like LinkedIn, direct message, as long as you find a way to get to them. But if you found a way to get to them directly and said, hey, I do. Right. I found you on AI and it says that you are one of the experts I should have on my show. And we're uniquely matched to talk about past passive income real estate. I don't think they'd say no to that. It'd be highly unlikely they would say no.

Well, there are things that you don't have control over, though. You don't know their schedule, you don't know how booked up they are with other things. Right. I mean, look, maybe Tracy, you can get all 50. That's awesome. I don't know. I have experienced some people who just aren't willing to do the research on you even though you've selected them, are they going to reciprocate and realize, oh my gosh, I absolutely should be on your show. Right, Right. Some people are pretty lazy. And anyway, I hope you're right.

Well, I would say out of it, like, I'm the one who usually does this for all of our podcasts and get people to come on. I would say that the ones that don't come on are typically not good guests because they're either too wrapped up in their own world or they are too uncomfortable coming behind the mic. So if you have to chase someone down and they're like, oh, I'm not sure I'm. I'm the right guest for you, or like, I'm not sure that I'm really confident about this podcasting thing, then you definitely don't want them on your show. They're just not good behind the mic and it's not worth chasing them down. But when I used to do this, and we did 650 episodes of our 3D print podcast, and I used to ask people to come on, had to educate them on podcasting, I would still get nine out of 10 people I asked without question. And the 10th person I could fairly quickly convince with a couple of messages back and forth. Very rarely, rarely did someone refuse to come on. And still today, even though that was like years ago when it was where there weren't as many people asking you to be on their podcast, but still today, I have very few people who refuse me or who I have to chase down, it get, it happens very rarely.

That goes to the value of the research that you're doing. And people that are probably not a good fit, they're not even going to make your list. So maybe that's the big point.

Exactly. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't a celebrity on the list and you have trouble tracking them down because they don't book their own stuff. That absolutely can happen. But that's why I'm saying once you've got this list of like 10 people, that's why it's so great. It's not too big, it's easy for me to, to tackle, and I'm likely to get two months worth of content out of that. If you feel like you need to expand out, go ahead and get a list of 20, and then you'll be very sure you'll get three months worth of content before you want to generate a new list again.

Sounds great, Tracy. Boy, a lot to think about there for our listeners, but sounds very valuable.

If search engine optimization or if searchability, visibility and credibility for your show is what you're seeking. Remember, digital visibility and digital credibility matters more today than it even did yesterday because of AI. Because of all of those things, it matters more today than it did yesterday. So I would rather have someone with digital credibility than I would have a celebrity for my show. It's going to add more value to someone who's going to like my website, go through my website, join my social profiles, and listen to my podcast. At the end of the day, that is how we are going to get more listeners to our show.

Couldn't agree more. Yep. Sometimes the more famous people are not going to get you what you really are going to get value from. So no question. All right, well, thanks for sharing all that, Tracy. That's very helpful. Hope our listeners got great value out of that. Remember, you can check out the blog post for this episode@potupties.com to get links to any of the things that we discussed and to see all of our other topics anywhere. That right there, there's a search. When you're on any of those blog pages, you can search on any topic related to podcasting and get some other great content.

Well, thanks everyone for listening. I'm Tracy Hazzard along with my co host Tom Hazzard, here on feed you'd.

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