Mastering SEO Secrets for Podcast Triumph With Melanie Gorman

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 finish 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, your host for today on Feed you'd Brand and I've got a very special guest on Feed you'd Brand. We don't often have guests. Usually it's just me and Tracy talking with you about a tip, technique, a tactic, something in the podcasting world. And if you've listened to us at all, you know, websites are very important to us. Podcast websites and SEO is something we talk about a lot. We have always believed that a website is a part of your digital platform. And if you're going to have a podcast, you need a website and you need to make sure it's the best it can be. So I've brought a special guest here today. Her name's Melanie Gorman of Crownsville Media, our go to SEO expert here at Potatise and I'm pleased to have her. Thank you so much for being here, Melanie.

Thanks, Tom. It's really nice to be here with you.

Wonderful. Well, okay, fair warning to all your listeners. I geek out on this stuff and I'm going to try not to go down too many technical rabbit holes here. But this is really important and we've been reminded recently not only how important it is with not only our own websites here in our company, but with some client websites. And we've brought Melanie in to help consult and help some of our clients achieve what they need to with their website or fix some problems that were holding their website back. And I think that's the thing that I would like to discuss with you first, Melanie, and ask you to, if you can try to put it in some plain language that everybody can digest. But I don't think people really understand what SEO really means about their website. And maybe I'll just let you kind of introduce maybe the subject and then I may ask a follow up question. But how can you help people understand sort of what it is and how important it is?

Sure, I mean, that's the best fundamental question to ask. So SEO is how the world looks for whatever you're selling. So whatever you're pitching, whatever you have that you want people to consume, whether it's content. It could be audio content, it could be visual content, it could be articles. None of it, it all applies to the same. But SEO is really how strangers look for you. And, and in most of our businesses, we have referral traffic that comes from people that know us or warmer leads. SEO is really about getting those people who need what you're putting out there on the Internet and have never heard of your brand. They don't know what you do. They just know they have a problem and they need someone to help solve it. And they're going to go to the Internet thinking like a consumer, not like you, not like your business or potatoes or like Crownsville Media. They're thinking like, hey, I'm totally. Like, I need to understand, like, what do I do to get my kid to stop crying? Or how do I get my kid to eat vegetables? Or how do I start a podcast, right? So way, way, way before anyone understands the value of poditize, they understand what they want, which is to start a podcast. So SEO is how you connect those two. And every single page on your website is looked at by Google like it's its own website. So what people often do is they write their 712 landing pages and they talk about who they are and the services they sell and how to contact them. But they're not really thinking from the perspective of the consumer, because consumers are never as educated as we are. They don't know all the ins and outs because if they did, they wouldn't need us, Right? So the reason that it's really important to write in the language of your customer is, is that customers, they think a specific way. And you can align that thinking up with keywords. And those keywords give consumers the ability to find you quickly and easily. And then you can lead them down the funnel and get them into your marketing so that they go from a cold lead to a warm lead, and you can convert them to whatever it is that you want them to do. But SEO is always the same. It doesn't matter if it's a plumber or a therapist or a podcast. All of it operates and functions the same way. You have to think like the consumer. You have to write for the consumer with their pain points in mind. But you really want to validate that there's any search for what you're writing about to begin with. Otherwise you're just wasting your time. And this is one of the most common pieces of feedback I give to people. They'll write an article and they'll think, this is brilliant. It's great. It's well researched, it's great. And I'll say, nobody looks for that, right? And that's so devastating. You know, you do a series of podcasts or you write a series of articles, and you're like, man, this is going to be great. It's going to sell my whatever widget I got, and it doesn't because the world doesn't look for it the way you think that they do. So you use tools within SEO to be able to validate. So it's research. It's no one's opinion. Right? It's the facts. 300 people look it up this way. A thousand people look it up this way. This is the competition. This is your easy way in. So SEO is one of those things that you can really do anytime, but it's always a project. It's not an instant fix. Anyone that says, I'm going to do SEO so I can fill the room at this event I'm doing next week, like, you need to advertise. Right? Don't do SEO.

Right.

But when you do SEO and you really change your marketing so you're thinking like the consumer, all of a sudden, all kinds of doors open to you that you may never have really even thought about. That makes sense.

It does make sense. My goodness. So many things in my mind right now that I was thinking about as you're saying that, that I want to discuss where to begin. All right, I'll save a couple of things for later because the little deeper and more specific about podcasting, but let me start here. I often will encounter customers, and pretty much all of our podcast customers do have a website. If some don't, or if they're starting a new podcast, they might need a new website because they don't have one for it, but most will have a podcast. And when I talk to them about SEO, they'll say to me, oh, my site's great with SEO. When you type in my domain name, my site comes up right away, and I'm like, okay, that's supposed to happen. And I think that's like, the most basic thing that really doesn't matter. And I'm curious if you agree with that, because if they know your domain name, first of all, why are they Googling it? And you've already won the battle. They know who you are. I care more about people that have no idea who I am to find me. Is that right?

There's a couple things. Number one, as a website owner, you've Probably Googled yourself before, right? So there's a cookie and so you're going to see yourself, right? So when you visited a website, because of how Google works, you'll see that same website more often if you Google it a second time. If you really want to know how your website's doing, don't look up Crownsville media dot com, look up Crownsville Space Media, right? Because then you're getting a more pure search and you'll understand like, okay, so, and that's especially true if there's common words. Like media is a really common word, right? So if there's that kind of language in there, then you should show up, right? And you should be the number one result. Where that gets tricky is if you have either something that's really branded, like potatoes is a really branded name, right? And Apple is a really diluted name, right? So Apple, I don't know how many hundreds of varieties of apples out there, right? And there's the brand. So you have to think about where and what people have to know about you to be able to discover you. So if you have a really highly branded name, then you're going to need to do SEO around the pain points your clients have before your brand name becomes anything. So you can't really rely on that. And if someone says, oh well, my brand shows up every time I Google it, that does is not an indication of popularity. In the same way, if you're looking at Google search and it says here's the results at the top, that's not a popularity number either. Do you know what I mean? Like, It'll say like 75 million, blah, blah, results. That's just the number of things you're competing with, right? That's the number of things indicated. That has nothing to do with how many people naturally look that up. And people get that mistaken all the time. So you should show up when you Google your name, you should have control, ideally of everything on the first page of search from your brand. Because as an SEO project, you can own your brand name. The pages underneath it that show. So that unpacked version of your site, you should see Facebook and LinkedIn, right? You should see things you actually control. And if you don't, then there's stuff you need to do to either push down your competitors or to own your brand stronger in search. But just seeing your name when you Google yourself, that is supposed to happen. You're totally right about that. And you have to also consider like, well, how you're doing. So if you're curious, do an incognito browser, and then you'll really get a good read on it. So. But it's just a tip of the iceberg with everything that's there to do.

I think it is the tip of the iceberg. And that's, I think, what can be so overwhelming for people and why. I don't necessarily want to go down a really deep technical rabbit hole in this episode, but there are a few key things I think that are fundamental to help people understand they either need to learn what they don't know or get some support with this. And one of the things that I also have found really surprising. I don't know why I did, but as you and I were talking about someone's site, I think someone we work with that they had a huge number of pages on their website and had like five of them that were ranking on anything. So people think, oh, I have all this content on my website. Of course Google knows about it. They just assume it. But it's really not the case, right?

No. And there's layers to that, right? So Google is like a child, right? So the way to think about Google, I mean, you know, when you want to teach your youngsters how to do something, you don't just say, okay, you're potty trained. It's time. Right? That's not how it works. Like, any parent knows that, not how it works. Right. So Google has to be taught in the same way. And so there's things where when you publish content, you have to send traffic to the content. You have to inspect the content using tools like Search Console, which is a free tool that Google gives anybody that wants it. So you have to do things to validate that your content is even being indexed. And then after it's being indexed, Google's going to say, well, do you send any other traffic to it? Does anybody come to it? And it's going to evaluate the value of the content over everything on your website. A business that has lots of content sometimes needs to clean up their website and get rid of content, because sometimes you're showing stuff to people that they're not interested in. But you also have something called your crawl budget. So your crawl budget is basically the number of pages on your website that Google has decided based on how popular you are and how busy you are, to allow Google to see every time it indexes your site. And when you reach your crawl budget, let's say it's 100 pages. If you have 101 pages, that extra number one is not even looked at. So it's important that you're controlling more of the narrative and you're really saying what is important to the brand. And typically that's your sales pages, your most popular blogs, your most popular podcasts, especially if they're doing what you guys do, where you're having an article with the corresponding podcast, your homepage is naturally going to get traffic. You don't really have to worry about that. But everything else, you should look at with a little bit of what's the value? How, how am I sending traffic to it? Because Google won't look at everything. And until you teach it what you want it to look at based on your linking and your promotion and your newsletter and social media and all the marketing things you do with the content, Google looks at it like it's all the same. And so if it's all the same, then it might look at the newest thing, which is new but not really valuable yet. So you have to have some assessment and some thought into that so you don't lose traffic that is really meaningful to your brand and you're not relying on Google just to get it. Because Google doesn't.

Right. Wow. So much good stuff there. All right, let's shift to blog content in particular, because we've always believed, really, because we've had, I guess I would say, indicators, evidence along the way that creating a comprehensive blog post for every podcast episode, if you do it a certain way or there probably are lots of ways to do it, but there are probably good and then better ways to do it is an important good thing to do. And I'll just give you one of the indicators. I probably shared it with you before, but we had this experience in May of 2018, which is almost, goodness, six years ago. Is it. It's been a minute, been a while. And feed your brand was a podcast back then, poditized.com existed and we published an episode like we normally do that had its blog post. They both published you probably like 3am and by 11am I had very unhappy phone call from the CEO of another company who had, I don't actually believe listened to my podcast. I believe actually his assistant had a Google alert set. And that because if he'd actually listened to the podcast, he probably wouldn't have been so upset at me because he would have heard what I said rather than somebody just tell him. But this was like, wow, how did this person find out about this episode? And I don't need to go into, into why he was upset. And I ended up talking to him and he was fine. But how did he find it so fast? I mean, this podcast hadn't even been live in the universe for 12 hours. And when we checked, we actually found this blog post in all of 12 hours had ranked on 3 pretty good search terms on the very first page of Google search. And one of them to this day, I mean, I don't really test all of them, but one of them to this day still works. If you and you all can try this out there, watching this live, or if you're listening to the podcast later, go to Google and search on worst podcast websites. Because we did this episode that was talking about the best and worst podcast websites. Oh, and actually that reminds me of another good thing I'm going to come back to about the title when I want to talk about that in a minute because there's a good lesson there for podcasters. But you search that on Google and the very first search result at the top of the first page of Google is the blog post for that episode of Feed you'd brand. Now you'll notice any of you current listeners, you'll notice, wow, that's a very different podcast logo. Yeah, we've changed it like three times since then in the years. And even the blog is a little bit older format than our current format, but the value is still there six years later. So that's the kind of power. Can you maybe help share a little bit about that value? I mean, I refer to it with people who don't know as building equity in your website of rankings and it results in traffic.

So first everyone has to know that your blog content can live out there online for a long time. I do regular audits with people's websites and I'll find an article that's 10 years old and it's still number one. And Google has a scoring system that's called their EAT score. So expertise, experience, authority and trustworthiness. And it's amongst all of the different algorithm pieces that they have. But when you write a really good authoritative blog post that's researched and backed by you as the expert or the business as the expert, Google gives higher value to it. When you write multiple articles about a topic, not repeating yourself, but you start to cover the topic in different ways, Google starts to see that you have more content about a particular area and it will see that as you demonstrating authority and it'll give you more traffic. So there's strategies around blogging where you can like double and triple down on your main core areas and that's after you've validated the keyword value and you know that people are really looking for it. But then you can write really great articles that teach the world something. So when you do that, Google says, this is great content. Whenever you do an SEO project, you have to remember who Google's client is. Right? Google's client is me and you at 3 o' clock in the morning going, I took Advil two hours ago. Can I take Tylenol now? Right. I mean, that search, when we do it, we want to know, yes, you're fine. Nope, you're going to the hospital. Right. So it has to be right. And if you give great advice and you build your brand and it's backed up by a website, that is all the things websites need to be so that Google sees them as an authority, that content can live online for 10 years easily. So. And you have to watch your traffic like you have to watch your competition. I have one client who is a therapist in Washington, DC. She's been a client of mine for 10 years. Let's say in 2018, she wrote a book called Hack youk Anxiety. She is like, published and well known and therapy, practice, all this stuff about anxiety. And she has one article about teenage anxiety that bobbles from position one to position six. We'll see it drop. I'm like, oh, delicious. Dropping. She's like, well, let's judge it up and I'll give her the advice on what to do and then we get it back to the top. We just literally did this two weeks ago. So when you have meaningful content, like, if this article was really like, this is a game changer, this brings in all new clients. We would go through that exercise and I'd say, okay, Tom, add these sections to it to make it new again. Like, make it valuable, make it 20, 24 or whatever. But that is how you can rework old content. And you want to know what pieces really make a difference to your brand. So SEO is about. It's targeting the three different customers that really come to your website. So you all know the traditional marketing funnel, the upside down triangle, right? But really, when it comes to the web and SEO, you have cold leads. People don't know you, they've heard about you, they found you in a search, some social media things sent them to your website. They, they need to be educated, right? They need to be wooed. They need to be like, you got the answers, right? You got those guys. Then you've got warm leads. So they're your referrals, right? They're the people that they know. They want a podcast they've thought about a long time. Is this the year? What's the investment? How much does it cost? They're asking different buying questions, and you need content for them. All of this can be in the blog. None of this has to be a landing page, because you can answer the various questions in blogs that allow the reader to not be forced into a sale before they're ready. That's the value of a blog. So you have all this stuff. So for cold leads and warm leads and then your hot leads and your current customers, they're the people that check out your landing pages. So my background is I'm a trained mental health therapist. Right. I started this whole gig. You don't know about me yet. I have a master's in counseling psych. Like, I started that direction. So I'm fascinated by the psychology of search. Like, why do they look at it this way, over that way? Where is the data or the psychographic information where someone says, I'm ready now? Because all of us sell things. When people go, this, whatever this is, is intolerable. And so when you reach an intolerable moment and I reach a moment like that, are very different based on our life experience, and you cannot predict that. All you can do is anticipate it. And so that's what your blog is for. And blogs are the backbone of the Internet. Most of us read a lot of stuff, and as much as people think, oh, we have no attention span and, oh, we're sick and tired, just put table contents in, like, let people scan, write for them. But it is that the blog is what gets people through the marketing funnel and teaches them effectively everything they need. So. And then they can come to your website and do something.

Okay, podcasters out there, I want to make sure y' all heard this. The blogs are the backbone of the Internet. That's the big ding, ding, ding message that I heard there. I mean, obviously, there's all kinds of wonderful wisdom coming from Melanie here, but really, that is an absolutely very important thing for all of us to understand. And I gotta tell you, I'm not a writer. Tracy Hazard is a writer. She can really write. I mean, she had an ink column for four years, and she can write the conventional way. I cannot. It is regardless of whether you're a writer or not, though, it's much easier to speak your way to a blog than it is to agonize over writing it and getting it perfect. And this is not really meant to be a shameless plug here, but, I mean, this is really the foundation of how to ties. And part of why we started this business is to speak your way to content that markets and grows your brand. Whether that's only about the podcast or it's about the business that also has a podcast, it's just a vehicle to create that content. And there's everything in between podcasters, those of you out there that are not using your audio content to create blogs. And you know what? I meet with six or eight of you every day. I can't tell you how many podcasters come to me. And they've got 150 episodes. Just had somebody ask you 188 episodes. Look at their website. Beautiful looking websites. Got all half of a dozen pages and these little short summary posts. Everybody says, oh, I have show notes. Okay, you do. I see it. You may have 180 little pages of a paragraph or two and some links and a track player. I got news for you, you're not setting the world on fire for SEO with that kind of content. It's just not enough material nor the quality of content needed to get Google's attention. You would agree with that, wouldn't you, Melanie?

Oh, 100%. I had this conversation yesterday with a client. They podcast and then they do an IG live streaming immediately after with the guest, right? So they interview someone, they do that and they have a basic paragraph, let's say four sentences introducing what they're doing. They have the title, the introduction, and that's the cell to get people to listen to it when it's happening. And then afterwards they have a transcript, but it's buried. And the transcript is the easy thing, right? Because if you set your podcast up properly, then you know the SEO to talk about in the podcast and that gives you the opportunity to be organic and natural. But you have some sense that the world is looking for this topic in this way, right? And so you can still speak your way to your blog, but you can do it in a way where you're more connected to what the world's really looking for as opposed to what you happen to feel like talking about. And with that client yesterday, it was pretty funny, ironic, I'll say. Even she said, well, this is what I want to talk about. And I was like, that's the problem, right? Like if we want listeners and an audience, we have to talk to people in a way that they're going to say, tell me more. And that's the goal. If you get anything out of it, it's like whatever you do, you want people to Say tell me more, because tell me more is the next step. And sales is all about micro steps. Like none of us sell anything instantly. There's a roadmap that happens. So I totally agree with you. Like, the show notes must be developed in a way that allow not just the audience to get it, but for Google to understand it too. Right. Because that's the other piece.

Right. And I've read other articles and things that Google actually values the plain spoken language rather than when we think and type and we sort of are writing it in a sanitized way. They've been able to tell, I think, since 2009, if I remember right, text that came from human speech versus otherwise, maybe even before that. But that's the earliest that I knew about it. So I'd like to just cover a couple more things here. We've also talked about, like one customer that actually was creating what we call the verbal SEO blogs from their podcast that were really driving the majority of traffic to their website and they were paying another agency to write other blogs. And you had a pretty interesting discovery there, didn't you, that those other blogs just weren't doing anything.

Yeah, they weren't performing. And part of it was around the strategy. So when you really make a commitment to write blogs, you want to understand how to lay the content out on the page so that it's telling a story to Google in a repetitive but not robotic way. And so Google reads your content in a particular way. So where you and I would sit down and we'd read the title and then the introduction, and then we kind of scanner, usually people scan and then commit. Right. So is this worth it? Okay, yes, I'll commit to reading it. Right. So those heading tags are what we scan. And then the paragraph, Google actually reads your website URL, page title, meta description, which are behind the scenes. Right. And those are for anyone that doesn't know. Like when you do a Google search, the blue link that you see in a search page, that's your page title. And Google will assume it or figure it out themselves if you don't declare it. So when you're doing SEO and you know the keywords, then you're carrying that keyword through all of that. So URL, page title, meta description, heading tags, then the body copy. So with that particular client, when we audited the articles that they were having written, it was ostensibly, they were written on the page. Fine. But they didn't have a strategy. So what I always tell people is you have to know your niche. And some people are resistant to niching or niching down. Some people think I'm a generalist. I talk about everything that a leader needs to know. And maybe you have to. But usually there's four or five main buckets or categories of content that you really are an expert in, and I challenge everybody to own those. And then don't go a mile wide and a teaspoon deep. Go a mile deep and a teaspoon wide. Because then you're demonstrating through the written word and the podcast and if you have video, right, all of your media is showing. I'm an authority. I know what I'm talking about. I know what I'm doing. This is how I do it. And I'm an authority in these lanes. When someone comes to me and says, I want to buy ads, right, they'll say, SEM, I want to do that. I have referrals for them. Do I know how to do Google AdWords? You bet I do. Am I going to do that? No. I can waste my time on that. I am not the proficient expert in Google AdWords that I am in SEO right now. Google AdWords and SEO are like kissing cousins. You gotta get it right so. Or it's really wrong. So you have to think about that and your ad person should understand the copy and the content on your landing page, or you won't have relevant connection and your cost per click is higher. So there's all of these ways that these pieces play together for that particular client. What we were able to say is your SEO team is doing their job. They're missing a strategy, so it's missing a maturity that your brand really needs. And we can move that needle for you pretty quickly. Right? So that's how I end up kind of netting out.

All right, what about those people listening who are thinking, yeah, I don't want to do all that much work, maybe. All right, I'll just have ChatGPT write my blogs.

This is the question of the year, right?

I couldn't let you get away without asking that question, right?

And I'm so grateful you asked it, because I just want to give everybody a warning. So I've been in the SEO space for 20 years, and I worked at a publishing company in New York. We would publish a thousand articles a month. Like, I've been on high frequency publishing, right? And we were penalized twice, and it was very painful. Like, you mean going from like 10 million clicks to 4? So anyways, I've been there. AI is useful in many, many ways. What you do not want to do with AI is is put any idea of any kind that one day you want to trademark. Because if you have an idea and you're like, this is it. This is my thing. This is my upcoming book. If you put it in AI, all free AI engines to this date, this could change. So just qualifying that, right? They take that, whatever you do in AI and they kick it back into the engine and they use your content to help refine the next search that comes along. So I come in and I put my magic idea into ChatGPT. And then Tom comes in and goes, wow, I never thought of that. Oh, this is a great idea. I'm gonna write a book now. Tom's writing my book. So you have to be very careful about your intellectual property in that way. So that's my disclaimer at this point in time. AI tools for images have watermarks on them. So if you're using AI to create images, like you see those ads on like Candy Crush and Facebook and whatever are like, take your picture in sweatpants and get a professional headshot out of it, there's a watermark on it that will say that it came from AI. Google is going to go in the direction to your point about knowing human speech, knowing how people converse, knowing how people write. Google is moving to be able to understand if it's AI written or not. So eventually there's going to be different search engines. We already see that with Bing. But where Bing is AI informed, mostly AI. And Google has got both ends coming and assumably will be available to all of us this year, right? To be able to choose what we want to do. You want to think about AI as a tool to ease up whatever part of the writing process is hard for you. So when I do SEO for clients, I will use AI tools like my processes. I do research. So I validate your keyword is looked up, whatever. I pick my key phrase. Then I do AI research to figure out who's beating you. And then I validate. Okay, well, if I want to beat them, what do I have to do? How do I need to be different or better or more interesting or have different research or different angle? What's my hook? Right? I'm thinking those things. Then you can outline it and you can either voice to text it and then edit it, or you can even use AI to help you write it. But you must edit it. You can see AI articles if you look at them, they all start with the word intro and they have the word conclusion. That's the easiest tell. So there are going to be things where people are like AI, and all of a sudden your article that would have gotten three minutes of reading time gets four seconds because people are turned off by it.

Is Google potentially also going to be turned off by it? Where you might have blogs that are AI written or AI enhanced and right now they're not maybe looking so carefully at the difference between that and each either originally written or the spoken word version. And there may be a future what we've heard about in the industry as a Google slap where they end up re evaluating and re ranking all these posts. And if you get filled with all AI generated stuff, they may say, all right, this is worthless. We're not sending any more traffic there.

So here's what I'll say to that. You know what Google's really, really good at? Patterns. So what Google does is you can break all the laws, you can break all the rules, and Google will let you get away with it. And then you get the smack. And it is so hard to recover from. So here's the thing. A lot of people make these choices and then they go, oh, it's working, everything's great. And then they get a penalty. So AI content is distinguishable because what Google's good at is recognizing patterns and chaos. And what we're not good at is chaos. So what we do as writers is we sit down and go, oh, it's got to be organized like this. And so we think we're trying to best Google, it's a lot smarter in that kind of information. So you want to be thoughtful about what can be seen in those ways. And what I tell my clients is figure out what your hardest pathway with writing is. Is it the blank page? Is it the editing? Is it the idea generation? Like, what is the thing that confound you and find the tool that will help you with that. And when you do that, then you can say, what's the safest AI tool? To speed this up now, I've experimented a lot with AI, I'll tell you that. I have a couple of articles on my website that I'm doing a case study on. I wrote them in AI, right? And I edited them 100%. So I wrote the whole thing. I outlined them, I wrote them, I edited every word. I don't think there was one sentence remaining in any of these articles. And all of them are outperforming the content I've written myself, right? So better traffic and better time on page. So I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about what Was my problem. I think my problem was the pattern. Right. And what I mean by the pattern was was the problem was my daughter's asking. The pattern was I'm trying to figure out how do I have a logical flow without getting sidetracked. You ever write and you're like, oh, squirrel, I gotta remember to tell you about that. That's the big difference in my writing is that all the tangents are not there. So that's the thing that's different for me. So I'll keep watching it and I'll let you know. I mean, I have like 48, 49 articles. I only have four or five that are written by AI in the way I just described. And it wouldn't surprise me if in a year they tank. So I might get a year of great traffic out of it and they tank. But it's only four or five out of 50. Right. So the ratios matter.

Yeah. You haven't gone too deep down it that you're going to be in trouble. Yeah. Well, very interesting. Okay, last little question. And then I want to make sure we let everyone know a little bit about some of the things. Things that you do that people can access for an evaluation of their website. So back to the titling thing. I told you I want to come back to this. So I have to pay off on that promise, which is we learned a while ago, because Tracy and I are so often co hosts and doing things together, we would refer to ourselves as Tom and. Or ampersand Tracy Hazard. And what we learned early on is people could Google and find Tracy easily because Tracy and Hazard are right next to each other. I'm Tom and. And who's searching on Tom? And so just a little tip on the importance of titling. If you really want to make sure you're doing things referring to each other. And this is even more true in the podcast search engines within the listening apps, folks, because they're not as good of search engines. And with authors, if you're co hosts, you have to have, especially if you're married or brother and sister and such like if you're. What is it? Jason Kelsey and now who's the other Kelsey who's with Taylor Swift now I'm forgetting Travis, you've got to say Travis Kelce and Jason Kelsey in order for them both to be searchable, especially in the author field in podcasting. So I find that as a rookie error a lot of the time among co hosts, especially if they're related.

Well, and the other thing I see with naming, it's called the piggyback strategy. And so I interview you and on my podcast, and you're more popular than I am. So my Fitzer Schnitzel podcast with my guest Tom Hazard. So what I'm really doing by including your name and everything is I'm trying to get connected to your name in search and the goal.

Oh, and that works?

Yeah, it really works. But you have to recognize there can be a tipping point, especially if you're starting to grow so you want to be thoughtful about. Okay, so how am I growing with popularity and want to make be careful to not have your brand just be about your guests. So you need to think about, like, the SEO. For brands that have this piggyback strategy going on, what's really important is to double down on what is your expertise and authority scores about you, not just your guests. Because otherwise you're like Barbara Walters. I'm Barbara Walters, and I interviewed Tom and I interviewed Melanie, and I interviewed this person. Right. And I'm a professional interviewer, and that may not be your brand at all. That make sense?

It does. That's great. I love how you took what I was talking about, which I thought was really simple, and took it further. That's fantastic. So, listeners, I want you all to know we're going to have all the contact information for Melanie, as usual in the blog post for this episode on podcasters united.org but also, Melanie, I just want people to understand you have some rather inexpensive things you do to, like, evaluate a website. If people say, I don't have any idea if my website is in good shape or not, how do I find out? You do have some ways you can do that, and it's relatively easy, isn't that right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. People can schedule a consultation with me and my team and I will review your website and we'll look at it through the lens of the tools that we have. And that will allow us to tell you what's working, what's not, what's broken, what direction you're going in, how many keywords you rank for. And a lot of surprises can be found there. And it can be anything from, holy cow, I rank for so much. I had no idea to my brand is crisscrossed. And I think in the chat is the link to my calendly. And people can schedule with me. We'll do the audit and we'll spend some time with you going over what we discover. And that's yours. Right. So if you want to go out in the world and shop around for someone to help you with SEO, that's great. And if you want to work with us, that's great, too. But I think it's important for people to have the knowledge to be able to know, because, I mean, you can see in your Google Analytics how much traffic you're getting, but it's not giving you a full picture of what people are searching for and how they're being connected to your brand. So it doesn't really give you a lot of direction on how to grow and how to grow the fastest. So happy to do that for everybody. Anybody that needs it. That's something we schedule with people all the time.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Hey, listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this as much as I have. I could go on for hours, but it would be a very technical, even more geeky show than this has already been. But I very much appreciate you and your time and coming on and sharing it with our listeners, so thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

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