Podcast Website Optimization: How to Avoid Critical Errors, Boost Organic SEO, and Drive Downloads

This is Feed Your Brand with hosts Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard. Welcome back to Feed Your Brand. I'm Tom Hazzard, along with my co-host and better half, Tracy Hazzard. And today we're gonna talk about, is your podcast website killing your downloads? For most of you, I think the answer's probably yes, but we'll see.

Well, and you know, when we say killing downloads, we mean it's like it's hurting your listenership. Because when you launch a podcast website or any website for that matter, it doesn't matter whether you're hosting a podcast or hosting a blog or hosting a video channel. If you don't do it right, then you are making sure that no one can find you. Right. And that is really the issue here. We're talking about people finding you, people listening to your show, the more listens you get. Most of our Poditise hosted clients. So anyone who is a user on our Poditise system will see about 30% of their downloads come from web traffic. So if you have no home base, you have no website, you're leaving 30% traffic on the table. Those of us who know about it get.

I think that's a pretty conservative number, honestly, Tracy, but—

I do too.

Yeah. And I wanna preface this just briefly before we start going through all of the things not to do, which is what this episode's about. And there's a lot. So please understand we're not gonna go into tremendous detail on every one of these topics. 'Cause otherwise it'd be an hour and a half long podcast episode, but it's a good solid list. But I wanna preface this by saying, if you do not have a website for your podcast, get one. You absolutely need one and your own website, not— now we'll talk about again what not to do. You'll hear some of, some of these things, but your own website, not one provided by the hosting provider. So we'll get into that. You have anything else you wanna preface with? Before we get started with our, our, uh, list, our recommendations of what not to do?

Yeah, we are not gonna talk about design here. Like, I honestly, and we have people who build thousands of websites and they will tell you that it doesn't matter what your site looks like. What we're talking about here has to do with the sort of the functional way that it works. But sometimes the design decisions you make make those fundamental things break. So be thinking about that. Like, we are not making a commentary on how pretty your site is.

I agree with that. It's not a, I mean, I do think that how a site appears has a lot to do with what people will do on the site and, you know, how attracted they are to dive into it, but we're really not talking about design. This is very much more functional. So yeah.

Structural even, right? I wouldn't even say it's, it's not just functional.

Yeah. There's some things we'll talk about that do impact the way things look, but we're really not talking about a good design or a bad design from an aesthetic perspective. We're not going to comment on the color scheme of websites. That's not the point of this. That's— it's definitely more foundational.

So Tom and I have been doing this a long time, and we have personally, within the way that our company does it, managed people's websites. So we see what goes wrong and what doesn't. And here's what we know, and also what is the prevailing wisdom within the entire I'm going to call it search engine optimized traffic industry, if you want to call it that, is that the number one thing you can do is pick the wrong platform. That's the number one thing you could do wrong. And we just straight out say here, if you don't have a WordPress website, then you're leaving traffic on the table. You're losing downloads.

There are some exceptions to that. We have seen some custom coded websites. We've seen some Squarespace websites. They're doing a better job these days of SEO. They just don't have as Platforms that are the what you see is what you get make it easier to build a website like the Wixes of the world. Please, my recommendation is don't use Wix. Don't use any of these other platforms because there's just not as much controls to be able to configure things and there are not enough tools to your advantage to make the website be found by more people through Google searches, which at the end of the day you're going to find is really one of the big keys. But no question WordPress is recommended. Squarespace is acceptable. It will, it will work, but it's just, again, not as easy.

And not as trackable. So it's really hard for you to tell if it's working. And then Wix, ClickFunnels, LeadPages, please don't use HubSpot. Podcast websites, like all of those other ones, just stop using them. They're not worth the effort and the money that you're spending 'cause you're not getting the results you want.

Especially ClickFunnels. I gotta put my foot down on that one and say, Do not use ClickFunnels as your website platform. We've had some people actually do this recently that we work with, and it was a disaster. I'm not saying don't use ClickFunnels for your sales pages. It's a great platform to use for sales funnels only, but they're trying to say to the world, hey, you can build your whole website on ClickFunnels. Just, you know, pay us more money, expand, do your site, do it all here. It just does not work for SEO. And I've actually talked and I'm not the I don't wanna take a deep dive on this, but this is one important point cuz I've experienced it speaking with a ClickFunnels designer engineer supporting someone with their website that was being converted all over to ClickFunnels. I asked them some questions. Well, so how do you do this and how do you do that? Which are, were critical functions of SEO. And they said, oh, well, ClickFunnels, we, we don't care about SEO. SEO doesn't matter. They really literally don't care about it because their entire business model is you pay money to market and drive people to your website, which is not what we want. We want organic traffic. You're speaking your way to wonderful content through your podcast. You can attract people to your website without having to pay marketing dollars. That's our point.

Yeah, and so we wanna just also be really clear here. When we say get a WordPress website, that's not where you're hosted. You're still gonna be on SiteGround or GoDaddy or some Bluehost or something like that. You have to have a host that's running that. And they will try to sell you sometimes on their stuff. Just don't do it. Just make sure you do a WordPress website on top of one of those hosting platforms. It's perfectly fine, does really well. It's exactly what you want and it doesn't have to break the bank. Super simple. And then you may get a theme. That's that design part. So there may be some other costs associated with it. Just keep that in mind. But it shouldn't break the bank for you to have this website, just the structure of it.

Absolutely true, Tracy. I believe in the way we do it, um, for customers that need a new website, WordPress with the hosting, they're paying a very small amount of money per year for the WordPress hosting. I mean, really like $29 to $40 a year type of money, uh, not very expensive. So just to give you an example.

And the host might be, it depends on your traffic and stuff, but up to $100 a month or something like that. Depends on what you've got, but.

What are you saying might be?

There are lots cheaper ones. Some hosting will be up to $100 depending on traffic.

Oh, some platforms. And it does depend. As long as you have a smaller site and it's on a shared server, it's low. If you need a dedicated server, you'll pay a little more, but these are all reasonable rates for what it is. And, you know, for those of you just starting out with a new podcast and a simple podcast website, I think if you purchase from the right hosting platform, the right company, and you don't have an overly complex, expensive theme, you really can spend $29, $40 max, maybe $50 a year for the entire cost of the website. Now you can always add things on and sometimes there are costs and, but just, you can decide though, you have the option to decide what you're going to add and what you're going to pay for and what you're not.

Right. So this thing that's going to drive 30% plus traffic is not killing You, from a monetary standpoint, it's simple to do and you should have one. You should have one if you've got a business, a mission, a nonprofit, whatever it is, you gotta have a website. So this should be a logical, easy thing to do. Now, the next thing on my list, Tom, I don't know about yours, but on my list is, I see it so often, they don't have their podcast on their website. They don't have a player. They don't even mention their podcast. Like it's just not there.

I see this a lot too. And 'cause you know what I do, I meet with 6 to 8 podcasters every day that I've never met before. They just, through LinkedIn outreach and such, they book a Power Podcast Appraisal on my calendar and I look at their websites and I'm always shocked how many of them actually have a website and they're not using it. And what they're usually doing is have a link to their show on Apple, on Spotify, or on YouTube, one of those 3. And they're sending people away from their website when they first get there. They're sending people away to listen to or watch their show. Like, there's a huge missed opportunity there. Why not have them listen or watch on your own website? Keep that traffic captive right there. Because while they're listening, they're going to poke around and see whatever else you have to offer.

Yeah, they might see a popup. They might see your email list. They might see other blogs that they would like to click on or other content or your book or your course, things that you've got there. So the longer you keep them on the site, the better it is. So everyone should have a podcast player now. Almost every host that every podcast hosting company like Poditise has a podcast player available to it. And even Apple and Spotify have podcast players. If you're, you know, if you want to go directly to the source.

Right. So if you want to say, hey, I want to drive all of my plays to Apple, there is an HTML player of every episode in your podcast that you can download an embed code and put on your website. Same thing for Spotify. I don't like to do that personally. Because then the analytics, it's, it's harder to know which ones are actually coming from your website than from one of those services. And I always like to isolate and know which, how many plays are coming from my website versus people in their phone on those apps or even on the web on those apps. So I think there are some really good reasons why. And not only that, you can't get the Apple player embed code for an episode until it's published. So that means that you can't set it up ahead of time and schedule that blog to publish with a player. But when you're using a Podotize player or whatever player comes from your host, you usually can get that player ahead of time and put it on the website.

Yeah, we call ours the Showcaster with an R at the end. And, uh, we have lots of website-friendly customizations because we're meant to support websites. Like that's what our, our whole mission is. So we have lots of things that make it look like your brand and stylistic ways to break it up and have tabs. So there's all kinds of different things. So there are different players out there. I'm a big fan, Tom, and you know this, of the main player, the big player that has your entire The whole list of episodes, right? Yeah. Has it all in one place, makes it really easy. 'Cause I've seen people just like sit on your website and go straight down that. That's a great place to have other information about you and things like that. And then another thing that I'm a fan of, of course, is the track player, right? Putting the track player right in the blog or the episode information for the page so that they could just listen to that one single episode. And all of our players have little subscribe links. Not every player does, but it makes it easy to just click and subscribe.

Absolutely. Yeah. Podcast player is a complete requirement on your podcast website. No reason not to have it.

And especially if, and this is where I want to mention to you, if your audience is older folks, people who don't have, aren't as podcast savvy as they might, as you might think, or aren't as smartphone savvy really. Right, exactly. Or yeah, especially, you know, if you're, if you're doing something where your audience would likely be using a Chromebook own browser or on, on the internet, on their computer versus being on a mobile device, you definitely wanna have a player cuz it makes it really easy for them to consume your podcast without having a podcast app and even understanding or knowing what that is. And if you're international, if you have a larger international audience and not such a US-centric audience, then iPhones are not as big around the world as they are here in the US. There are still lots and lots of Android devices around the world. And honestly, the podcast apps suck on Android. They really do. And so unless you're gonna pay for Spotify or, you know, you're gonna use that, there really isn't much options for you out there that are really good anymore. So sometimes the player becomes a great default for them to come and get your show. So be thinking about those things. I think they're really important. And speaking of that, Tom, mobile optimization, right? Sometimes those players look terrible on mobile. They don't look as good as they're supposed to. And so you really need to have a, both a mobile optimized site, mobile optimized players, and make sure that you've checked all of that for your theme and all the things that you use, because a podcast listener is likely a mobile phone user. Very likely.

They are. And I'm glad you mentioned not being mobile optimized. This is a something I see a lot as well when I'm reviewing websites. And I think a lot of people who are, you know, having their first website created or creating their own website, for those of you on, you know, more of a budget for your podcast, maybe doing everything yourself and creating your own website. And I even have some customers that pay for full done-for-you production that created their own websites, but they almost never look at their website from a mobile perspective. And everybody should understand today, more traffic to websites is coming from mobile devices than it is from desktop and laptop devices. Most websites by professionals are being designed for mobile view first. And, you know, if you're on the backend of your website in most platforms, you can preview it and look at it in a mobile view. You've got to do that and make sure everything looks right because oftentimes you get this, everything organized on your website, the layout and how you want people to navigate through the site and flow through it. They, you get it all worked out from a laptop or desktop perspective. Don't even think to look at the mobile. And when you finally do, it's like, whoa. That isn't what I expected it to be.

'Cause it's usually wonky and out of order because this, if you've got things side by side on the website, the theme has to pick and decide what's gonna be on top of each other. You have an opportunity to adjust it, but it's gonna stack it and it might stack it in a really weird order and you don't like that. But I have so often, I have people who never look at the mobile view of their site even though it was designed for that. So check it and make adjustments.

And you have to keep checking it periodically too because as software updates happen, things can change and might need adjustment. So it's something you should I was just looking at podcastersunited.org again today on my mobile phone in advance of recording this episode, 'cause I wanted to make sure that one works as we're telling everybody, hey, you gotta look at mobile view first. And it does, it is the way we want it to be. So, but very important, please don't overlook mobile view of your website.

If you have a really old website, update it now. Just, just update it. It's time. It's very easy to update a theme and then make adjustments like this. So just do it. And speaking of updating, Tom, not being consistent or constant with new content is one of the number one download killers. I think if you're not consistent and constant on the podcast side, that's also not good for your show, right? You're not getting more traffic, you're not getting more downloads. It's not happening. But when you're not then publishing them in your website either, you're not getting Google credit for it. You're not getting to be a trusted source for new information, a thought leader in your area, and anyone who can post more content than you is going to outrank you no matter how popular you think you are.

Or even if your content's better than theirs. You're 100% correct, Tracy. I bet a lot of you podcasters out there listening to this episode are like, oh, I have a website, but I barely have time to get my audio episode, episode edited and, you know, out and published as a podcast. I only occasionally create that landing page for the website or those show notes or, you know, whatever it is that you're doing for a page on your site. And, you know, you know who you are. You, I understand, don't always have time. I get it. But guess what? Google knows. Google knows when a new page goes up on your website. They're looking for it every single day. And I'm not exaggerating, folks, not at all. One of the episodes that I know we're going to reference later on in this episode, we published in April of 2018 is still a top ranked for some keywords on the first page of Google search. And we found that out the hard way the day we published the episode. Why? Because Google indexed it right away, ranked it on some keywords, and it ended up in someone's Google alert. And I got a not so nice email from the CEO of a company who thought I was saying something negative about his company when actually I was saying something Complimentary, but that's kind of beside the point.

It'll be interesting to see if you now get one from the ClickFunnels CEO. You might.

I hope I do. Because honestly, I will stand behind that. I did my research and I am speaking truth about ClickFunnels that truly they don't care about SEO.

My point is, is that this was called the best and worst podcast websites, and somebody took major issue with the fact that we called them one of the worst websites. But it was based in fact, just like this is here too, as well. Absolutely.

But, you know, it's kind of like Santa Claus. He knows when you've been sleeping. He knows when you're awake, right? Google knows when you're publishing new content and when you're not. And so it's really that important. It's really the— what's the old cliché in the journalism? Publish or perish.

Publish or perish.

Yeah. The reality is very true about online content.

I think that's an education, like it's like research.

Maybe it is. Maybe research professors Or your white papers, whatever. But in any case, it is really true being consistent and constant. And I know our mantra is always with podcasters, you've gotta publish on a consistent basis. That's true, but you've gotta publish on your website too, and you've already spoken your way to it. You just gotta take it over the finish line.

So here's the other thing that I wanna just give you a little bit of tip on this consistent and constant side. Something that we do really well, schedule it at the exact same time day as your podcast, because the other thing that Google loves Is that level of detail consistency of posting at the same time each week. And don't go seasonal. This is why Tom and I are not a fan of seasonal, like podcast websites, websites in general, but your podcast listeners don't understand why you're taking a week off. They don't get it. They're not off. Why are you off? And Google thinks the same way.

Yeah.

They want someone who's gonna show up week after week after week.

In fact, we have a scoring system on our backend at Poditise, and shows that publish consistently every weekend, don't take a break, get a higher score than those that publish randomly or, you know, publish a bunch of episodes, then take a break for a few weeks. You actually get bonus points in the scoring when we look back 52 weeks and see, you know, how many times—

But you're making it sound like we skew it, but that's not the case. It's just that Because you're posting so consistently, all the points you get will raise you up well above somebody else. That's just what's going to happen.

It's part of the algorithm that creates the how we score podcasts.

But so now this last one that I have on like the real download killers, the real things that are killing traffic, it's kind of related to not having your podcast on it. You also don't have your social, your email, all the ways to contact you and connect with you. So you're not creating this simple and easy way for me to say, oh, that's a real person. I wanna connect up with this host. I wanna subscribe to their show. I'm gonna trust them. You're creating this mess of not being able to connect. And on the flip side of it, you're creating a mess of not being able to share when you fail to put your social links in. I have seen about a dozen websites just this year so far in the last couple of months, Tom.

Wow.

that don't have social links on their website at all, or they're buried so far into the contact pages or the bio, like they're right down at the bottom of the bio or next to their profile photo. It's too hard to find.

That's just really hard to understand. I have to think for most people it just comes from a lack of awareness or lack of attention to detail. They're not really thinking through the missed opportunities. This is especially important when you do create, as we recommend, a really comprehensive episode landing page for every episode should have a guest bio section with your guests' social handles and connection links too. And, you know, you should be giving that stuff to your listeners for free, but guess what? They gotta go through your website to get it right on that landing page on your website. So there needs to be, as Tracy's saying, links and connections back from your podcast, your descriptions, and your episodes.

Mm-hmm.

Any social posts that you make about episodes always should be a link back to your website.

It should be two-way. And that's what we're trying to get across here is like, look, we're talking about building a website that Google sends traffic to you, that 30% plus that are looking for whatever it is, the topics that you have and are covering on your podcast, you're now put it in a place that it's searchable. But at the same time, we also have things that like we want to send traffic in from our Facebooks, from our Instagrams, from our TikToks. We wanna send it from our YouTubes. We wanna send people back to the core, to our home base website, to get them to find us, to buy our books and our courses and to do other things and subscribe and listen to our podcast as well. But just because we built that website doesn't mean they're gonna come. So we have to do a good job of both sending traffic in and sending traffic out so it reciprocates, right? That's what we're trying to do is create a circle. So when we look at having easy way to have social links, so someone who's already found the website can go and then follow me on Instagram, right? So it's a great follow-through and great way to do it. They can follow me in the place where they know they're gonna get the most information where they prefer to follow me. But on the same time, when I'm posting out on Instagram, I wanna send traffic into the website so they can find out and reach out and get more from me as well. So we want both going each way. The other benefit to putting your social links on your site is also to use some of the, you can use plugins like Better Click to Tweet, Share on X, like there's a bunch of stuff like that. Simply the share links that come with your theme, and you can put them on top of each blog. They sometimes, they run down the side of the site, and all someone has to do is click it and share the content. It's super easy. You should actually do that yourself. So every time you post up a new blog, click on it and share it on Facebook straight from your website. You're going to get more bonus points, and Google's gonna look at that as, wow, we got— look, they're being shared on social, and we want a piece of social, so we're going to make sure and share your site even Now, I want everyone out there to really understand.

You might think, oh, this is a lot of work for me to share my own stuff. Okay, it takes some effort. I'm not gonna lie. You can get support for it. And if you can justify the cost, but it does take some effort if you're going to do this and be successful with your podcast and raising awareness. But guess what? You don't have to do it all yourself. When you have a guest interview format podcast, You want to incentivize that guest, make it easy for them, make them want to share your stuff. And I'm not going to take a deep dive into that right now, but go check out past interview Feed Your Brand about ego bait. You can go to podcastersunited.org and search on ego bait and you'll come up with some of those past episodes and episode blogs. But there are a bunch of ways you can use ego bait. To incentivize and make your guests wanna share your episode and link back to the episode page from their website. Super easy way to get them to do it. So check out EgoBait.

And if you're sending out an email newsletter, if you're doing anything like that, I recommend sending out the links from your website and not from anywhere else. It gets confusing because when you're trying to share your podcast from an email, You don't know whether or not they have an iPhone and they're gonna use an Apple player, or they have an Android device and they might not have Spotify. Maybe they use CastBox or something like that. So you don't know what their preference is. And to put all those links in crowds down an email puts too many outbound links and you get penalized for that and you have a low open rate. So what you wanna do is have one link making it really easy. And that's why having these social links there, having your subscribe links, having everything you need Makes it so much more efficient and easy. Plus it drives all the authority, all the everything back to your home base where they only get you. They don't get a bunch of other people.

Very important. Very, very important.

So all roads lead back to your website, right?

Um, all digital roads, all digital roads should lead back to your website. Everything that you publish anywhere about your show should be sending people where you are going to get the most benefit from it. And that is your website. And it's not that we don't want them to watch your videos on YouTube when you're doing videos of your podcast episodes. It's not that we don't want them to listen on Spotify or Apple, you know, the only 2 places where there are like ratings, reviews, and followers/subscribers, right? The major ones that there are. We do. But you know what? It doesn't matter what platform you want people to listen on or watch on. They're gonna listen or watch where they prefer to listen or watch. You just wanna make sure they're getting all your content first, getting all the value first, and they're gonna like you. They're gonna go subscribe and you, most people, you don't need to tell 'em where to do it.

Right. So Tom, you look at a lot of websites. I look at a lot of websites and there are some really common mistakes and most often they come from, I'm gonna say, inexperienced web designers, web builders who haven't built a ton of sites and haven't made the mistakes yet. So we have that. We also have it when we have a lot of do-it-yourselfers. There's too much information out there. If you're doing it yourself, you don't know all these details. So we don't want you to think of these things as total criticisms, but we see these mistakes again and again and again. And if we can announce a prevention, right? Like if we can prevent you from making these mistakes, or a web designer says, oh, I only use this. And you're like, wait a minute. Tom and Tracy said no, not to use that. Now you can question whether or not what's, you know, they're right about everything because they seem to talk with a lot of authority and a lot of times they don't know what they're talking about.

Well, and, and you know what, there may be a good reason why, or a good business reason why, that a web designer might suggest something different than what we're saying from experience. Look, it's your show, it's your website. And if you're like most of our podcasters, you're in business in some way, or your podcast has become a business, you need to make a business decision for yourself. We're giving you our advice and our experience here and making suggestions, but it may not be right for everybody. And, you know, that's okay.

But these are also things to come back and look at. And if it's not working, here's probably why.

Yep. All right. So let's talk about some of those common mistakes inexperienced designers or DIYers make on their website. Ignoring SEO. That's a real big one. That's a big one. And I also, I want to say here, SEO doesn't mean you have to hire someone to maintain your SEO monthly. That's really internet 1.0. I know there's a lot of agencies who are probably going to be unhappy with me pulling back the curtain on this, but month to month, there's not a whole lot that people need to do to maintain SEO, a website that's worth spending many hundreds of dollars or more a month for.

Yeah.

Having someone who knows what they're doing, check it out, configure it from the start to be correct is good.

And because you should rank on your business name, your name, the website name, you shouldn't have to pay to maintain that. That is not difficult.

But there are things that change with websites over time and software updates and things. They do need to be maintained. And there are some reasonable website maintenance and, and there are reasonable SEO services that can help correct those things that also don't break the bank. The real power for SEO for websites that we have learned and spent more than the last decade proving out for ourselves and all the people we support in podcasting is in these episode landing pages that you are created from every episode. That's the fuel, the SEO fuel that when you publish consistently keeps filling that website and impressing Google and making them want to send more traffic to your website, even if everything's not configured Perfectly. And actually, we should probably jump to a tool related to this, Tracy. I know it's in a later section, but there are 2 tools to help you configure pages of your website on your own: Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO. And I don't really have a preference of that one or the other. You only need one, one or the other, and they're both good. So you could just pick one and it will guide you to do that. It's pretty easy to understand. But I also want you to know this: it doesn't mean you have to get either of those tools to say every page on your site is 100% configured according to their guidelines. Get it close, you know, 80%, 85%, you know, 90% is awesome if you can. Those are guidelines. It's not that, uh-oh, if you don't get it 100% configured, if it's not all in the green, the page is bad. Please don't misunderstand that. It's just pointing you in the right direction. Get it as close as you can and move on.

But I think the biggest thing about what we're saying here is that the most common mistakes is that they ignore SEO altogether. They think the only thing that their site needs to rank on is their name or their company name, right?

Oh my gosh, that is the biggest rookie error in websites because guess what, folks? They already know your name. You won the battle. You won the marketing battle. They're gonna find your website when they know your name. Your name may be in the URL or your business name or your show name, whatever it is.

It's a given. It should be a given.

It should be a given. And it's like, it takes the minimum of effort to do it. One of the speakers I love named Dan Clark always has this expression where he talks about people that are just going through life achieving what he calls minimum requirement mediocrity. They're only doing the minimum required, and then they wonder why they're living a mediocre life and not getting, you know, good things aren't coming to them and all that. Well, this is similar. If you just say, oh, well, Well, my site's good for SEO cuz I rank on my own name. That does not mean your site is good on SEO. You want people to come to your website who don't know who you are, who don't know your name, but they're searching on things you and others say in your podcast every episode. That's SEO victory.

Things that you're a thought leader in, things that you wanna be known for, right? Those are the things that, that you want to have ranking on. And so when you don't have, and it is not easy. Trust me, because I've been given an SEO silo where they give you all these words and you have to, and you're like, this doesn't, this isn't important. And they say, oh no, you have to do this or you're not gonna rank in your industry. We can tell you for certain that that's not true. That if you are talking about things that are absolutely current, relevant, and important to the people who are doing the work in this industry, when we do it and we are talking solely to you podcasters out there and we keep our, our focused on that, our content will rank anyway. And that is because Google understands that about 20%, 1 in 5 things that it's being asked for, it's being searched for, it doesn't even— it hasn't even heard of it. So it doesn't know where to go yet. So those are the things that I wanna be on the cutting edge of. So it's okay to be almost ahead of it. And so that's where our spoken word is so brilliantly ahead of it.

You're 100% right, Tracy. You just— I mean, you know, as we prepared for this episode, I, I really forgot about that. And that was one of the early lessons we learned, I think back in 2015 or so, that just because you have a website with old content— and old content is good, publishing new content also tells Google you're current and keeps adding a lot more to it— but I think, Tracy, and I'll have to look up this stat again because I haven't looked it up in a few years, but as I recall fully 20% of the new searches that happen in Google every day Google's never seen before. And that's a staggering stat. And that was absolutely true a few years ago when I last talked about it.

But what you need to understand is Google's not gonna pop up something that says what we call null, right? No result.

It's like, sorry, no results. Yeah, they don't do it.

They won't. They will figure out who has enough authority, who's talked around that kind of subject. And with AI today, it's even better at it. It's going to send it to your site, and that's what you want.

It's going to give you the closest thing that it believes is relevant to what you searched on. And that's why old content, old web pages, old blog posts continue to get new keyword phrases associated with them all the time, because there are always new keyword phrases being typed into Google. I know that may be a mind-blowing stat. The first time I heard it, I'm like, how could that possibly be? But with the billions of searches going on in Google every day, literally, again, last time I looked it up, it was fully 20%, 1/5 of all the searches, the phrases people are typing, Google had not seen before. And so you can take advantage of that when you have more written content on your site. You can benefit from that.

So now here's what I don't want you to do from what you just heard from us. I don't want you to use any of those services or do any keyword stuffing or follow any of these things where you put like all these keywords Keywords in white at the bottom of your white page so it's there but no human can see it and the bots see it. Keyword stuffing is a huge, huge mistake and it will kill your site. It doesn't work.

It can be counterproductive. Internet 1.0, and we're at least in like, I think, I don't know what they're calling it in the media, we're in at least 3.0 in my mind here. But anyway, in the early days of the internet, you know, when Yeah. Remember our first business, Tracy? Not only coding our own websites, but our own shopping cart for buying things in it. And thank goodness we don't have to do that anymore. But there were days in the early internet where keyword stuffing worked. It does not work today. Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm so that you can't game the system. What we are advocating is creating quality content. We're not hacking anything. We're not suggesting hacking anything. Create the kind of content Google wants to serve people when they search on things that are related to what you talk about in your podcast or have on your website.

Don't tag, don't categorize, don't use the tools that are within the blogs. Absolutely use those. Don't do hashtags though, because that just— it's not, it's not useful in a blog. Use the tag fields that they have instead of hashtagging yourself at the bottom. And but having content is like the most critical part here. And so, but content of stuff you actually talk about. Of stuff you really said, of value you really provide. That's the real critical part— point here. Now, the flip side of this is, is that we see sites that have what Google calls thin content. It doesn't have much. It's— they're too short. The blogs are too short. Google actually likes really long blogs.

That too short, I think, is the number one thing that people think. I have a— I mean, I know there are podcasters out there, a lot of you saying, oh, I have a blog post for every episode. Okay. I'm glad you do, because that's better than not having it. And I'm glad you have a website, even if it's on Podpage or something like that, which is not really going to set the world on fire, you know, from a few perspectives, but I'm glad you have a website rather than not. The problem is the typical show notes blog post summary has a little, and especially the ones that are automatically created from your podcast RSS feed. They're definitely not going to do it for you because number one, it's very formulaic and the same content is on every, you know, on Apple's website and on, you know, Spotify's website and everywhere else. But it's just not enough material. It's not enough content. The days of the 600 to 800 word blog post ranking for a lot of stuff on Google are long over. They're looking for long-form content. My rule of thumb is 2,500 words or more. I think 2,000 or more may be okay. But they're looking for long-form content, not quick hits, right?

And keep this in mind, this is not what humans read. Humans read less and less and less and less. But the bots, the things that are gonna get your site ranking, the things that are gonna get you traffic. And that's why we love what we call verbal SEO blogs, which is your transcript but utilized in a blog format. That's why we love it, because it does it without you having to do all the writing work. I still write 600 to 800 word Articles, but I don't put them on my own website. I actually give them to other people to use in their newsletters, to use on their websites. We have a great partnership with Breakthrough Author Magazine and Juliet Clark, and I write an article for them every single month. So it's really fantastic to be able to use those articles to send traffic, the right type of traffic.

See, but that's why, you know, you're doing it for a couple reasons. Number one, Juliet is somewhat of a power partner in business and—

Somewhat, she is.

We're contributing— no, what I mean, you know what I mean? I didn't want to make people think that we're in business together because we're not. It's a separate business. But you're contributing content to her blog, her site, which you're being a good, you know, joint venture sort of partner in that way. But the advantage for you and us selfishly is There's a link back from every one of those back to our website, right?

That's right. And so that's also, I think, something that we don't realize is that there's not a lot of that cross-linking going on. And that's something that's missing from a lot of websites because they never put a link in. They never take the time to put a link in. They never put a link out to their guests. They never do those things that you were talking about, like putting all the social links for the guests, things like that. So those are also missing, and that creates it's less valuable content on the page because if the page doesn't have cross-links out, then it's not valuable either. Now, when I used to write for Inc. Magazine, one of the things that we knew was cross-linking within your own blog, within your own magazine is extremely important. And we were charged within the first paragraph making 3 links to other articles. So you being able to cross-link to your other blogs from within your blog is super, super powerful. You're sharing episodes, you're sharing information out there. So those are things that are missing and we call that thin content when it doesn't have links, it doesn't have lots of words, it doesn't have all of these shares going on as well.

All right, Tracy, let's just cover a few more common mistakes rather quickly.

Yeah, I think the other thing I just wanna hit quick on this one is the H tags, right?

Oh my goodness.

When you do create a blog, if you have it too short and all you've got is this one paragraph, you don't have subheadings, You don't have a title, you don't have all of these chapter sections, things like that. We need to use our H tags and not make them pretty. Like I see people where they just create like larger size fonts, but they're not using the heading placements, the tags that are in the site to be able to use them and insert them automatically.

So to expand on that, H tags, their purpose is to have a hierarchy of information within the blogs to help Google understand the story that your blog is trying to tell them. That's not how most rookies use H tags. They think, oh, H tags are how you make a font bigger or smaller. And so that often your decision on what fonts to make larger or smaller has really not a lot to do with walking Google or anyone reading the page through the journey of what the story is of that page. And so that's a big mistake.

And they're easy to fix, by the way. If you're obsessed with the font sizes, they're easy to fix. You can change the size, the template size of those font tags.

With the right website platform. Not all are so easy to do it with. But anyway, H tags are important and you should, if you don't know what they are and you do your own website work, you should do a deeper dive in that, you know, however you like to research things. I like to look up YouTube videos a lot of the time for stuff like that, but you'll have to find your own way. I also want to mention slow loading speed of your website, something you should be aware of. And there are tools with which you can assess that. And we have a tool that sends us a monthly report on our website and tells us, hey, this page is loading slowly. And then we go figure out what's wrong with it. There are tools you can use for that.

9 times out of 10, it's the image or the player.

Really big image.

Yeah, an image or a player or some kind of plugin you're using. Could be YouTube, could be something you're using, like a lot of the features you might use from Instagram or other places like that slow them down. So there's, there might be something that's systemic across your site could be fixed very quickly. One of the tools we recommend using is like, it's called Smush or something. Smush.

Smush Pro or something. Smush Pro. Yes.

There's a few of them.

I mean, your images don't need to be very large in file size to be good quality looking images. That's the one of the biggest things that slows down a site for sure.

Yeah. And it happened recently cuz I was playing with some things in Canva and I just hit download. I wasn't And I wasn't really paying attention to the size that it was resulting in. And when Tom saw it, he was like, wow, that's gigantic. Why is that a 3 gigabyte file? And it's like 600 by 600. It was not a big deal. So I was like, this is just crazy. And so pay attention, especially if you're using something like Canva. It's customizable. JPEGs are a lot smaller than PNGs. That's gonna be a real plus for you. Makes it easier to get them smaller.

Our SEO go-to expert always tells us, don't use PNGs on your website. She's just like, stay away from 'em. So, you know, I, I agree.

Yeah, absolutely. So pay attention to that because that's one of the biggest things that can slow down. And if your page loads slow, they're not going to click on it, they're not going to stick around, they're not going to wait for it, and then they'll never consume your podcast.

Yeah. Okay. Also, long-term on your website, make sure you know how to check out your analytics for your website. Be aware of what they are and what some of them mean, because that's something you should be aware of.

All right. And I hate those. Like, don't get me wrong, like, there's some— they're so confusing. There's so much of it. That's kind of why I'm I made Tom build into our portal. So in the Poditise portal, we have website stats and podcast stats side by side, and we use a more advanced service to be able to do that. That's kind of expensive, but it gives us just the top-level things that I wanna know. How much traffic is going in and what keywords are ranking, what pages are doing well? Like, I just wanna know the simple things. So go in and figure out what those analytics are that matter to you.

All right, are we gonna go share a couple quick tools, Tracy, before we wrap this up?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Google Search Console. which is basically website performance and monitoring. It should be installed. If you don't know what it is, it's not— it's free, it's easy. Google has a complete tutorial on how to put it in. Same thing with Site Kit, and which is kind of like if you used to install Google Analytics, or I forget what they had, it had like a weird name like G3 something.

There's, there's a few different plugins for WordPress sites that allow you to view some of your Google Analytics of your website in them. It's a choice which one you would like to use. You can check a few of them out. We use Site Kit. It and are happy with that one. But of course, your Google Analytics are available to look at on the web in Google Analytics. It's just kind of easy that you can look at it on the backend of your website when you're doing other things on your website, if you install a tool in a website that allows you to install such a tool. So we already mentioned Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO. Don't really need to go that again. Back up your website. Oh my goodness. I can't tell you how many people have their websites at risk because they're not backed up. And when something goes wrong, you're stuck. You've got to rebuild the whole website. Can't— there are many, many tools out there to back up a website. And if you're on a WordPress website, a simple one's called Backup Buddy if you don't already have one. But also, I also want to warn you do-it-yourselfers, sometimes you may not realize you have multiple backups being saved of your website. And that can actually cause a different problem because if you have too many backups being saved as your website grows, You end up running out of server space and that can take your entire website down when you run out of server space. So there's sort of 2 sides to backups. You need them, make sure you have one doing a daily backup, overwriting them after however much time, a week, a month, whatever you, you know, want it to do. You need a backup because when something goes wrong, much easier to find backup just prior to when things went wrong and restore it and then fix the problem than to have to try to fix the problem the hard way or spend a lot of money on someone else trying to do a forensic Yeah, there's other ones out there.

You can find ones that just to help compress the images on your site to keep them small, and it'll do it as you load them up. So as you load them into your library, into your image library, it'll smush them for you. So that's an easy one. The other one we have is XML sitemap, and that really is, you have to have your Google Search Console in, you submit the XML sitemap of your site, and it'll automatically do it for you. to the Google Search Console, and it helps Google learn how to crawl and index your site. If you do that, it just makes everything easier.

Giving Google a roadmap for how to find all your stuff will make Google more likely to rank you for more keywords. So yes, that's an important thing. And again, many of you may have people doing this for you, and that's fine, but this is more, I guess, for the DIYer to know some of these things. All right, Tracy.

I had one more thing that I just wanted to like quickly go down, really, the essential website elements. If you don't know what you need for your website, I, this is it simple. Have the simplest, clearest navigation. Don't call things funny things. Call it a blog, call it a about, like just keep it simple. Contact, right? Make it streamlined as possible. Don't get cute. Mobile friendly, we talked about already. High quality audio player. We need to make sure that we do it. But keep in mind that if you fail to keep up your RSS feed, if you do not keep it live, if you do not keep it continuous, if you don't pay your fees or do whatever it is you have to do, if you break your RSS feed, Mm-hmm. RSS feeds, you break your audio players. If you break your audio players, you better go fix them because a broken link can harm you even more than anything else that goes on in your website. A broken link says you don't care about your property anymore and Google should definitely not send anybody by your house. And so that's how I look at that. You have to have an about section or an about page. Doesn't matter. They wanna know who you are, right? Who's running this thing? Is there a real human here? Google cares about. And based on the sort of rules and laws of the internet and all the things out there and the EU standards and just all this stuff that's out there, the best thing for you to do is make sure you have a contact section or page. It must have an email address and a mailing address to be compliant with the laws. You need to have a privacy policy and a terms of use if you have a blog or a store or anything like that. And then we like to add publication standards that you can register with some of the social media apps and get treated as a journalist. So it's actually really— it can be a benefit. You can be, you know, have bonus checkmarks and other things automatically added to your profile. If you want to see some simple ones, just go to podcastersunited.org. You have our permission to copy them, but you must do it at your own risk. We are not lawyers. We are not your site. You have to customize those and make them at home, but you're free to use ours as a guide. And then don't forget all those subscribe links for your podcast and the social links for your profiles everywhere, right? Don't forget those. Don't forget the email address as well. And then absolutely, if you don't have a blog, we question how you're going to get traffic to your website. So have a blog. It's optional, but it's highly, highly recommended.

Absolutely. Okay. Couple— one other little tip about the privacy policy, terms of use, some of those basic pages. That Tracy mentioned, any of you that are doing any kind of mass email through MailChimp or Google or ActiveCampaign or anybody who has like, I'm not talking sending individual emails from your local Mac Mail, Gmail, or Outlook. Okay. That doesn't apply. But when you're sending large group emails, newsletter emails, or any other kind of mass marketing emails, The domain name, first of all, needs to be connected to a website. And then that website needs to have the privacy policy and terms and conditions. The powers that be in the internet that guide what domains get on the bad list versus the good list, meaning which email addresses that emails sent from make it through spam filters and get to inboxes. are looking for these things. And if you don't have them, they think, oh, this is spam. Boom. Always go into junk. So there are other good reasons why, having nothing to do with podcasting, when you have your website, you want to have some of those key pages.

Absolutely. So I know we covered a ton today. We squeezed it all in and we went really long, but this is such a critical home base. It's the, it's the crux of everything that you should be doing on the internet should stem off of your, your website. So it is really important that you have all those elements filled in and, and kept up to date.

All right. Well, I hope you got some good value out of this. There's going to be a lengthy blog post for this when this publishes as a podcast on podcastersunited.org and with links to everything we talked about today. This is going to be a very long list of important links, but guess what? Those also will be very helpful for SEO and Google will appreciate that. But hopefully so will all of you that are wanting to go get a link to something we talked about. You may be listening and you're driving like, damn it, what was that thing that Tom mentioned? Well, go to the blog post on podcastyoudeny.org and that full list is right there for you in the blog for this episode.

Thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back next week live. As always, if you're catching this on the podcast, you're not catching us live, but there's always a next up episode that tells you where we're going to be and what we're going to be talking about. So catch us on the next step.

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