Getting Your Podcast To The Top of Google SEO Best Practices - Podcasting Amplified

🚀 Want to get your podcast noticed by more listeners? You can’t just rely on people stumbling across it on Spotify or iTunes. That’s where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in! In this episode, I sit down with [Podcast Name] to dive deep into podcasting SEO and how you can use it to grow your audience. 🎙️✨

🔎 What we cover:
 ✅ What SEO is and how it helps get more listeners
✅ The power of backlinks (and how to get them)
✅ Why your podcast needs a website & how to optimize it
✅ Smart social media promotion strategies 📲
✅ How to choose keywords for your titles & show notes
✅ Tracking website & podcast traffic like a pro 📊

If you haven’t thought much about getting your podcast ranked on Google, or you want to give it a serious SEO boost, this episode is packed with actionable insights! 🚀

💡 Pro tip: Stop just sending guests to YouTube or Spotify—learn how to get backlinks from your own podcast website to increase your authority in search rankings!

Don’t miss this game-changing conversation—hit play now! 🎧🔥 #PodcastSEO #PodcastMarketing #SEOtips

Transcript

0:00

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a key way of getting your podcast noticed. You can't just rely on people searching. For your podcast on Spotify and itunes. But getting your podcast episodes and your podcast website to show up in Google search can be a challenge. SEO expert Brandon Leibowitz joins me in this episode for a crash course on podcasting SEO. In this episode, we cover what is SEO and how can it help you get more listeners, why backlinks are essential and how to get them, the benefits of having a website for your own podcast, and how to get started. Social media podcast promotion tips, how to choose keywords to use in your titles and show notes to get searched for, how to track traffic to your website and podcast and more. If you haven't spent much time yet on how you can get your podcast to show up in Google Search, or you just want to give your podcast an SEO boost, then this is the. Perfect episode for you. Hi, Brandon. Thank you for joining me on podcasting Amplified. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you for having me on today. Good stuff. So Brandon Leibowitz helps people who are. Struggling to get more website traffic that converts into sales and leads. And he started podcasting nearly four years ago now, and today we're going to focus specifically on SEO search engine optimization from a podcasting lens. So you've been working in the SEO space for about 20 years now, is that right? Since 2007. So almost there, yeah. And about four years ago, you started podcasting, and I can see that you also do a lot of podcast guesting. So how has how has podcasting helped move you forward in your career? It's just been another way to get my name out there as a subject matter expert and tap into new audiences, especially lately. Podcasting became really popular, especially during the 2020 when everything was shut down and couldn't really go outside. So I teach a lot of classes, and my classes were in person. Couldn't do those in person anymore, so started doing them on Zoom and realized with Zoom, it records the audio and video separately. And the audio or the video I could just throw up on YouTube or throw up on different places to get more exposure. But also the audio, I use that to start podcasting and distribute it on different podcast channels to just get more. Get my name out there, get more visibility, but also get some SEO backlinks. So the way SEO works is the more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as, and the higher they're gonna rank you in the search results. And Podcasting is just another way to help tap into that SEO and building more backlinks. And when you talk about SEO, just in case anyone listening is a complete beginner, and it's the first they've heard of search engine optimization, or they haven't really gone into it yet. So you mentioned that backlinks are a way of getting you ranked higher on Google. So you show up in search, and then I know that keywords are a big part of it as well. Based on what people are searching, can you give a brief overview of the key components of how someone, you know, why someone would show up or why a website would show up in the sort of first, second, or third place on a Google search? Yeah. The way Google works is they're gonna look at your website and evaluate the coding on your website. So what we see and what Google sees is different. Google looks at the code and they're looking in the coding for you to put keywords in different places so they could better understand what that website's about. But unfortunately, Google doesn't really care what keywords you put on a website because it's kind of easy to manipulate that, and Google just doesn't believe anybody. And you have to build that trust up with Google. And the way to get Google to trust you is by getting other websites to talk about you. The more websites that talk about you, the more popular Google sees you as. And then they look at those keywords on your website. But it doesn't work the other way around. If you're not building what are called backlinks, Google's not going to trust you, and they're not going to rank a website that they don't trust. And what is a backlink? A backlink is a clickable link from another website that points to yours. So if you're reading an article, let's say, on Forbes.com in there, it says Brandon Leibowitz, you click on it, and it goes to my website. I'd be getting a backlink from Forbes.com. So would you say that backlinks are far more important than keywords, then? Yep. You could put keywords all over your website. You could make your website load quickly. You could do everything that Google wants to make a perfect website, but without those backlinks, they're just not going to trust you, and they're not going to rank a website that they don't trust. So backlinks, that's how Google's algorithm became popular or became popular, because people were using in the Past search engines would look at keywords only, which anybody could put keywords on your website. So I can put keywords about topics that I'm not really relevant about and start ranking for that. And Google said it's not really a good user experience. We want to look at trust signals. And the trust signals that Google looked at were looking at other websites that link out to you as kind of like a vote of confidence, like a popularity contest. The more websites that linked out to you, the more popular Google CD Scene thought you were and the higher they're rank you in the search results. But nowadays, well, in the past it was a number of backlinks. If I have a hundred backlinks and you have 200 backlinks, you rank higher than me. But there's lots of ways to manipulate backlinks and build what are called low quality backlinks. So Google now says we want quality versus quantity. So the more quality backlinks you have, the higher they're going to rank. And what is a quality backlink to Google? Quality backlink is from a website that's related to what you're doing. That's really important. So relevancy and then authoritativeness. How popular, how big is this website? I gave you a backlink from my website. It's a good backlink, but it's not the same quality as Wall Street Journal or New York Times or Wikipedia. So the bigger the website, the more SEO value and the more relevant it is to your niche, the better off it's going to be. So for podcasters, podcasts, it's quite hard to find. Podcasts, like the discoverability isn't particularly fantastic. Compared with other forms of media, YouTube and things like that, and podcasters, they try and, you know, put their podcast in different places on social media and on their own website to get some copy on there. But in terms of backlinks, how would you suggest that a podcaster would go about finding good backlinks and do things like putting your podcast episodes on YouTube and having links to your website from your YouTube videos? Does that kind of thing help as well? Yep. It would be good to put your podcast up on as many different sites as possible. The more the better. Putting up on YouTube, on Spotify, on Google podcasts everywhere. The more places you put it, the better off it's going to be, the more backlinks you're going to get. But a lot of these sites don't give you backlinks, or the backlinks from these sites are no follow so Google doesn't count these backlinks. And if you're a podcaster and well, there's lots of different strategies, but if you have guests on your podcast, then it's really easy to get backlinks. Because what you should do is create a page about each podcast episode and when the guest has been on your podcast, send them the link to your website. Don't send a link to YouTube or Spotify or any of these other platforms because they're just going to promote that and that's not yours. You don't own any of that stuff. You're just helping YouTube get more traffic or Spotify or whatever platform you're sharing with your guest. But if you create a page on your website and have the podcast on there and give that to the guest, then they're going to share that episode or that URL on social media. They might share it on their websites. You're going to get some backlinks that way. But if you're just sharing Spotify or YouTube, then you're not really going to be able to get those backlinks. You're just helping these other platforms get backlinks because you're just renting space off these platforms. You don't own any of that stuff. Your content is there and lives there, but it's really their website that you're promoting. And also, yeah, I think there's lots of distractions on these platforms. Like YouTube has ads and they recommend other videos. So if they did watch your podcast episode, at the end of that episode, they're gonna recommend some other videos or they might click on some ads and get lost. And doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna go to your website or wanna listen to more episodes, but sending them to your website, you get full control there. And that's where you can really drive people to your website. But another way to build backlinks if you don't have guests on your podcast is by getting, well, depending on what industry you're in, you want to get similar sites to link out to you. So if you're doing a podcast about food, then you want to find other websites about food to link out to you. And a great way to do that is by blogging on other people's websites. So you can find food blogs and reach out to them to see if you could be a contributor to their website. And then you're going to start getting backlinks from sites that related to what you're doing. Because it's really important to find relevant sites, not Just find any random site. But finding targeted sites and a good way is offering something for free. And usually websites are pretty receptive to some free content. Yeah, you touched on a really, a really good point about websites, because I would probably say most podcasts don't have a dedicated website. Like, they don't own their own URL unless it's of a certain size. And yeah, like you say, they'll be on Spotify, they'll be on, you know, Liby and Buzzsprout or wherever they're hosting their podcast, but that's not their website. And yeah, we do encourage podcasters to put their episodes on their own website, like you say. So, yeah, that's a really good. That's a really good point. Yeah I want to add something else else to there, because that is really important that a lot of podcasters miss. Yeah, it's kind of like a blog. Like, each episode could potentially be a blog post that you post on your website gives you more content for your website, more con or new pages. The more pages you have, the more keywords you could target and the more opportunities you have to rank for new keywords and just drive more traffic to your website. So don't just throw your podcast on your website, but make each episode its own unique page, because each episode is going to be about a different topic. Even if it's about similar topics, it's still going to be slightly different. So you could target different keywords and try to drive traffic to your website through those episodes. And also getting your guests to share those episodes on their social media platforms. Maybe they might share it on their email newsletter and also share it on their website to get that SEO backlink. And in terms of the keywords. So you're working hard getting, getting backlinks in terms of the keywords. I'm presuming each episode you want to be targeting a specific keyword or key phrase that people might be searching for. How would you recommend podcasters choose what keyword they're going to target for their episodes? That depends what platform they're trying to rank on, because each platform, the keywords are going to be slightly different. Like for Google search versus YouTube, people are going to be searching different keywords, slightly different keywords. So a lot of tools out there that will do keyword research. But one good one is a Google Keyword Planner. It's from Google and it's free, and it'll let you see how many people search for your keyword every single month. So you could pick a keyword that you want to rank for. Throw it in the Google Keyword Planner and then see how many people actually search that keyword. And it's going to give you hundreds, sometimes thousands of variations just off that one keyword. So you could see, maybe I should use a plural. Because sometimes going from a singular to a plural could have a tenfold impact on your search traffic. And little changes like that, you're not going to be able to just guess. You have to really do the research. Like, I have a client that's a lawyer and their personal injury lawyer, and we see that we would do keyword research. Personal injury lawyer forgot how many searches might have gotten, like a thousand searches a month. But personal injury lawyers, I think, got 10,000 searches every single month. So just adding that s and making it from a singular to plural has a huge impact on search volume. So doing the keyword research is a first starting point. There's lots of paid tools that you could use out there, but most of these pay tools are just getting their data from the Google Keyword Planner and just making it look nicer and prettier so it's easier to navigate and read through. But the Google Keyword Planner is from Google, and it's free, so you can't really go wrong with that tool. Okay, so Google Keyword Planner will leave a link in the, in the in the show notes. And I suppose there's a balance to strike between getting that keyword but also putting together an enticing title that's going to get people to click through. I guess sometimes it can be hard to sort of make some keywords into an enticing title, if you know what I mean. Yep. That's where copywriting comes into play. And trying to get that balance of putting your keywords in there, making it catchy, trying to get people's attention, trying to get them to click through, but also making sure that's optimized for search engines and for people search engines. So you get those keywords and you rank for those new keywords, and then for people to get them to want to click through and listen or watch your episode. Would you suggest that podcasters do research for Google and what they're going to use for their audio podcast, and then if they're putting the episode separately on YouTube, that they might consider changing the name slightly to fit a keyword that's targeted a lot on YouTube? Yep. So each platform, you might want to customize it a little bit. For the most part, it should be okay. But search volume, or the way people search is different on each platform from Google, From Facebook, from YouTube, from Spotify, all those places. So just trying to do keyword research. And there's tools that would let you do keyword research for YouTube or any of these other platforms, and then you could really just narrow it down. But for the most part, if you do the keyword research for Google, it should trickle down to these other platforms. But there might be just unique cases where people just put different keywords in YouTube versus Google versus a different channel. Yeah, because sometimes I spend a lot of time researching a keyword on YouTube, and it's got so much competition that even though I've found a popular key. Keyword, it doesn't really get picked up. But then it might have less competition through Google search. Or or I come up in like a. One of those little preview video things in the Google search, and then it ends up bringing traffic from Google instead, even though it didn't really take off on YouTube. Yeah, Google owns YouTube. So when you search on Google, if videos appear, sometimes videos appear in search results. The majority of the time you see those videos, it's going to be a YouTube video because Google owns YouTube and, and they're going to try to promote YouTube as much as they can because they don't want to send people to Facebook video or Vimeo or some other platform because YouTube is one of their websites. And what's the first thing that you see when you search on YouTube? There's Or when you watch a video on YouTube, there's always an advertisement. So YouTube is making money, which is really Google making money, and Google really only cares about making money and they're just going to promote themselves as much as they can. But you should put your video up everywhere. I put the video up on YouTube, on Facebook, video on Instagram, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on maybe Pinterest, you can put videos and just TikTok and just try and throw up as many places as possible just to try to cast a wide net and see if your audience is on these platforms and if so, and I get some new viewers, some new. Some new subscribers hopefully to your. To your podcast. So is there any of those particular social media platforms that you champion that work really well for you, that you sort of prefer in terms of getting traffic for your podcasts? Episodes? Yeah, I mean every audience is different. So it's all about just knowing who your audience is and where they are. Like for myself, I do SEO, so a lot of my audience is going to be on LinkedIn primarily and YouTube. But it just depends. If you're doing like sports and entertainment, then TikTok and Instagram are going to probably be more popular. If you're doing more news type of stuff, Twitter is really popular for that. And just trying to take a step back and think, if you're looking for your product or service or your podcast content, where would you go? What platforms would you go on? And it's really good. Just test it out, throw it up everywhere and see what sticks, and then try to push more effort, more time into the ones that you see you're getting a better response with. But still trying to catch that wide net and try to be everywhere. Because if you already create the content. That's the tough part. Posting on these websites only takes a few minutes. Creating that content is really where it takes a lot of time. But a lot of people get overwhelmed and think it's going to take forever posting it. But there's tools like hootsuite or Buffer that will let you post on all these platforms And makes things a little bit easier. You could schedule it all out. So you have to go in every single time you do a new podcast episode. You just have 10 podcasts that you've done and then go into Hootsuite or some tool like that and schedule them all out for the next month or, or week or year or whatever you want to do. And I try to schedule them out as much as I can to really automate your social media strategy and just try to have one less thing that you have to worry about. Yeah, yeah. I finally went for a year subscription of later, which is very similar tool to what you've just mentioned. I've used Buffer as well and that's good, I think. Yeah. If anyone's still sort of posting individually on all the different social media platforms, then it'll be worth looking at one of those tools because it saves you so much time. And I also find that it saves me time because I don't have to go onto the social media platforms and then end up getting distracted with the endless scrolling. Because you can look at your analytics and that right from Buffer or hootsuite or later, whichever tool you use as well. Yeah, it's good not to get sucked into their algorithm because it's way too easy once you go on those websites. So using a third party tool, a scheduling tool, is a great investment and it will save you a lot of time and a lot of headaches. So when you say you post episodes across all social media platforms are you posting the full episode on Facebook video or are you just linking to YouTube or wherever else it's hosted? Both. Sometimes I'll post a whole episode. Sometimes I'll just post a little teaser and try to send people back to my website, not to YouTube. So trying to drive all the traffic to my website because I don't want people going to YouTube. I'll put the episode on my website and embed the YouTube video there. So you can watch the video on YouTube on my website. But I don't want to send people to YouTube or to any other social media site. I want some all to my website so I can get that traffic and really customize the experience they're going to get with the, with each episode, listening to it, watching it on my website, then I could have called Actions. And there's no ads there, there's no distractions, there's no noise, there's no algorithm to get you sucked into. And there are all sorts of different platforms that podcasters can use to build a website like WordPress or you know, something custom built or PodPage, something like that. What's your website built on? And do you know if there's any kind of effect on the SEO in terms of SEO of what your website's built on? So for example, WordPress might be less or more likely to be ranked over something else. Yeah, the platforms don't really matter too much nowadays. A few years ago they did like Shopify and WordPress are probably the better ones. Wix and Squarespace were kind of limiting what you could do for SEO, but nowadays they're all pretty much similar. I wouldn't worry too much if you already have a website, but if you're building a new one or redesigning it, I would definitely recommend WordPress because it's free and it's easy to use and it lets you customize everything. But if you already have a WIX website, I'm not going to say change it From Wix to WordPress. Five or ten years ago I would say definitely change it because it was so limiting. But nowadays it's not that big of a deal. But it's just making sure now once you have a website that you do all the right things. So having a WordPress website doesn't mean you're going to rank better, it just means that you have the opportunity to put more keywords in different places and customize a code to make it easier for Google to read. But you still have to go in and put the keywords in the correct places. Make sure you have all the technical stuff like title tags and meta descriptions and headers and schema code and all this really technical stuff in place, which WordPress lets you do anything you want to do. Some other platforms don't let you do everything, but for the most part it's not that big of a deal nowadays. Cool. Yeah, it's really customizable, isn't it as well, WordPress I use a tool called Yoast, which you've probably heard of. Just for anyone who doesn't know, it's plugin that you can use for WordPress which helps you sort of pick keywords and goes through your copy and to tell you if it's optimized for search engines and things. But by the sounds of it, backlinks are such a huge part of it. And Yoast and a lot of these tools don't seem to really talk about backlinks as much as they do keywords. So just to give clarity to people, if, if there's one thing, if they haven't even thought of SEO at all, if there's one thing that they should be doing first, would you say backlinks is the most important thing to get started with? Oh, you want to do everything at once. So SEO is like a puzzle. There's a lot of pieces to that puzzle. Some pieces are much bigger than others. Like, the content on your website is. Is very important, and the backlinks are very, very important. But there's so many other little things that you need to do as well. But I would recommend building backlinks right away. Like, even before you even launch your website. Try to think of a strategy to start building backlinks, because backlinks are what takes the most time to build, and also takes the most time for Google to find the backlinks, look at them, readjust their algorithm to trust you more. But backlinks, you got to start doing them right away. And then content keywords on your website, you should be doing that right away as well, because once Google starts seeing all these changes, all these backlinks, they're going to look at the keywords on your website. And if you don't have any keywords on your website, they're not going to know what to rank you for. So you have to do both. But backlinks just take probably 80% of The day is, for me, is building backlinks for myself and my clients. And what seems to be maybe shrouded in secrecy a little bit is how the algorithms work on the podcast platforms themselves. So I know, obviously, if you searched SEO podcast on Spotify, it's going to come up with some SEO podcasts, but I guess it's. It's nuanced. It's not the same on every platform. You know, you could search on Google podcasts the same exact keyword, and different things would come up. So is it worth considering all of these different platforms and trying to figure out how they're ranking you and how you can sort of work around that, or is it just a bit much to be thinking about every single different platform? And should you just focus on getting ranked on Google? I mean, you want to be on as many different places as possible. If your audience is on Spotify or Google Podcast and all these platforms, you want to try to get that visibility exposure. But a lot of it comes down to reviews. So getting people to review you helps out. And if you're on 20 different social or podcast platforms, then it's going to be tough to get 20 different reviews on each podcast platform. So you might want to pick and choose. Like maybe I want to focus more on Spotify or itunes for the time being, and then you start branching out these other ones. But it does come down to a lot of promotion and getting reviews with keywords in it. Putting a title and a description is good. Making sure your file name before you upload it to these platforms has keywords in it. Don't just upload video mp4, put some keywords in that file name before you upload it to your platform to anywhere on the Internet. And that's going to help out a little bit too. But it does get a little tricky when there's so many platforms. That's where you got to pick and choose and trying to figure out where should I invest my time? Because trying to rank on 20 different platforms means you have to give each platform 1 20th of your time versus just picking one or two. Then you can really go all in on it and hyper focus on those. And obviously the results is what really matters. So actually seeing the traffic to your website go up and then hopefully seeing that convert into new listeners. Where can people start if, you know, if they've thought, you know, I need to make a website and I need to start building up backlinks and getting some traffic. Where can they start in terms of monitoring the analytics and actually measuring the growth based off of this SEO work? Yeah, there's a lot of tools you could use and there's a lot of free tools out there. Like Google Analytics is a free tool that will show you how much traffic your website's getting. So you can see where your traffic's coming from, what pages they visit, or episodes of your podcast. If you put each page as an episode, you can see how much traffic each one gets. See how long people stay on that page. If they leave that page immediately, you could see all that stuff through Google Analytics. And then there's another tool called Google Search Console. Both are free from Google and they'll give you just a ton of insights about your traffic, keywords you're ranking for, and things like that. So Google Analytics is just more for general traffic, where all your traffic comes from. Google Search Console is more for SEO traffic, saying what keywords you rank for, and if there's any errors on your website or technical issues, Google's gonna show you in Google Search Console. And then I'm guessing that you can monitor where people are clicking as well. So I know it's obviously gonna be hard to maybe match up your Spotify and your itunes and everything, all those analytics with your Google Analytics, to try and get a really clear idea of your conversion rate. But I guess you can track what links people are clicking if they're clicking through to Spotify and other links on your page. Yeah, you could track all that stuff if you put UTM codes and you could see where your traffic's coming from. Gets a little technical, but if you look up UTM generator, there's tools that will generate UTM codes and then you add these little codes to the URL that you're promoting. So if you're on Spotify, you could add a UGM code with source as Spotify campaign could be the episode name, and then you could track that in Google Analytics and see how much traffic Spotify is bringing you. But most of these platforms don't want to send you traffic. They don't want you to leave Spotify or leave YouTube or leave any of these platforms. So they don't really give you that many places to put links or clickable links. So it's going to be tough. Usually it's best if you just say what your website is and hopefully people will go to it. But even then, the chances of that happening are pretty low. That's why it's great if you just have everything on your website, because then they're already on your website. They don't have to find your website and you get full control there. But the platforms are great for getting new listeners and new viewers to your website. Thanks for that. There's been a huge amount of info. There's definitely something to get started on for podcasters who haven't been thinking about their SEO or could do with looking into it a bit more. And as we wrap up, is there anywhere you've you can share? Any, anything you can share that people can learn a bit more if they want to dive deeper into what you're teaching today. So anyone that is still listening or watching, I made a special gift for you. If you go to my website@seooptimizers.com, that's S E O P T I I z ers.com forward/gift and you can find that gift there along with my contact information and a bunch of classes I've done over the years. I've thrown them for free so you can see step by step how to do a lot of stuff that we talked about. And also if you want a free website analysis, I'm happy to check out your website from an SEO point of view and you can book some time on my calendar there as well for free. Thanks Brandon. That's really helpful. I mean there's definitely a couple of things that even I need to need to think about as well in terms of backlinks. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you for having me on today. Thanks for listening to Podcasting Amplified. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We'll be back next time with another conversation offering more insights to take your podcast to the next level and help you to achieve success. Happy Podcasting.