Promoting podcasts with search engines and SEO
Published by on July 1st, 2007
There is no doubt that affiliation with the right network can add some fuel to your audience building fire. But how many networks enable you to genuinely reach that currently untapped resource of new audience who are not already inside the Podosphere bubble? Reaching outside that bubble is tough, it takes money, serious money to get the message right in front of your average Joe’s face, and there are very few players in that field.
Every podcaster can actively reach out to new audience using what the web is best at: indexing text. Despite one or two companies attempting audio and video indexing and searching (such as EveryZing), text content searching will likely remain the primary means for internet users to locate the information they want through their normal, familiar, every day use of search engines, at least for the foreseeable future. It therefore becomes immediately obvious that in order to be found by your average web user, a podcast must have a presence on the main web search engines. I believe that some knowledge of basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is vital to generating new audience.
Are people actually searching for podcasts?
Of course they are! In fact, as of May 2007, there are around 10,000 searches per day containing the word ‘podcast’ (data supplied by Wordtracker). But don’t let that mislead you into thinking they are all potential audience for your show. Each search is likely looking for something far more specific than merely ‘a podcast’.
In addition to these podcast-related searches, there are niche subject searches, unrelated to podcasts specifically, but which could be for information which they could discover within your programming - how important might show notes be in this case?
How about searchers who want information about your niche subject, but who may be unaware of the existence of a podcast..? Just imagine how many more searches there are for, say, “childrens stories” in contrast to “childrens story podcast”. In fact, “childrens story podcast” doesn’t even register on the search engine stats radar, while “childrens story” gets many hundreds of searches per day. I’ll bet a good number of those searchers hadn’t even considered that there may be a children’s story podcast available. Each of those could be a potential new listener.
SEO experts have frequently reported how effective blogs are for generating strong results and search engine visibility, so if you use a blog, you may well already be quite visible. But there is so much more you can do than simply use it to upload your podcast and generate your RSS feed. If you generally focus your promotional energies on directory listings, iTunes, and cross promotion with other podcasters, you are then only targeting the existing space and audience. Beyond that relatively easy to reach world, there lies an untapped, significantly larger potential audience base, already on the look out for your content - they just don’t know it yet.
One Response to “Promoting podcasts with search engines and SEO”
Yes, you are on the money, and whilst many podcasters or new media enthusiasts might not be very SEO aware, they’d be wise to be. It really is what it is all about when gaining visitors.
Another option to consider is to use an audio transcript service, which essentially creates a text version of the audio content. They are inexpensive, like 1 pound per min, which in terms of potential search engine rankning is VERY cheap.
Put text on the web and google will munch it up.