5 Ways To Use Podcasting as Part of Your SEO Strategy

Podcasting is an amazing way to have genuine in-depth conversations, build relationships, and then share those meaningful conversations with your audience. Above all, podcasting is about sharing ideas, passions, and driving social change through conversation.

When SEO and marketing professionals talk about quality content creation as an essential piece to SEO and digital marketing efforts, podcasts fit perfectly into this category of “quality content.” 

Why? Because real people are setting aside precious time to meet and discuss what’s important to them and their audience. 

So, not surprisingly, podcasting can be a huge driver of organic growth as a stand-alone channel, but when you combine your podcasting efforts with other SEO strategies, the two can work together as an efficient and effective way to drive traffic to your website and increase inbound leads. 

“There’s a bunch of really healthy SEO things that happen. One thing that I’m always shocked about is that podcasts, it’s not like live radio, so you can have an inbound lead come from a podcast that first was aired nine months ago, but all of a sudden it’s getting more and more popular and so people binge-listening as they first touched this podcast and they just keep listening and listening. And so we get leads from podcasts that I’ve done like a year ago, which is just wild to me — I didn’t expect that happening. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.” 

— Huckabuy Founder CEO, Geoff Atkinson

Here is a list of five SEO benefits of podcasting:

  1. Podcasting for link building
  2. Podcast guest appearances as a backlink strategy
  3. More content for your site 
  4. Increased impressions and ranking keywords 
  5. Recycle podcast content for other marketing channels

Podcasting for Link Building

If you own a podcast, and the content is entertaining or interesting enough that people really get value out of it, it could very well attract links all on its own. But, to really use your podcast as a part of a larger search engine optimization and backlink strategy, there are other things you can do to get maximum results.

Podcasting is a great way to get links. Podcast conversations can be a starting point that carries over to social media, and many guests will promote their appearance on your show through their own social channels or even on their site. 

In order to get the link going back to your site, you’ll need to make a dedicated landing page on your site for each episode. A best practice for landing pages is to include a summary of the episode, an introduction to the guest, and some key highlights. 

One way to sure up the link is to talk about it with your guest when you meet in-person. Your guest has already agreed to begin a relationship with you, and you are helping them out by giving them exposure to your audience. Simply asking the guest to help promote the episode will increase your chances of getting a link back to your site.  

You likely will have your podcast show on various audio platforms (Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.). So, you’ll want to make sure that your guests know that the best place to link to — both for you, and their audience — is the dedicated landing page on your site. 

Podcast guest appearances as a backlink strategy

You don’t have to own a podcast to build links. Appearing as a guest on other people’s podcasts is a great way to get links going back to your site. 

After the podcast episode is published, the host will almost always include a link going back to your site in whatever form of show notes they have, and as mentioned above, it is a best practice to have a dedicated landing page on your website for each podcast episode with a summary and highlights. 

This is your opportunity to combine SEO strategy and backlink outreach efforts with the network you've build through podcasts.

Here’s how: 

More Content for Your Site

Whether you run your own podcast, or often appear as a guest on other podcasts, podcast episodes can be converted into crawlable content for your site and boost your SEO. 

Yep, you guessed it, I’m telling to make a dedicated landing page for every podcast episode with a summary, a short guest bio, and bulleted highlights from the show. But I’m also telling you to go beyond that. 

The goal is to create more content for search engine bots to crawl and index from your website. To make each podcast episode as accessible to search engines as possible, you’ll want to have a full time-stamped transcript on your site underneath the more skimmable list of the show’s highlights. 

Here, you can also find places in the transcript to include internal links to other key pages on your website, and you are setting your content up to be more easily repurposed onto other pages or channels. 

Google has talked about making audio searchable several times over the past few years. Google announced at I/O 2019 that podcasts will be indexed, and we’ve already begun to see them integrating into search results. 

Given the announcement at Google I/O, transcriptions seem to be the primary method of picking out parts of an episode to match a search query.

Bonus SEO Tip: Include timestamps in your podcast transcription and add a table of contents in order to make the article easier for Google to find and rank you for relevant SEO questions and keywords and improve the user experience at the same time.

Increased organic ranking keywords 

This point goes hand-in-hand with creating more crawlable content for your website. Keyword research and keyword-based content creation is a key part of SEO. 

By simply posting the full-transcription of a podcast episode, you’re doubling down on work you’ve already done.

At Huckabuy, we tried this out for ourselves. We created unique landing pages for each podcast episode that our Founder-CEO, Geoff Atkinson, did a guest appearance on, and found that our organic ranking keywords began to steadily increase as the search engine crawled these pages. 

Of course, like all things SEO, we didn’t start to actually rank for these keywords until a few months after we created the landing pages, so you’ll want to be patient as you track the results. 

Another great aspect of this keyword ranking strategy is the fact that you are getting an even better idea of keywords you are organically linking for, and keywords that you could possibly target. 

Recycle podcast content for other marketing channels

Last but not least, all podcast content can be recycled, repurposed into blog content, and split into micro-content for social media or to place as quotes on various other pages on your site. 

Here’s how you do it: 

Summary

Podcasting is a great way to build genuine relationships and collaborate on quality content.

If you aren't leveraging podcasts for your marketing and SEO strategy, it's not too late to begin now.

Happy Podcasting!