What is Audio SEO, Why It Matters and How to Do It
Audio SEO is still a new and relatively unexplored field, but it will surely not stay so for long considering the fast pace of developments in the online world. If you are producing any kind of audio content and/or running podcasts, it is essential for you to know how audio SEO works.
Audio SEO provides you with ways to improve your podcast ranking organically. Basically, audio SEO is a collection of the most effective optimization best practices that enable audio files to achieve a better ranking on search engines and podcast platforms.
In this article, we’ll explain what audio SEO is, as well as why and how to apply it. If search engine optimization, in general, is entirely new for you, it is a good idea to get familiar with the basics of SEO before you start exploring audio SEO practices.
Stay tuned to read more about:
Best Themes for Marketing
View Collection
Audio SEO describes the process of optimizing audio-specific content to appear in organic search results. It was not before 2018 that Google was able to display podcasts in search results. Searching for a podcast by episode title, a podcast guest or a topic has hugely affected the audio content discoverability, which is probably the biggest challenge for all types of podcasts.
Finding podcasts that you’ve already heard of has never been too hard, but discovering new ones is a whole new game level. Top charts and curated podcasts lists have until recently been almost the only way to discover a new podcast. Therefore Google is finding ways to make finding podcasts easier by including them in the search results.
The audio market is growing and developing rapidly and the podcast ecosystem is more and more recognized as a promising marketing channel by many huge brands. This rapid growth of the audio market puts a new challenge in front of podcast creators – retaining, engaging, and attracting new audio listeners is becoming significantly harder unless you find a way to make your podcast stand out. That’s where audio SEO steps in as a game-changer making it way easier to make your podcasts reachable and visible. Without audio SEO that’s a slow and uncertain process, but if you manage to focus on audio SEO and implement its tactics correctly you will easily be steps ahead of your competition.
The key to crafting an effective audio SEO strategy lies in understanding how Google ranks its podcasts. Therefore you should know that Google even filed a patent concerning how audio content ranks in the Google podcast app. This indicates that Google uses its understanding of topics and subtopics (the topic layer) and applies them to a variety of audio content. The key issues you should bear in mind when optimizing your podcasts according to Google are:
-
Popularity
-
Inclusion of evergreen content
-
Splitting the podcasts into episodes that can be skipped by the listener, so that everyone can choose to listen to only the episodes of relevance to them
-
Whether the content is well organized by topics and/or categories that are of interest to a particular user
Optimize Your Podcast Content
The first step is to identify the subject you want to focus on in your podcast and then stick to it consistently. It is highly recommended that you make a script in advance that includes answers to all the typical questions related to the topic you are covering for each podcast episode. Keyword research, as well as tools like alsoasked.com and answerthepublic.com, can help you identify the key issues that your target audience will want to hear about. This is essential and when you have this covered it will be much easier to apply any other audio SEO tactic.
Optimize Your RSS Feed
RSS feed is at the core of audio SEO. Your podcast RSS feed needs to include a proper title, author name, description, featured image as well as all the podcast end episode tags. It is thanks to the RSS feed that your podcast gets to reach out to your listeners, so make sure each new episode you publish is properly optimized.
Find a Perfect Format for Your Podcast
Based on the experience of the most successful podcasts, it is highly recommended you include two or three hosts in your show. This creates a dynamic and makes the podcast more engaging and interesting to listen to regardless of its topic. According to Buffer, the ideal length of the podcast is 22 minutes, it should be published once a week and Tuesday is the best day to publish it. You don’t have to stick strictly to these guidelines but they are surely worth considering.
Invest in the Quality of Your Audio Recordings
Not only do your listeners expect top-quality audio content from you but Google also pays attention to the quality of your recordings when ranking them in search results. Make sure you use adequate tools, include engaging music and sound effects that highlight the topic of your podcast and match your brand.
Take Advantage of All Available Streaming Platforms
Reaching your target audience is the key to success and you will achieve it much faster if you make the effort to publish your podcasts on all the relevant streaming platforms. The popularity of your podcasts is one of the major issues Google considers for ranking.
Include Quality and Accurate Audio Transcripts
Adding accurate audio transcripts for each podcast episode helps Google understand what the topic of your show is. A quality transcript includes everything from timestamps to sound effects and every podcasting platform allows you to add transcripts to your podcasts easily.
Make Your Podcasts Easy to Share
Making your podcasts easy to share via social media plays a huge role in their popularity and is very significant for driving traffic. Google recognizes traffic as a positive ranking factor that indicates that your content contains relevant and important information. Sharing on social media will help you increase your search visibility in a very natural way.
One Topic – One Keyword Per Each Episode
Make sure you use the selected keyword in your episode title as well as throughout the audio content. Google crawls the episode title and description and will display them as a result when someone searches for information related to the topic of your podcast.
Titles and Descriptions Matter for Audio SEO Too
Even in cases when users use voice assistance for search, keywords are essential. That’s why it is crucial to use the keywords in your podcast episode titles and descriptions so that they show up in search results whenever someone uses the specific keyword.
What makes a well-crafted title and description is the inclusion of the most important keyword in front of the title and description. If you got that covered, the next thing to do is to make sure your titles and descriptions are clear, concise, unique, and relevant.
Create a Dedicated Landing Page for Your Podcast
Having a well-designed, powerful dedicated homepage that explains what your podcast is about and targets your desired audience well can make a huge difference in how fast your reach and popularity will grow. For this tactic to be successful make sure you include a link that points to your RSS feed and that your audio files are crawlable. Your podcast should also be easy to find via voice commands which are done if you applied the above-mentioned practices.
Encourage and Collect Reviews
Encourage your audience to give you reviews – they are of great importance both for Google app and Apple store ranking. Generally, there’s an unwritten rule that the number of reviews, subscribers, and downloads a podcast manages to collect in the first eight weeks from launching is an important indicator of its success in the future.
In Conclusion
In the future, we can only expect Google to get better and better at finding the answer to searches within audio content. Even if podcasts are not your thing, including audio content in your overall content and marketing strategy can pay off in many ways. Podcasts are the first thing on mind when talking about audio SEO, but its best practices can and should be applied on all kinds of audio content you use. Bearing in mind that these are the early years of audio SEO, it is rightfully considered as a huge growth opportunity for all kinds of business and you should not miss the chance to be among the first ones who took advantage of it.
