5 SEO Tricks to Get More Subscribers for Your Podcast

Podcasters often wonder how they can get their shows in front of a wider audience and gain more subscribers. The answer: podcast SEO. It will boost your podcast’s ranking in search engines and help you reach more people. Check out our five tips to see how to improve your podcast’s SEO and get more subscribers.

When trying to promote their podcasts and find new subscribers, podcast hosts face a unique problem; unlike blogs and company sites, which have dedicated websites for their content, most podcasts can only be found through third-party podcast apps or platforms, such as Spotify and iTunes.

On these platforms, a podcast competes with thousands of other shows, which makes it difficult for a podcast to stand out. So, how can you get potential listeners to find your podcast so you can gain more subscribers? Through podcast SEO!

Why is SEO important for podcasts?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it is as important for podcasts as it is for any other type of digital content because it ensures that people will find your podcasts on search engines.

Sure, you can start a podcast, share it with your friends, and then hope that they will spread the word about your podcast so you can gain new subscribers. However, unless you are a celebrity with millions of social media followers, this won’t be very effective for gaining new subscribers.

Good SEO practices, on the other hand, will improve your podcast’s ranking in search engines results and help you grow your audience.

How good podcast SEO can gain you new followers

The better your podcast’s SEO is, the more likely it is for a search engine to pick up your podcast and put it at the very top of the search results. For instance, if you have a podcast about U.S. history, people might find your podcast by searching for related topics, such as “What happened at the Boston Tea Party?” or “Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving?”.

Having a good SEO ranking therefore means that people interested in topics similar to your podcast content can find your podcast easily, even if they aren’t searching for it directly.

There is also another reason for trying to get your podcast to show up in search engine results, especially on Google: Google has now added a feature where your podcast episodes can appear as search results, and people can listen to it directly without having to leave the search results.

If somebody searches for “What happened at the Boston Tea Party podcast,” Google results will show relevant podcast episodes at the top of the search results, and users can simply hit the play button and start listening.

Overall, a high ranking in search engine results makes it easier for new people to discover your podcast.

Check out our following podcast SEO tips to start growing your audience!

1. Establish relevant keywords

In order to reach an interested audience on a search engine, it is important to establish the most relevant keywords for your podcast. Keywords are words or phrases people are typing into search engines when they are looking for something.

As an example, relevant keywords for a baking podcast could be “easy baking recipes” or “gluten-free baking.” Depending on the content of your podcast, some keywords will fit better than others.

Researching good keywords might take some time, but there are many web tools out there that can help you with it. Some free keyword research tools are:

• Soovle
• Ubersuggest
• Google Keyword Planner
• Answerthepublic
• Spyfu

Once you establish the most relevant keywords for your podcast, make sure to include them in your podcast title and in the podcast description. It’s also worth establishing keywords for individual episodes to increase your chances of being found on search engines.

2. Create listener personas

The better you understand your audience, the better you can fine-tune your keywords to fit their searches.

Creating listener personas is a great way to work out who your audience really is. It’s also a fun way to visualize your listeners since you assign them names, professions, and even hobbies.

A persona for a science-for-beginners podcast could be Gary, who is 58 years old and works in sales. Despite his desk job, he has always loved the outdoors and been interested in science. Another persona could be 35 year old Emma, who teaches third grade science and is always looking for inspiration for her classroom activities.

Listener personas will help you with improving your keywords to better fit your target audience, and they are also very useful for explaining your target audience to potential sponsors if you want to monetize your podcast.

3. Provide additional content

Search engines focus mainly on text in order to evaluate the content and the relevance of a blog, a web page, or a podcast.

Since your podcast is mainly audio content, adding written content to each episode can be very helpful for getting search engines to pick up your podcast. Make sure to add show notes, short descriptions, or even transcripts to your podcast episodes.

You could also upload a video of your podcast to YouTube. It will not only help you to create an inbound link to your podcast (see tip number four), but it is also an easy way of adding additional text content about your podcast, such as video descriptions, which can be picked up by search engines. For a podcast video, obviously, you can record yourself as you do the podcast, or you can add visuals, such as slides later.

4. Connect with bloggers and content creators

Search engines value inbound links. These are links from other websites to your content. If a lot of websites include a specific link to a magazine article for example, search engines will understand that that particular article must contain relevant content, and they will rank it higher in the search results. The same goes for your podcast.

The more people include a link to your podcast on their website or on social media, the more “social proof” it will give to your podcast, and the higher your podcast will get ranked by search engines.

So, try to work with bloggers or other content creators who can help you spread the word (and link) of your podcast. You can try to reach out to them directly. Identify important creators or influencers whose content relates to your podcast and then contact them to let them know about your podcast. Chances are, if they like your podcast, they will let their audience know about it and link to your podcast.

Another way of getting inbound links is to ask relevant content creators to be part of your show, as interview guests for example. Once you publish the episode with them, send them the link and encourage them to share it with their audience.

5. Include individual artwork for each episode

While search engines cannot determine keywords from audio content, they are able to read embedded keywords in images. You can use this to your advantage by creating unique artwork for each episode and including relevant keywords.

You can use programs like Canva to create unique designs for your episodes. Or, try one of the most effective visualization types available for podcasts: audiograms.

Audiograms combine a short audio clip from your episode with images and the wave form of the audio to create a short video, which will make your podcast really stand out. Audiograms are therefore not only helpful because they allow you to include keywords that search engines will pick up (since you can embed keywords in the images you choose for them), they are also a very catchy format that will get people’s attention on social media.

Audiograms are very easy to create. You can use free online tools, such as Audiocado, to create cool audiograms for your podcast in just a few minutes.

Try it out now!