Promoting Your Podcast from A to Z - Search Engines
Clicks from search engine results pages are one of the most sought after sources of traffic on the Internet. This traffic is free and tends to produce well-targeted visitors. There’s a good chance that someone who clicks to your site from Google wants something that you have. This is called organic search traffic to distinguish it from paid search listings, such as the ones that appear on the right side of Google’s search results.
The goal of search engines is to serve up the most relevant information when someone searches for a given phrase. The engines give top search placement to web pages that they think offer the searcher what she’s looking for. Your goal is to get ranked as high as possible in search results for phrases that are relevant to your podcast’s topic. To get one of the top positions you need to provide content that the search engines see as on topic and good in quality.
It’s important to note that the major search engines, such as Google, only index text content. Even though you’re a podcaster and produce audio/video content, it’s text content that will determine your rankings. To get a higher ranking you need to optimize your site content to be as relevant as possible for the search engines.
Search engine optimization is based on keywords. These are the phrases that people who are interested in content such as yours are likely to search for. To get more search engine traffic, choose keywords that your prospective listeners are likely to search for and use them in your show notes and other quality text content on your site. For the best results, you must use keywords that are searched for often, but don’t have too much competition.
Take a look at your show notes and see if you could do more to use keywords. Consider adding supplementary content to your site to get indexed and ranked higher for your keyword phrases.
In chapter 4 of Promoting Your Podcast you’ll learn how to:
- Plan your search engine marketing campaign
- Find which phrases get searched for the most
- Find the keywords with the best supply/demand ratio
- Use your keywords on the page to increase your search engine rankings
