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• Video SEO

Podcast SEO: Optimize Your Podcast for Search Engine Discovery

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March 21, 2023

FREE Webinar: Accessible Audio for Podcasting

The age of digital media has forever changed the way we consume entertainment, news, and other information. Artificial intelligence (AI) and short-form video have taken the world by storm, but there’s another player in the online media arena: podcasting.

In 2006, only 22% of the adult population in the United States was aware of podcasting. Now, the industry is projected to generate $4 billion by 2024, and more than a third of 18-to-24-year-olds are listening to podcasts at least weekly.

If you have a podcast or are thinking about starting one, you may be wondering how to set yourself up for success in an increasingly competitive market.

Podcast SEO can help your podcast rank higher in search engine results, making it easier for people to find and listen to your episodes. This can lead to increased visibility, more downloads, and, ultimately, greater success for your podcast.

Here are six tips for boosting your podcast SEO.

1. Provide a transcript

A major way to improve your podcast’s SEO and accessibility is by providing a transcript for each episode. A search engine can index text far better than it can index audio. 

A podcast transcript converts all the keyword-rich content from your podcast episodes into text that bots can read. In 2014, This American Life decided to publish audio transcripts of their entire archive to learn how transcripts impact SEO. Adding transcripts to their podcasts resulted in a 4.36% increase in inbound traffic, along with many other SEO benefits.

Transcripts increase your chances of getting quoted in a tweet, blog, or article, which improves page authority and SEO.

Even the smallest podcasts often have listeners from around the world. On average, a show with 30 listeners has users from five different countries. Translating your podcast is a great way to expand your audience, and it’s easy if you have a transcript. The text file for translations helps search engine bots crawl for relevant keywords, helping your video rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) in those languages. 

As of March 2022, only 1% of today’s podcasts offer transcripts. That means 99% of podcasts are exclusionary to the 37.5 million Americans who have trouble hearinghearing. Making your podcast accessible will allow this community to enjoy your content and greatly expand your audience.

2. Have a keyword for every episode

Keywords are essential for any type of SEO, and podcasting is no different. Keywords help search engines understand the content of your podcast, increasing visibility and attracting new listeners. 

Once you have a keyword, be sure that you’re using it effectively. Try to include your keyword in the title of the podcast, as well as the podcast description and/or the episode’s show notes. A well-written podcast description is important because it plays a big role in whether or not someone listens to your show. An effective podcast description gives readers a sneak peek into what your podcast is about and makes them curious enough to give your show a listen.

Show notes are a mini summary of each podcast episode. They also list additional resources and provide other relevant content. Show notes are a great place to include your keyword and boost your SEO.

 Going Beyond the Listener: Accessible Audio for Podcasting [FREE Webinar] 

3. Repurpose podcast content for new audiences

It takes a lot of work to produce a single podcast episode. Luckily, you can make many other pieces of content out of one episode.

Instead of having to come up with all-new written content for your blog, you can save time by using podcast transcripts for quotes, content ideation, and more. Derivative content like a blog gives you another place to share your podcast, creating a new opportunity to build backlinks which improves your website’s authority and therefore improves SEO. Repurposing a podcast into different formats can also increase visibility by appealing to audiences who prefer different types of content.

4. Promote your podcast on other platforms

Content repurposing is a great way to share your podcast content with a wider audience, but don’t forget to promote the episodes themselves, as well. There are 4.62 billion people using social media globally. Sharing your podcast across social media platforms is an easy way to expand your reach and drive more attention to your work.

You can also embed episodes on your website so that any traffic to your website has the potential to translate to podcast plays. Using the podcast community to your advantage through cross-promotion is an effective way to get people talking about your show. This collaboration can simultaneously grow your audience and result in productive partnerships.

5. Create a mix of trending and evergreen content

In a world where we’re constantly being bombarded with new information, it can be difficult to create content that stays relevant. Producing a mix of trending and evergreen content will help you stay current while maintaining a timeless show.

Trending content helps you connect to your audience and touch on topics they’re already talking about. You can feel confident about writing an episode on a trending topic, as it’s already proven to be popular.

Evergreen content is search-optimized and remains relevant regardless of the current news cycle. Topics with consistent interest make your podcast desirable, no matter how old your episodes are. Trending topics are good for a temporary boost in traffic, while evergreen content will attract organic traffic for years to come. 

6. Choose the right platform

Podcast audiences listen to their favorite shows through multiple platforms. However, there are a few platforms that attract the most listeners, the biggest being YouTube.

It may be surprising to some that YouTube is the most popular place for podcasts given that it’s a video platform. Podcasts on YouTube actually defy the definition of a podcast because the platform doesn’t use RSS feeds, which is where podcast services store episodes. 

YouTube’s popularity for podcasts can be explained by the boom in online video. Podcasters often post episodes on YouTube and Spotify accompanied by videos of them and any guests speaking into their microphones, and six out of ten weekly podcast listeners prefer podcasts with video.

Be sure to optimize your podcast for YouTube and other popular platforms like Spotify. To help you do this, Spotify published a resource about optimizing your podcast’s landing page. Encouraging your listeners to follow your podcast is great for SEO; fans who follow your podcast will listen to 4 times the number of episodes.

As the podcasting industry continues to thrive, SEO will become increasingly important. These SEO tips will help your podcast reach the almost 1/3 of Americans who listen to podcasts weekly and create a show that keeps your audience coming back for more. 

About the author

3Play Media

The post Podcast SEO: Optimize Your Podcast for Search Engine Discovery appeared first on 3Play Media.

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• Accessibility

YouTube SEO Strategy: Tips to Boost Your Search Ranking

3Play Media

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May 27, 2021

Automate Your YouTube Captioning [Learn About the Integration]

YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world – second only to its parent company, Google. Eight out of 10 video search results are YouTube videos, and the platform is constantly growing, with over 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. How do you avoid getting lost in the sea of videos? Your best bet is to optimize great videos for search using video SEO best practices. With these tips, you can create a solid YouTube SEO strategy.

What is a YouTube SEO strategy?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the ever-changing practice of designing web content to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs). Search is often the gatekeeper to your content, so optimizing your content for search is necessary to attract traffic and grow a following.

Unlike Google, which uses backlinks and other factors to evaluate rank, YouTube SEO involves optimizing your channel, playlists, metadata, descriptions, and videos. You can optimize your videos for search both within and outside of YouTube.

You may know the basics of SEO for YouTube videos, like including keywords in titles, meta descriptions, and tags. However, there’s more you can do for YouTube SEO through video accessibility. Since search engine bots cannot watch videos, they rely on accompanying text data to index them properly. A key component to a YouTube SEO strategy is harnessing the power of your video’s text in the form of transcripts, closed captions, and subtitles, which can positively impact user experience, engagement, watch time, viewership, and SEO.

Here are ten tips for maximizing views and boosting your YouTube SEO.

Learn about 3Play’s YouTube integration

1. Select a great keyword

Before you can boost YouTube SEO, you need to select the right keyword or phrase for your video. Keywords often land in video titles and metadata, and when spoken in the audio, keywords appear in captions and transcripts. That’s a win-win for SEO.

Keywords and keyword phrases should correspond with a) whatever describes your video accurately and b) the words and phrases that users enter in search engines to find content like yours.

To find out what phrases and keywords people use in search, you’ll have to do some keyword research. An easy strategy to find a keyword for your video is to use YouTube’s Search Suggest. Type a word or phrase relevant to your industry in the search bar and see the suggestions that YouTube offers.

You can also find keywords from your YouTube search report (in the YouTube Studio under Traffic Sources > YouTube search).

To check if you have a good keyword, search for it on YouTube and see how many “About results” it generates. Ideally, you want to find keyword variations with high search volume but less competition so you can stand out from the crowd.

Selecting the best keyword is easier said than done, but plenty of tools can help. Some tools include:

• Moz Keyword Explorer
• AdWords Keyword Planner
• UberSuggest
• VidIQ Vision

With these tools, you can explore other resources such as keyword volume, which is the number of searches the keyword gets per month on Google, and cost per click, which is the average cost per click for the term on Google Ads.

After you’ve identified a great keyword, include it in your video file’s name so YouTube knows your video’s topic. For example, your file name could be “makeup-tutorial-for-the-hulk” followed by your video file type.

Pro tip: For individual videos, try going after “long tail” keyword phrases, which are more specific. For example, “makeup tutorial for the Hulk” would be a more targeted keyword phrase than just “makeup tutorial.”

2. Include accurate closed captions

YouTube automatically transcribes your videos to provide automatic captions. However, YouTube’s auto-captions are only 70% accurate, making for incomprehensible and often embarrassing captions.

Google rewards helpful search results and penalizes spam. Part of the definition of spam is “automatically generated gibberish,” which is an apt description of most auto-captions. By using inaccurate captions, you risk being labeled as spam and losing search rank for your YouTube channel.

To combat the detrimental effects of auto-captions for YouTube SEO strategy, you’ll want to add accurate closed captions through an SRT file to your YouTube videos.

Search engines can crawl text, but they can’t watch videos. Your captions will be full of relevant keywords that indicate what your video is about so that Google can crawl your content and rank accordingly.

There are multiple options for adding captions to YouTube videos. Some YouTubers use the automated transcript as a starting point and manually clean up errors. There are other DIY transcription options, which are cheap but time-consuming and tedious.

The simplest solution is to send your videos to a professional video transcription service. Professional video transcription is high-quality with a quick turnaround time.

In addition to increasing SEO, captions also have the following benefits:

• Higher search rank: Digital Discovery Networks performed a study that proves captions on YouTube videos boost SEO. They saw an increase in views by 13.48% in the first 2 weeks using captions and 7.32% overall. To test this, they searched for a keyword phrase that was present only in their video captions, not in the title, description, tags, or metadata. Captioned videos ranked highly for the phrase because search engines could crawl the caption text.
• Better user experience and engagement: Closed captions increase viewership because they keep the viewer engaged regardless of their access to audio. This is especially important for mobile users who may not have access to audio. Since more than 70% of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices, it’s imperative to have accurate captions. YouTube videos with closed captions are proven to increase user engagement, earning more likes, shares, and comments than videos without captions. Higher engagement, in turn, boosts video search ranking factors, which translates to more views. In addition, higher engagement leads to increased watch time, a critical metric for determining search rank on YouTube. Longer watch times correlate directly with higher SERP ranks.
• Video accessibility: In addition to increasing SEO, closed captions make your YouTube videos accessible to viewers who are deaf or hard of hearing. Captions also let hearing people watch your video on a noisy train or in a quiet library with the sound muted. In essence, captions make your video viewable, understandable, and enjoyable for a larger audience.

3. Add a transcript to your video description

The video description is the best option for displaying your transcript on YouTube. The description field fits 5,000 characters, which is usually enough to fit a transcript for a dialogue-heavy, 10-minute video. If your transcript doesn’t fit or you want to include other important information in the description, like a call-to-action, you can add a truncated version with a link to the full version on a separate web page.

Although Backlinko’s research found no correlation between descriptions optimized for a certain keyword and the rankings for that term, keyword-rich descriptions are still a recommend best practice as they can help your video rank for related terms and appear as a “suggested video.” Transcripts can also boost engagement by making content quickly scannable.

Pro tip: Make video transcripts your content marketing shortcut

Many brands are doing amazing outreach with video, but marketers often fail to realize transcripts can do so much more. Videos can be a starting point for content creation and targeted inbound marketing efforts through video transcripts and derivative content.

Consider using a video transcript to boost SEO by creating useful, shareable content. Some uses for video transcripts include:

• Blogs
• Infographics
• Whitepapers
• Fact sheets
• Website copy

4. Offer subtitles in multiple languages

Just as English captions make your videos accessible to more viewers, translations further expand your audience and increase YouTube SEO. YouTube’s global reach is massive. Only 16.4% of YouTube’s site traffic comes from the U.S., and around the world, over 2 billion logged-in users watch YouTube every month.

Foreign language subtitles let international and non-native English-speaking viewers enjoy your videos. Search engines will also index your translated caption files and include your video in search results in those languages. This can be huge for a YouTube SEO strategy since you have a better chance of ranking higher for non-English keywords due to lower competition.

Remember to always check your translations for accuracy, and consider using a vendor for guaranteed high-quality subtitles.

5. Write a keyword-optimized title, description, and tags

Once you have a great keyword, you need to ensure that the texts associated with your video are keyword-optimized.

For example, if you publish videos about makeup tutorials, make sure you optimize the title, descriptions, and tags for the phrase “makeup tutorial.”

Keep in mind: search engines have wizened up to keyword-stuffing, the practice of over-using keywords and variations of keywords to try to hack the system. Don’t bother with that. Write for humans, not robots, or else you may get penalized.

Once you’ve done keyword research and picked your keywords, incorporate them naturally into the following fields:

• Title: Fits 100 characters but truncates at 70 characters, meaning your most important information and keyword should be close to the front. Use compelling language to encourage a click: “how-to,” “advice,” “tips,” or numbered lists can help. For example: “7 Tips to Increase Video Subscription Rates.”
• Meta-Description: Fits 5,000 characters but truncates at around 120 characters depending on your device. For e-commerce sites, it is crucial to include a link to your product, considering more than half of consumers are influenced by product videos. Remember to include the http:// or it won’t be clickable.
• Tags: Fits approximately 500 characters, but don’t go overboard. Use double quotes (“) to surround phrases so your video is an exact match for a long-tail keyword phrase. For example: instead of tagging your video as “makeup” and “tutorial,” tag it as “makeup tutorial.” Think like a user and always add tags in order of importance.

YouTube Creator Academy lists the following tips for writing searchable descriptions:

• Give an overview of your video using natural language, not just a stream of keywords.
• Put the most important keywords toward the beginning of your description.
• Identify 1-2 main words that describe your video and feature them prominently in both your description and title.
• Use Google Trends and Google Ads Keyword Planner to identify popular keywords and their synonyms. Including these terms can help you maximize traffic from search.
• Avoid irrelevant words in your description, which can create a poor viewing experience and may violate YouTube policies.

If you plan to post your video on several domains in addition to YouTube, remember to vary the keyword phrases slightly. You don’t want to compete against yourself across different sites.

Lastly, use honest, relevant terms. Trying to ride trending topics irrelevant to your video content will only result in a negative score later.

Automate Your YouTube Captioning

6. Say your target keyword in your video

If you don’t say your target keyword in your video, it won’t appear in your captions or transcript, two vital components of a successful YouTube SEO strategy.

Try to incorporate your keyword thoughtfully and naturally in your video as not to overstuff your transcript. If it’s helpful, plan a script in advance and try to incorporate your keyword at the beginning of your video so it appears early on in your transcript.

7. Use a compelling thumbnail

Choosing the right video thumbnail image makes a drastic difference in click-through rate. Use high-quality, high-contrast images that have a 16:9 aspect ratio. Facial close-ups work best. YouTubers can choose which frame to display as the video thumbnail. YouTube will present 3 screenshots to choose from, but you can also select a shot of a different moment in the video or upload your own image.

If you need ideas for images, try using sites such as Canva, which has thumbnail templates just for YouTube videos.

Note that YouTube overlays the video duration in the lower corner of the thumbnail; make sure it doesn’t obstruct anything important in your thumbnail. Also, keep in mind that Google uses image recognition to automatically filter out certain imagery, such as the YouTube logo.

Ideally, you want an image that is a great visual representation of your target keyword; this will take your presence in relevant results even further.

8. Add YouTube cards and end screens

YouTube cards are preformatted notifications that encourage people to take desired actions during your video. Once set up, cards appear in the top right of your videos for users to click on and explore. Since YouTube aims to keep people on YouTube, cards are a great way to boost your ranking.

You can add up to five cards in a video. Cards can include various CTAs, such as directing viewers to another channel, donating to a nonprofit, or crowdfunding.

End screens appear after a video finishes and tell a viewer what they can do next. Both cards and end screens can optimize viewer experience and encourage them to watch another video or take further action when they’ve finished. End screens can direct viewers to these elements:

• View other YouTube videos, playlists, or channels.
• Subscribe to your channel.
• Explore your website, merchandise, or crowdfunding campaigns.

9. Focus on user engagement

Engagement metrics such as comments, likes, shares, and subscriptions strongly correlate with higher rankings, according to Blacklinko’s research. Google cares most about how viewers respond to your content because that’s what keeps people on their site. To increase engagement, try to encourage viewers to share, like, or comment on your videos, and take the time time to respond to comments and messages.

YouTube watch time

Watch time, as you might imagine, is very important. Watch time refers to the actual time spent watching a video (not the percent watched). For example, 50% completion of a 10-minute video will rank higher than 100% completion of a three-minute video. It’s important to hook your viewer in the first 15 seconds with a teaser. If your video describes how to do a DIY project, show the viewer the finished product at the beginning to spark their interest.

Session watch time

Session watch time is another important measurement of user engagement. YouTube values how a video contributes to a user’s overall viewing session. Did the viewer leave the site after the video, or did they watch three more videos? YouTube wants people to spend more time on their platform and favors videos that help them achieve that goal. Although it may seem counterintuitive, videos designed to bring users to your website will hurt your SEO because they move viewers away from YouTube.

User intent

Google can read your mind. Ok, not quite, but Google does understand what searchers mean. For example, if you were to search “how to get more views on YouTube,” you would be shown a video called “How to Get More Views on YouTube in 2021 – in 2 Minutes.” When creating a title for your videos, be sure to write something compelling and relevant. You might be tempted to title use the #1 searched phrase or term as your title, but don’t. Instead, answer the user’s question in your title, and add the search term to the description. Trust us, Google knows.

Growing subscriber base

Subscribers can generate a lot of watch time within the first week your video is published. The more you can amplify user experience and engagement in the first seven days, the better. It’s a good idea to post regularly, so your subscribers know when to expect a new video.

Use playlists

Relevant, short (four to six videos), subcategorized playlists can greatly boost user experience and engagement. It also makes it easy to share multiple videos at a time by sharing a link to the playlist instead of one video.

10. Track your analytics

The only way to know if your YouTube SEO strategy is working is to track your analytics. Metrics can help you understand where your videos are doing well and where they might need some tweaking. YouTube offers several analytics reports to help you track your performance.

There are many analytics you can track, but every YouTuber should know these metrics:

• Watch Time: Watch time is the total number of minutes viewers spent watching your videos. This metric matters because YouTube boosts videos and channels with higher watch times in their search results as watch time is a great indicator of engagement.
• Impressions Click-Through Rate: Impressions click-through rate measures the rate at which people watch your video after seeing it on their homepage, recommendation section, or trending section. Impression click-through rates will often spike after you release your video and decline later, but it’s still an important metric to track as it can help you refine your thumbnails.
• Card Click-Through-Rate: Cards are preformatted notifications that encourage people to take action while watching your video. Analyzing card click-through rates can help you optimize your card CTAs, timing, duration, and placement.
• Unique Viewers: Unique viewers is the estimated number of individuals who watch your videos over a certain period of time. This metric helps you audience your audience size and can be helping in evaluating engagement.
• Traffic Sources: The Traffic Sources report shows you how viewers found your videos and which sources contribute to the most engagement. You can use this data to better optimize your video promotion strategy by deciding where to share your content.
• Subscriber Growth: YouTube’s Subscribers Report shows you which videos, locations, and time periods gained and lost subscribers. With this data, you can learn which topics resonate with your subscribers and where to target new subscribers.

Monitoring these metrics over time will help you see which videos have the most engagement and the factors contributing to their success. Take note of what sets these videos apart from ones that don’t perform as well—you might notice patterns in the topic, type of video, length, or posting schedule.

This article was originally published on March 7, 2016, by Emily Griffin and has since been updated.

About the author

3Play Media

The post YouTube SEO Strategy: Tips to Boost Your Search Ranking appeared first on 3Play Media.