If you are producing outstanding podcast content, you might as well make sure that it possesses long-term residual value. One of the most effective ways to accomplish this is by creating your own podcast website and doing consistent blog creation. Tom Hazzard explains how turning your episodes into keyword-rich verbal SEO blogs can generate tremendous traffic even months or years after publishing them. He also discusses Google’s new data about search relevancy, why WordPress is the best website platform to use, and the power of SEO-designed descriptions in improving search rankings.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How Blog Creation Benefits Your Podcast’s Long-Term Residual Value?

In this episode, I want to talk about the long-term value of blog posts for your podcast episodes. I have some examples I’m going to share to show you how long-term that value is. I also have some new data from Google to back up part of what I already know and that we, at Podetize, have been talking about for many years. There are some very new relevant data from Google that is very helpful. It’s going to be interesting for all of you. We’ll share that. I will talk about it.

For those of you reading, there are some cool visuals that I’m doing in the video version. You may want to check out the blog post at Podetize.com for this episode.

This is a long-term residual value of blog posts. The whole idea here is that we don’t just create blog posts for our podcast for the sake of creating blog posts. There is a real purpose and a good reason why you would put that effort into doing it yourself or you would pay someone else to do it. I’m going to share those good reasons why.

I have a couple of examples and I’m going to use ourselves as an example. I also have another longtime client’s website I’m going to use as an example. This is all publicly available information. Nothing is proprietary. For those of you that may be new to podcasting, you want to pay attention to this. You’re going to learn something in this episode. If you leave your audio show just as an audio show out there in all the listening apps, you are leaving an opportunity on the table.

Feed Your Brand Blog

Let me share that back in May of 2018, we already knew that Feed Your Brand existed as a podcast. We were publishing episodes back then. This issue of the long-term residual value of blog posts, which we weren’t talking about at that way at that time, was a big differentiator for what we do as a company, the service we provide and what we are sharing freely on our podcast with all podcasters out there. It makes a difference between getting every ounce of value out of your show and not.

A CMS is a Content Management System for the platform your website is built on. What we knew is that some like Wix or Weebly are bad for SEO. You’re not going to set the world on fire and be found by people that you don’t know and people that you haven’t told that you have a podcast. You want to be found by people that don’t know you yet and your website is the best way to do that.

If you have a Weebly or Wix type of website, they make it easy to build a website that even is very good looking but they’re not in alignment with Google. Squarespace is a little better but still not ideal. It will work to an extent but the best platform and we were talking about in that episode was WordPress. We created this episode called The Best and Worst Podcast Websites. The idea was we’re talking about the platform of podcast websites that we recommend you build websites on and talking about the best ones and the worst ones.

 

We published this episode on May 16th, 2018. We usually publish at 3:00 AM Pacific Time. Within about eleven hours so by 1:00 PM or 2:00 PM that same day, our blog post for the episode was coming up on the very first page in Google search for three different terms, best podcast websites, podcast websites and worst podcast websites.

In preparation for talking about the long-term residual value of blog posts, I did a little research. I went back and said, “I remember that episode we did.” I didn’t even remember when it was. I had to look it up. I found it was in May of 2018. I was like, “I wonder where we rank now.” I searched the best podcast websites and we were there but we were down. We’re no longer on page one. We’re somewhere on page two.

The podcast website is similar. I then looked up when I typed in worst podcast websites and here’s where those of you watching the video are in for a treat. This is a screen capture I took of the worst podcast websites. I searched for it on Google. You can see that our blog post on Podetize.com, which is our podcast website, is the number one organic item.

Nobody is putting an ad out for the keyword worst podcast websites. For whatever reason, somebody’s decided not to advertise. There are no ads or paper clicks on that but there are over 102 million search results for the term worst podcast websites. This blog post is the number one organic search result for that term.

There’s some long-term residual value and this is why blog creation benefits your podcast’s long-term residual value as long as you’re going to keep podcasting. I’m even going to show you examples where if you pause podcasting, those blogs still have residual value, even if you’re no longer podcasting. We’re getting people coming to our website who are typing in the worst podcast websites and they get to our blog. Our blog is about the best and the worst podcast. This is the actual blog on Podetize.com.

That episode is so old. It was number 50 in our lineup of episodes. You can see that it has our old show logo. Those of you that know this show and our current readers, you’ve seen our logo. That logo there looks nothing like it. Truth be told, that was our old logo. It is what we started with. With that green, black and white color there, we ended up pivoting our show cover and changing it because Libsyn came out with a podcast called The Feed. Their colors were too similar to ours so we’re like, “We need to differentiate ourselves from Libysn.”

We pivoted and changed our colors, cover art and whole logo for our show but that’s what it was at the time. This blog has huge residual value for us. Years later, it’s still the number one search result on the first page of Google for worst podcast websites. That’s pretty killer. As they say on Cheesy TV, “But wait, there’s more.”

 

Search Relevancy

This is a very good old example. If any of us are getting the first page on Google search for an episode of our podcast, we’d be thrilled years later. I’m quite sure we all would be. There’s new data from Google that came out in the summer of 2022 that talks about search relevancy by the type of post you make on the internet. I’m going to go through this from bottom to top.

It was Finn Connor or some event. This data was presented there and the source is Google for Creators. Twitter, when you make a tweet that has a relevancy of about fifteen minutes, that means it’s going to age out of relevance quickly. Why? It’s because there are millions of tweets going on every hour, maybe even hundreds of millions. After fifteen minutes, it’s going to get buried so far down. People aren’t going to find it. If they’re not active on Twitter looking at an active feed, they’re not going to see it.

TikTok videos have a relevance of about 30 minutes. That speaks more to what’s going on on that platform. People aren’t going on TikTok to look at videos that are a month old, a week old or a day old. You’ve got 30 minutes on TikTok to get someone’s attention. Facebook has a search relevance of about six hours. LinkedIn is a day. That one surprised me a little. LinkedIn is still a social platform. You get a little more stickiness but that’s about it.

Instagram is two days typically in research relevance, meaning people are going to find your post after about two days. What you put on an Instagram people aren’t going to see anymore. YouTube is twenty days. YouTube videos stay up there forever and people are going to find your YouTube videos years from now but this one speaks to the volume of how much content there is on YouTube.

“Why isn’t my YouTube video still relevant years from now?” It would be but the search relevancy will be there on YouTube. If you’ve embedded it on a blog post on your website, it’ll be there and available for people. There’s so much new content being pumped into YouTube. The practical search relevancy according to Google for Creators is about twenty days.

Pinterest is a little more sticky. It has four months of relevance for your post there. The podcast is determined to be more than a year. Why? Podcasts remain out there and people go remember looking for podcast content. As long as your podcast is still in the ecosystem and it’s evergreen content, it’s going to be relevant for whoever is listening to it at that time, a year plus from now.

With any blog post, this is not just this data from Google or podcast-related blog posts. They’re saying that in the whole ecosystem of search relevancy of the content on the internet, blog posts have a relevancy of plus, meaning more than a year. That Google search I shared with you before is a case in point. This is the best evidence and relevancy that you can see in a post that we have done nothing with.

 

Here’s the other great thing about the relevancy. We moved this show from one website to another. It was not always on Podetize.com. We moved all of our blog content and the podcast website from FeedYourBrand.com, and I think it was on its own website at one point, to Podetize.com. That keyword value and search relevancy went with it.

You can move your content from one website to another. It’s not something you want to do very often because there’s a lot involved. You want to make sure you do it right but it can be done. Years later, we’re number one. For those of you reading, I’m showing some visuals in the video and there’s a slide here talking about that search relevancy time by type, meaning Twitter, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn up to blog post.

This graphic will be in the blog post at Podetize.com. When you’re done driving or somewhere where you can go either look at that blog post or watch the video, go to Podetize.com where you can see all these slides that I am sharing on the video. For our customers who are watching this live, they get it first. Everybody else in the podcast world who doesn’t work with Podetize gets it a couple of weeks later.

SEMRush Data

I want to share with you another amazing example to aspire a podcaster who has done this for 700 episodes. I want to show you the Semrush data on her podcast website. This customer is Dr. Diane Hamilton This is a podcaster. She has a podcast called Take the Lead Radio. I’m showing you the Semrush data, which is public. None of this is private. Anybody with a Semrush account can look this up.

This is the data of her podcast website. The only blog content created on her website is from her podcast. She came to us with 200 episodes already published and no blogs. At the time, the number of keyword rankings on her website was about 250. The number of people and unique visitors going to her website every month was about 350 at the time. We started producing blogs for all her past episodes and continued to do them since.

She’s over 700 episodes now. Why? She’s publishing three episodes a week usually. Although I do want to share that she’s taken a bit of a break in 2022. She’s only published 6 or 8 episodes, a very small number. Her website is still killing it. The blog creation benefit she’s gotten for her podcast and the long-term residual value of her podcast episodes through these blog posts is huge. You can see in the video that her website ranks on almost 32,000 keyword phrases of Google search. Half of those are in the United States alone, and most of her audience is in the United States but in any English-speaking country.

All of those keyword rankings on those posts attract. It means Google is sending people to her website organically through what they search on over 87,000 people per month. It can fluctuate. Google changes its algorithms over time and keyword rankings go up or down. The amount of traffic they send goes up or down. In the long-term, what we experienced after we converted 200 episodes was her site ranked on about 10,000 keywords total worldwide.

Most bots and algorithms are not as sophisticated as Google. They cannot combine words next to other but can only search keywords that match the exact terms. Click To Tweet

She was getting about 20,000 unique visitors to her website after those 200 blogs were created. As she keeps publishing three per week for years, working way up with hundreds of more posts and she has 700, she’s been able to take a break. She must be exhausted. I would be after 700 episodes. I’ve had my podcast that got up to about 650 and I’ve taken a long break.

Dr. Diane Hamilton has gotten tremendous long-term residual value from those blogs. She’s got killer traffic to her site. That traffic can be monetized if you want to, whether it’s with the things you’re selling in business so you lead generating for it or this is a website advertiser’s dream wanting to be able to put ads on that website and get all those 87,000 eyeballs a month. Diane can make some significant money that way through that traffic.

This episode is not talking about monetization. There are 150 different ways to monetize your podcast once you have the ears and the eyeballs on your website. How you want to is a business decision and a choice for what is in alignment with your goals but you got to have the traffic, ears and eyeballs first. Consistency in publishing for a long time, we’ll get you there and create these long-form comprehensive blog posts. We call them verbal SEO blogs at Podetize.

Couple Nuggets Of Wisdom

You can go to school with us and learn how to do it. We have free content for that. As a company, to be perfectly transparent, we do provide those done-for-you services for customers that would rather pay some money to save time. Here’s the proof that it works and it’s good. Especially for you new podcasters, I want to provide a little value to you and share a couple of nuggets of wisdom, experience and information that are relevant to this. Even for those of you that don’t yet have blogs but you may have a lot of episodes, I’m sharing with you a podcast in the video.

There’ll be screenshots in the blog for those of you reading. You can check it out at Podetize.com. This podcast, Spiritually Hungry, which is hosted on Podetize, I had a meeting with this client the day before I’m recording this. That’s why it’s fresh in my mind. They were wanting to know how they can be found by more of their ideal listeners. They have over 100 episodes. They do have a website but no blogs. They’re not utilizing their website effectively.

I shared with them, “Create a blog for each of these 100 plus past episodes. You’re going to start getting keyworded rankings and organic traffic from Google Search going to your website. This is how more people are going to find your podcast and business.” That’s what they’re trying to do, lead generate for their organization. That’s tip number one.

Tip number two, this one usually flies over the radar of everybody that I talked to. They never considered this and it’s right in front of her face. This screenshot is of the particular show’s listing called Spiritually Hungry on the Apple Podcasts. I wanted to draw your attention to the author’s line. The title of the show is called Spiritually Hungry. It’s co-hosted by a couple, Monica and Michael Berg.

 

What I want to share with you and any of you that are co-hosts, this is for you so pay attention. If you’re watching this, look carefully at the author field. I’m talking about keyword value within the listening app. Let’s say somebody who knows Monica Berg thought to themselves, “I think Monica has a podcast. I bet if I search her name in my podcast app, I’ll find her.”

They are not going to find this podcast if they search on Monica Berg. Why? It’s because I’ve looked at this listing in detail. You’ll see that nowhere is the last name berg right after the first name Monica. Not only in the author field but also in the description of the podcast. Everywhere this couple is referred to, it’s Monica and Michael Berg.

If you know Michael and you search on Michael’s name, this podcast will come up in your search. You’ll find it. Monica is a ghost in SEO. Think about the bots and algorithms. They’re searching on keywords and they will match that term, especially in the podcast listening apps because they are not the most sophisticated search algorithms and functions of the software, not like Google which sometimes will combine words that are not right next to each other and might give you some results like that.

Podcast listening app search functions are not that sophisticated. The proper way to make sure that Monica Berg will be found and the show will come up in search when people search for her in the author field is you’ve got to put Monica Berg and Michael Berg. You got to separate it, even though that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well. Maybe as the co-host, you don’t like the idea of communicating that way. You don’t want to represent yourselves that way.

I understand that. I understand marketing and business decisions. Ultimately as a podcaster, it’s your decision to make. You can represent yourself however you want. You’re the king of your castle in the podcast ecosystem. What I care about for all of our customers at Podetize is for you to be found by people that want to find you.

People searching on Monica Berg are going to be like, “I guess she doesn’t have a podcast. Maybe it’s not on this app.” They go look at another app and they’re not going to find her there either because all the apps feed from the same data. Usually, when I tell people this, they’re like, “I can’t believe I didn’t know that.” They facepalm and hit themselves over the head with a feather and get knocked over here. It’s elementary on the one hand but on the other hand, most people don’t consider it.

This is the difference between SEO for podcasters and long-term residual value. You got to think about these things. It’s wonderful to have a well-written description that you get an A plus from your English composition teacher. I don’t care about descriptions that are written that way. The first 2 or 3 sentences and the first paragraph, sure, make that well written. The rest of it, it’s all functional. Keyword SEO value, making sure your show comes up in more searches.

 

Long-Term Residual Value

Those are the two little tidbits I wanted to share with all of you, especially you newer podcasters who might not know this. The main point of this episode is to talk about how blog creation benefits you as a podcaster in your podcast’s long-term residual value. There is a ton of value to be had. If you got a podcast that’s just an audio show, I’m glad you’re recording your podcast and putting it out there as an audio show. That’s great because at least you’re recording that content, putting it out there and making it available for more of the world to listen to and benefit from. That’s a great thing.

Congratulations on doing that but I’m here to tell you that you’re leaving an opportunity on the table. You are waiting to be discovered by so many more people through your website and podcast episodes not by listening to them but by converting them into verbal SEO blog post text, which is the currency in Google, especially if you’re talking about things that people desperately need. If people have needs that you will meet and they’re desperate, they are searching for you probably at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. They’re probably going to Google first.

Even if at some point they think, “Maybe I could look for a podcast,” they’re probably going to Google first. Most of us do. If people decide they want to listen to a podcast, then there’s some SEO within the podcast apps about your author field and the description of your podcast. You want to optimize that too but there’s only so much data there. It’s only going to do so much for you. The blog post is the key and currency for the long-term residual value of your podcast.

There you go. That’s what I want to share with you in this episode. I hope you all got great value out of that. Remember those of you reading who haven’t seen the visuals and images, go to Podetize.com. There is a section in the menu for the Feed Your Brand Podcast. You’ll find the blog post for this and all of our episodes there. You can check it out or watch the video there too.

Thanks so much, everyone. I hope that you will come back for another episode and hopefully get some more value in the future ones. If you haven’t been reading a lot, a lot of times, it’s me and my co-host Tracy or sometimes just her. You get a little variety. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks so much. We’ll be back next time.

 

Important Links

• Podetize.com
• Wix
• Weebly
• Squarespace
• WordPress
• The Best and Worst Podcast Websites – Past Episode
• Take the Lead Radio
• Spiritually Hungry
• Spiritually Hungry – Apple Podcasts