FYB 190 | Negative SEO

 

Inviting great guests and producing engaging episodes are not the only requirements to build a strong podcast following. You must also be wary of negative SEO that could destroy your online presence. Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard share tips on addressing black hat SEO tactics, malicious posts, and content hijacking that could mess up your podcast’s online reputation and rankings. They explain how to bury negative search terms deep into Google search results by creating relevant and keyword-rich content. Tom and Tracy also emphasize the need for a well-audited business website, which is one of the main reasons for negative SEO if not managed properly.

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here


 

Negative SEO: How To Fix It And Boost Your Podcast’s Google Rankings

We’re going to talk about negative SEO for podcasters and how to fix and boost your podcast’s Google rankings. This is something that too many podcasters don’t consider. I especially meet a lot of people, even if they’ve been podcasting for a while, that think of their podcast as an audio show and don’t consider the Google impact of their podcast. I think SEO has something to do with their website and not with the podcast. I’m very excited that we’re going to talk about this, Tracy.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That doesn’t apply to Google. It applies to Apple, Spotify, Bing, it applies to anything that you’re using a search engine algorithm for. That’s what we have to understand. That applies everywhere. If we do it for Google, we’re doing it for the podcast app too. It works. Except that Google does a better job of tracking and walking through more data than Apple, Spotify, or any of the podcast search engines do because those podcast search engines only work with titles and descriptions for episodes.

Also, the name of the show, author, description, and category for the show itself, the show level. That’s how this works. It’s thinking that we have to get in right our titles to our episodes and our descriptions. If we do a great job of having blogs or other things, but we’re using those same titles and descriptions, then we’re doing our job across all search engines from Google to Spotify.

That is so important, and I’m glad that you’re sharing that and that we’re discussing this. It’s critical. You want to get the most out of your podcast. You want to be found by more listeners. You’ve got to think about these things.

I want to define negative SEO and what some people call reverse SEO, which is what we’re talking about here. I’m talking about negative SEO fixes because what happens is that some of you may have problems. I know one who’s on the call who’s had this problem before. You have issues where you are being negatively associated with something that you don’t want to be.

It could be something distasteful. It could be a scam or fraud. It could be anything having to do with somebody putting a bad review in for you or your company. There’s a whole host of things that could be happening, but there can also be what we call black hat SEO tactics happening to you, which is someone who wants your keyword and wants to take it and use it for themselves. They’re hijacking it. That’s what negative SEO tends to be.

Reverse SEO is the suppression of negative links. That can be anything negative about you, your company, or your industry. Cryptocurrency has lots of negative links associated with it. It can be hijacking the ability for somebody to find your great information because it’s in the way. That’s what we’re addressing. It’s these types of things.

 

FYB 190 | Negative SEO

 

It combines malicious attacks, purposeful attacks on you and your keywords, and trying to tarnish your reputation with Google and steal your SEO rankings away. That can be happening in blogs, videos, and podcasts. It happens in all those places because they run in the same search engine. It’s malicious, but it can also be functional in the way. It can also be reputation based.

I know this from a fabulous crisis PR person who’s an expert in this, who has told us again and again that when you have a reputation issue, very typically, it’s a former employee or a family member. Those are the two biggest areas that tarnish your reputation somewhere. Those are the ones that are out to get you. If you think about this, you might be going through a bad divorce, you might be having some issues with a child, your kid who’s pissed at you about something.

If we learn anything from what goes has gone on in the world, it’s those family members who are tanking people and harming their reputations. Whether or not it’s true doesn’t matter. That’s what’s happening. It’s associating you, your name, and your company with something that’s negative that could impact your business and your podcast name. It could even be your podcast name

Also, just your good name. We see it happen in political campaigns too. We see people that have a son or a daughter that write a book or come out in the media and talk about them. You have all these negative search terms that you’re showing up in.

This is a very important thing to understand that podcasting can help you in a powerful way. You have to. If you have a negative SEO situation, this is one time when you’re not paying for video, audio, and blog, it is the time to get it and pay for that. Even if you don’t do business with us here at Podetize, that’s not you’re on our DIY side. You’re just publishing episodes.

This is one time when you’re trying to combat this that I urge you to find the funds. It is going to be the cheapest way. There are crisis PR companies who come to me and say, “We are going to buy a podcast package, or we’re going to buy guest episodes. We’re going to buy our way into guesting to help reverse this negativity.” This can happen. This is a powerful tool for you to be able to use.

It is true in podcast listening apps to a lesser degree only because all there is there for those apps to provide in search results is the titles and descriptions of your show and of your episodes. Certainly, that will help and you want to maximize that. The same thing I’m going to say applies to that and applies to your ranking in Google and your SEO, the keyword phrases that are associated with you.

 

I want everybody to understand that the results both in Google and in podcast apps come up most recently published stuff first. The relevance of how recently things have been published comes up in search results first. If it isn’t obvious, I want to emphasize this. It’s worth emphasizing. Older results, the older they are in time, the further down in the search results they come up. I want to ask a rhetorical question to all the readers here.

How many of you click through to page 3 or 4 or beyond of the Google search results? I bet the answer is very few. If we were taking a live poll, everybody else on social media here, I probably had 100 people and they would say they don’t go past page 1 or certainly past page 2. Now, I have a comment here from someone saying, “There’s page 2 or 3?” Yeah, there is. You want to dominate page one and push everything down.

How do you do that? You flood all of these channels with new content. That means the more podcast episodes you publish in a short period of time through a crisis PR situation, the faster you’re going to accomplish moving everybody else off page one and getting whatever that negative stuff is so far buried in history. No one’s going to be aware of it because they’re not searching that deeply.

That’s the number one piece of advice. Publish and get more content out there. Tracy, as you were saying, if you haven’t been publishing a video for your episodes, get a video done and get that up on YouTube. If you haven’t been creating blog posts for your episodes, create a comprehensive, verbal SEO post and get that up on your website. If you’ve been publishing 1 episode a week, publish 2 or 3. Do this for a period of time. Maybe you only have to do it for a couple of months, three months, a quarter, then you could go back.

This is the plan. To think about if you want to combat negative, you do need to do it speedily. You want to have a 30-day plan for this. What I recommend to crisis PR companies is to do 4 guest episodes and 4 of your own episodes. That way it’s coming at it from two directions and you’re getting a minimum of eight. I do recommend they try to do 12. I think 12 can push you all the way down on the front page because 10 is about typical in terms of there being 10 spots on the first page of Google.

If you’re going to do 12, this is the way to do it. If you can do 12 in 30 days, so if you could do 8 episodes of your own and 4 guest spots, 8 guest spots, and 4 of your own, whatever it is, I recommend you offer to pay for your guest spots. Not to pay for the spot but to pay a rush fee so that you can time it and pay for a titling and description edit or override. You might offer them $200 enough to cover production. Think about it like that. Do you know what production is? $200 should more than cover production. You could do this fairly economically for less than $1,000 in a month.

You can do this. This is cheaper than your crisis PR. Those firms will cost you a minimum of $50,000 in a crisis month. That’s what they charge because it’s an urgent issue and they have to get you on TV and they have to do all of these things. This is the cheapest thing that they do. A lot of them do subcontract out to us to let us help them with these kinds of things.

TikTok

 

What we do is we say, “You want to make sure that all the guest spots you’re going to do have video. You want to make sure that you know what negative keywords you’re trying or a set of negative keywords.” it might be your name with fraud, your name with scam, and you want to use those exact phrases. That’s why you want to be careful about how it’s used. If you’ve got Podetize fraud as something you’re trying to combat, or we’re trying to combat, is just say understanding why reversing Podetize fraud is necessary.

There’s always a way to spin that negative keyword. Use it and have it be a positive instead of a negative. If you’re trying to push that search term down, you’ve got to use it.

Explaining the fake Podetize scam. You’ve got fake Podetize scam as your keyword, but Podetize scam is there because that’s what’s showing up in search engines. I looked, and it’s not, by the way. If you type in Podetize fraud, what you get is our privacy policy because we talk about fraud protection in our privacy policy. You get all of our information coming up when you type in any negative word and the term Podetize. We don’t even have a bad review out there.

You can combat a bad review, but you have to understand what keyword it’s ranking for. Use that and then put the positive spin on the front or the back of it so that you’re not putting it within the keyword. The keyword needs to stay exact. This is why you want to offer to pay any guest spot to make sure that those words stay intact in the description and in the title and that’s what you’re paying that $200 for. It’s for making sure that they run it in the month that you want it to run in and that they’re using that phrase in both the title and the description properly.

You have a little oversight of it to approve it and make sure it’s reading the way you want it to read. That’s what you’re paying for. You’re not paying for advertising. You’re just being regularly interviewed and you’re going to discuss and talk about what happened and why you have this negative review or why you have this negative issue.

You’re going to talk about it and you’re going to authentically say, “I wish this didn’t happen. I wish this customer’s transparent about why they’re giving this bad review,” or “This bad review’s happening, but this person has never been a customer before.” That happened to us on Facebook once. They’d never been a customer before. Why are they even bothering to do this? Why is this a problem in the world? You could talk about it from that perspective.

Why are fake reviews an issue? Now your whole conversation’s about fake reviews, and yet you’re still addressing your fake review. That happened there in a different way. It would be a fake Podetize fraud review or something like that. That would be what you wanted to cover. By doing this, you are setting yourself up to suppress those terms because your content is fresh and new. Using the verbal SEO that Tom was talking about, those words that you’re saying it’s going to outrank any written post.

FYB 190 | Negative SEO

Negative SEO: Dominate page one of Google search results by flooding channels with new podcast episodes in just a short period of time.

 

This is what you have to remember. Most of these things are done maliciously. Somebody’s hiding behind that. They use a fake name. They won’t go on video. They very rarely children of celebrities aside because that’s happening in the world nowadays. Those people are willing to come out there and say something because they want the publicity of that.

For the most part, when they’re doing this as a black hat or malicious attack from an SEO standpoint to commandeer the keywords or to harm you, that employee or ex-employee doesn’t want to come out. Your kid doesn’t want to say it. They’re trying to use it to defame you, but they are trying to stay away from that official defamation territory. They’re trying to do it by not putting themselves out there or in front of that. They’re trying to avoid the legal repercussions of that.

That’s where you being video, audio, and blog can come out in front of that in an authentic way, putting yourself out there. The reality is, if there’s a real customer who might have been affected by that, they’re going to look at that and go, “They took this head on and this is a reason for me to do business. They have integrity.” You’re fighting it on both fronts.

That’s important to do, especially if it’s a customer or something. It can be like playing Whac-A-Mole at some point, can’t it? If they’re creating a fake profile on social media account, then there’s no real person behind it, and it’s on you to try to prove they’re a fake account.

They’re fake emails and fake profiles and you should report them. You should go in and report them on social. It is like Whac-A-Mole. You’re right, Tom, about that. That’s hard. The reality is that when we’re talking about Google ranking or SEO ranking, Google owns YouTube. The video and audio are going to rank. Google podcasts exist. These things show up in those places where this fake person, the person who’s using fake personas is hiding, and they’re less likely to show up there. If you’ve ever read them, they’re always short, nasty posts. They’re never long. They’re not going to go on a 30-minute interview and talk about you unless they’re in that super celebrity category.

That’s going to be rare that that’s going to happen, and those people can afford a crisis PR company to help combat that. You can’t. Your business can be at risk. I’ve seen doctors and dentists and other people with fake reviews on Yahoo and in the system. The only way to combat that is to pay for a program within the Yahoo system or pay for the program within the different review systems. They’re trying to get you to charge that. There’s a whole nefarious system built to do fake so that you’ll buy the program.

That’s outside of Google and the podcast ecosystem. That’s a different subject.

A former employee or a family member are the two biggest areas that tarnish your reputation. Click To Tweet

You can. Google would rather do content, so you can push down those review services on Google when you have content that covers it. That’s the point of what we’re talking about here. There are a couple of things I do want to make everybody aware of and think about as we’re talking about what you call reverse SEO or negative SEO fixes, which results in what we call reverse SEO. We’re trying to reverse and fix these malicious attacks. We’re trying to get back our keywords and our good name.

Part of it is that we want to make sure that we aren’t contributing to the problem by how we’re handling our websites, podcasts, and YouTube channel. The first thing that we want to do is make sure that we’re not paying for fake stuff. You’re not paying for bad backlinks. If you are paying for them, you’re opening yourself up to the attacks more likely there because they see this going on. They know they can hide the way that they do it. They can hijack your keywords, your backlinks, and your results because they see that you’ve already done this and there are lots of bad backlinks and other things going on there.

If you are a client of ours and you think your website might be an issue, make an appointment with Tom and Cody and let them help you. Make an appointment with our sales team and they will review it. They will pull your thing through SCM Rush and they will check on what’s going on on your site to see if any of these things are occurring. Don’t pay for this. You know if you’ve done it. Don’t pay for fake followers on YouTube. Don’t pay for these things, fake reviews, fake comments, fake views. You know you’ve done it. You know who you are out there. You’re opening yourself up to the attack when you do this.

I’d like to add that there’s no shortcut to good SEO. There are proper ways to configure the pages of your website, your main pages, and things like that. That’s true. You can add metadata. If there’s no actual text on those pages that have those keywords on them. It’s not going to help you to stuff the metadata in the backend with them. Google cares about real content. Creating a comprehensive blog post that is a speech-to-text verbal SEO version of a podcast episode, Google loves that content. That’s the content they want to serve people. What we’re saying is, as a podcaster, a video caster, use your skill.

Use what you do. You’re all set up for success.

Publish more real organic content that’s going to rank and push this other garbage down because, in comparison, the proportionality of it, what they’re doing, short posts, scraping about something, not with a real person behind it. Your posts, real person, quality content, video, audio, blog on that. It’s going to flood the timeline of content with a lot of great stuff and push the other stuff out of relevance.

Check your stats overall. That’s the first thing because you’ll be able to tell what those backlinks are if you’ve got a lot of bad backlinks and what’s going on. Remember that cross-links and the things that you do from talking about your podcast in a blog post, even if it’s a short post and you’ve got cross-links to your guest and out to resources and other things like that are not bad. Google sees them. They’re highly valued. Usually, they go back and forth because the guest is also cross-linking back to you.

FYB 190 | Negative SEO

Negative SEO: Make sure you are not paying for bad backlinks, or else you are opening yourself up to attacks.

 

Those things, they look at them, they’re high value, they suppress and pull down, but if you’ve got those bad backlinks in there, it can be counterproductive and start to destroy the good things that you’re working on. You do want to get rid of them. You want to purge your side of them. You want to make sure you don’t do them. Don’t pay for them. Check your stats and take a look at them. If you start to see slow site speeds, that’s also some indicators.

We have a web maintenance program that we run here at Podetize, and we check site speeds every month. When we see a crawl, like where it went from doing well and now it’s doing slow, usually it’s slow and it’s building up to getting better and better over time. That’s the way it goes. You start out at 50% or something like that and we’re helping you improve that. That’s the goal. If you see that you had a great score and then all of a sudden, it starts dropping, that’s usually a sign that a whole bunch of things came in and are encumbering and rerouting things on your site causing a slow load.

It’s usually a pre-sign of an attack. If it’s not already happening, it’s coming. That is an indicator. Bad keyword spikes. If porn topics are starting to show up on your site, hacks are happening. You don’t have a porn website. If you have cryptocurrency terms and you don’t have a crypto website, this is a sign of a hack that’s coming or a negative SEO that is going to be coming in. This is something you want to keep your eye on. If you start to see these irrelevant keyword terms and you know you didn’t talk about them, it’s time to rethink what’s going on and take a deeper dive.

Content scrapes can happen. This is highly unlikely to happen to a podcaster who’s blogging, but it can happen if you have a website that is not WordPress. It’s more likely to happen on a HubSpot website, a Wix, a Squarespace, a Weebly, a podcast website. The reason is that they take longer to index if they index at all. Someone is smart about this and wants to do a content scrape.

Let’s say you’re ranking on amazing real estate terms and they see that you’ve got a Weebly website, they know they could take all of your blog content that’s over there and it won’t be ranking on Google fast enough, and they can pop it onto a WordPress website and outrank you. Now they’ve gotten in before you index. Their content becomes what Google looks like as original content and not yours. They’re stealing your content, your IP.

Now you can report them. You can do a copyright report through Google removal. It takes forever. It’s difficult, but it can reset that. That’s what you’re going to have to do to reclaim your original content. It’s highly unlikely. If you’re using a WordPress website and you’re following the process of doing video, audio, and blog, all those things are going to outrank and rank before, it’s going to happen so quickly that Google’s ranking you because you have all those three components. It’s highly unlikely even if you only had two of those components. It’s highly unlikely that Google isn’t going to be ranking you faster than anyone could scrape you. They will always then be following you. You are the original content, you’re the originator.

Checking your stats, checking what’s going on doing a whole review of your website, an audit of that can tell whether or not that’s occurring. There are sites like Copyscape that look for plagiarism across the web. If you’re concerned about your content, you can type the title of your show or the opening paragraph of your blog and or your description and they’ll check for plagiarism. This is how schools do this. There’s a bunch of those. If you want to look for plagiarized content, there are a bunch of free tools that you can use out there.

If you have a WordPress website for publishing podcast videos, audio, or blogs, you will probably rank faster than those who want to scrape your content. Click To Tweet

I wanted to frame this up for you that there are some things you can do to indicate it, be checking on it, be sure that nothing’s going to be happening to you if you’re worried about it, especially if you’re in an area where there’s a lot of scams and other things. I’d say real estate, finance, cryptocurrency, of course, anything, if that is your industry, those things happen. It happens a lot in the music industry as well. If you’re covering the music industry or you’re you have a music-based podcast, it can happen over there as well. Those are some big industries that it’s common in. Are there any ones I’m missing, Tom, that you can think of off the top of your head?

I’m sure there are. I wasn’t thinking about that right now, but what I was thinking is, Tracy, I’m glad you’re on my team and you’re not against me because knowing how to fix it means you also know how to try to attack someone if you want to.

I would never use my skills for bad. You know that. I only use my skills for good.

I understand that. That is true, but what a brilliant scheme, if you were not wanting to do everything completely ethically, to know that Google is not in alignment with Weebly websites at all. They’re also not very much in alignment with the Wix website. If there’s good content there, you could scrape that content and put it on a WordPress site. Google isn’t going to pay attention to the Weebly or the Wix site much at all. They’re not even going to flag it as duplicate content because they’re not fully indexing some of these other platforms.

It’s never a good idea for anybody to duplicate content and put it on their own website. If Google does eventually see there’s duplicate content on more than one site, like on more than one WordPress site, that’ll negatively impact both websites. Duplicate content is not a good thing. Is Google going to see it as duplicate content if it’s on one of these other platforms that don’t get indexed properly? Maybe.

They won’t even notice it.

I know. In some ways, it’s a brilliant, maybe sinister tactic somewhat to try to steal someone’s authority, and it’s not good. I don’t recommend trying to fight it, honestly. Even the copyright law, if you own the copyright, that’s not a path that’s going to produce good results if you’re going to fight it.

FYB 190 | Negative SEO

Negative SEO: It’s never a good idea to duplicate content and put it on their own website. If Google sees duplicate content, it will negatively impact both websites and will not be indexed properly.

 

It’s not fast. There is a takedown process and you should do it if you’ve got a whole bunch of stuff scraped. If you got your entire blog scraped, you should report the website because Google will take down the whole website. They’ll de-list them. That can happen, but it does take time. There’s a whole process for it. The important part is that there is a process for it.

By the fact that that’s your voice on there, and you’ve got the voice associated with the transcript, with all of those things, there’s no way for them to argue that you’re not the copyright holder. There’s no argument on the other side. They’ll move it on and take down the site. They’ll start a new one somewhere else eventually, and you’ll have to take it down again. It happens like that.

My concern is that this is going to happen more if you are not taking your podcast and turning it into the written word. It’s going to start happening where someone’s going to get wise to what we’ve been talking about and what we’ve been doing, and that they’re going to say, “I want to start a what a power website in the real estate space. This podcast over here has no website blog. They’ve got a landing page or they’ve got this ClickFunnel. That’s all they’ve got. They have their podcast, but if I took their podcast and transcribed the thing, and threw it on a website, Google would be ranking me for their keywords in no time at all. All I had to do was take all the links within that and send the links to my stuff to whatever it is that I want to sell and advertise for.”

As I said, I’m glad you’re on my team. That’s true, though. It’s an interesting point. Even if someone’s intention isn’t so nefarious, when you have content out there as a podcast only or as a videocast only on YouTube, and you don’t have a website, or you have a website and you don’t have a blog and you’re not using the written form of your own content, I feel like shame on you. You are leaving all kinds of value on the table. If somebody else is benefiting from it and you’re not, you’ve allowed that to happen. It’s not that the other person should be doing it, but you’ve allowed it to happen.

Think about it in sports terms. You’re leaving them an open net. The goalie is not in the net and they can kick the soccer ball or get the hockey puck in there so much easier and win and you lose. It’s wonderful. You listen to this show and you are a podcast or you’re recording and creating content, that’s awesome. If you’re reading this because you’re considering starting a podcast, by all means, do, but you’ve got to put your content out there in every form.

You’re staking your claim on your content in every which way that makes it not only harder for someone. Someone could do it, someone could attack your site, sure. It doesn’t happen all that often. What you’re doing is building a bigger moat around your territory and making it harder for someone else to compete with you. That’s the big message.

This is what I want to say. Black hat hackers and people who do this are nefarious. They know what they’re doing. They’re being malicious about this. They’re way ahead of all of us. There’s no question about it. I’ve got my eye on this. The tactics that they use or the way trolls come into YouTube and why they’re hijacking comments and doing stuff like that, it doesn’t have common sense to most people.

Implement practices that will make hackers think twice before coming after you. This also allows you to beat out lazy competitors who will not put in the same amount of effort. Click To Tweet

You look at it and you think it’s a one-off, but it’s a pattern of behavior. It has to have something that’s of value to them at the end of the day that they’re making money off of or they wouldn’t take time to do it. There’s a whole industry doing this. That’s going to happen anyway. The reality is that if you’re doing the best practices, you’re not an easy mark. That’s the difference there.

They’re going to go for the easier marks.

That’s easy for them. The second thing though is that if you think about this, if you built in these best practices that make some malicious hacker think twice before coming after you, you’re also got to be beating out your lazy competitors because most people will not put the amount of work in or the time or the thought in. I don’t think that what we do here is a lot of work. It has a lot of best practices built into it. It’s extremely effective for as little work as you can possibly do. That’s how I look at it. I want us to do as little as possible and get the maximum results, benefits, and competitive advantage as possible. If that helps us fend off hackers as well, then let’s do it.

I agree with that statement, Tracy. It’s very good. I also think we should be transparent with our readers here that it does take work, though, to do it and do it right. You either have to spend quite a bit of time doing it yourself if you’re bootstrapping it or you’ve got to pay to save time and have someone else do it for you. It’s going to take one or the other. I remember learning in college a very important rule in business. The three variables of anything in business are time, cost, and quality. You can have any two at the expense of the third. You can do it cheaply, but it’s going to take you a lot of time.

Your quality Is probably not going to be the best practice.

You can have high quality in what you want, but you’ve got to put the time in if you’re not going to spend the money. Those are the three. You can have the two at the expense of the third. You can have high quality and you can have it fast, but you’re going to have to pay for it. You’re going to have to spend some money. Those are the three pillars.

Our goal is to try to keep the cost to be reasonable. It’s not something we want to be gouging.

FYB 190 | Negative SEO

Negative SEO: Every piece of podcast content you produce must be 30 minutes or longer. Shortening content than that could be less powerful.

 

There are people out there that are in college, maybe starting a podcast. They don’t have the money to spend on it. We understand that. You can have it be the best. You got to put in the time, though, to create quality.

I want to recap quickly. In case you are having any of these issues, I want you to know that we’re here to support you on this. If you want to figure out a strategy, we’re here for you. This is a great time. If you join the coaching hall and you say, “I need a strategy for this,” we’ll pop you on. We’ll hot seat you. We’ll talk to you about this here. You can also make private one-on-ones and you could do some things like that if you need to do that as well. This is something that we can help you with. It’s like a specialized topic and guesting strategy that you can put into place. I want you to know that that’s available to you if you need it.

Here are my three guides for it. Every piece of content and everything that you do must be 30 minutes or longer. It’s not powerful enough if it’s shorter than 30 minutes. You don’t want to go on somebody’s ten-minute show. You don’t want to go on a TikTok. That’s not going to be as useful to you as doing a 30-minute guest spot longer or doing your own show for 30 minutes. Thinking about that, everything needs to be 30 minutes. You want to do at minimum 8 in 30 days. Eight pieces of content in 30 days.

If you can do it, do 12. My recommendation is if you’ve already got your podcast and you’re doing 4 episodes, do your 4 regular episodes. Don’t make them all customized to the topic area. You’re going to do four that are specifically to combat the negative SEO, the keyword changes that you need. You’re going to do 4 of those, 4 guest spots. You’re going to guest on somebody else’s show because that’s outside authority.

Four guest spots, 4 of your own that are targeted at those keywords and 4 of your regular, because that still helps you rank because it’s new content in your space. It’s helping to also build up that Google ranking for you overall and keeping your site authority in play. That’s my recommendation to you in those areas. Get a website check. Get an audit. If you’re in this situation, assess the situation properly throughout. Don’t look and say, “That’s happening on the first page of Google,” and not check your website.

Point of emphasis here for those of you new podcasters listening to this or podcasters that started and thought, “It’s all about being on all the listening apps.” If you don’t have a website, you are missing out. You need a website. Burn that in your brain.

It’s going to change the way you are discovered on your own podcast app in addition. It’s going to change the conversion and it’s going to do so much power for you. It has the most longevity return on investment over a long period of time.

A business website can change the way your own podcast app can be discovered. It has the most longevity return on investment over a long period of time. Click To Tweet

That’s it. We’ve covered that one. That’s maybe a little longer than our typical episode, but this is a lot to unpack. We even, in a lot of ways, scratched the surface. You could take a deep dive into SEO and get lost for years. You’ve got to start somewhere. Fortunately, podcasters, speak your way to it. It’s your best plan.

Thanks, everyone, for reading this episode. We are here every week because we do this at a live stream and coaching call for our clients. We are live on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube every single week. You can catch it there and you can, of course, join Podetize. Join into our coaching call and get hot seated and ask questions, which is what we don’t share with you on this show.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back next time with another great episode.

 

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