Getting featured on podcasts as a guest is a great way to boost your SEO and visibility without the hard work of creating your own content from scratch. Podcast audience numbers and engagement are booming so now's a great time to get involved!
It's not necessary to start your own show to take advantage of the benefits. Lots of hosts are eager to be pitched by potential podcast guests with expertise to share on the topics that they cover.
Increase brand visibility with SEO
So what is SEO?
SEO stands for 'Search Engine Visibility' and refers to how high your website ranks on Google. There are lots of well-known ways to make sure your content comes top of the list, such as writing a blog, getting featured on other sites, keyword targeting, making sure your technical SEO is up to scratch, and many others.
If you've read any marketing tips, chances are you haven't heard about how getting featured on podcasts can massively improve your SEO and brand visibility. In fact, we think it's one of the most undervalued SEO tactics out there.
Here's why!
Get more backlinks from podcasts
Backlinks are links from a certain page of a website pointing to another website. If a person adds links to your websites on theirs, you'll automatically have a backlink from them and vice versa.
Google and other search engines treat backlinks as votes of confidence. In other words, the more "votes" your site has, the more likely it is to rank highly for relevant searches.
When you get interviewed on a podcast, the host is very likely to link to your website or specific page in the episode show notes, especially if you encourage them to do so. Episode show notes are syndicated all over the web by the dozens of podcast apps and aggregators that exist. So you won't just get one backlink in return for your time, you'll likely get one from each podcast directory where the show is listed.
Many hosts also post a transcript of the episode on the podcast's official website and that's another opportunity to gain backlinks. Note that larger and more established podcasts are likely to have greater domain authority and therefore their backlinks are more valuable.
Being invited to appear on podcasts as a guest can be a more cost-effective and impactful way to generate backlinks rather than hiring an expensive outside agency.
If you've not already got a podcast website, here are some tips to get you started.
Repurpose the transcript as brand new content
You can use the transcript of the episode that you appeared in and publish it on your own website as brand new written content that can rank by itself. Some of your audience may even prefer written content over audio.
However you may need to transcribe the episode yourself using a third-party service or manually.
Be sure to embed the podcast episode audio on your website too.
Increase your dwell time
SEO experts tend to agree that dwell time (the amount of time a visitor stays on your site) positively influences your search rankings. More time spent on a page is taken as a signal that the content is engaging and useful.
When you get featured on a podcast you should re-post it to your own website with an embedded audio player.
If a visitor finds your page and listens to the entire episode then your average dwell time will hit the roof! Even short fifteen minute podcast episodes could be enough to make an impact.
Get a social media boost
Podcast hosts tend to be very active on social media channels like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Often it's one of the primary ways to reach a bigger audience and improve their podcast listener numbers.
When you get on a podcast you will usually benefit from the host sharing the episode on their accounts and tagging your social media handles. That's good for improving the rankings of your own social media accounts; the more your accounts are mentioned, the more likely they are to appear higher in Google's search results.
Of course you should share your episode appearance on your own social media accounts too.
Looking for a better way to find and pitch podcasts?
If you're looking for podcasts to pitch as a potential guest, Rephonic is a great way to find the right shows in any topic or niche and quickly find the best email address to contact them with.
