Pod­casts have emerged as one of the go-to sources of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Pod­casts have been around for near­ly a decade but its pop­u­lar­i­ty has crashed the roof in recent years. Many dig­i­tal mar­keters are of the opin­ion that pod­cast­ing is going to give a tough com­pe­ti­tion to video mar­ket­ing in the years to come. Its bud­get-friend­ly nature is par­tic­u­lar­ly talk of the town in the online world now.

Apart from pro­vid­ing an impec­ca­ble audio expe­ri­ence to the lis­ten­ers, pod­casts can great­ly con­tribute to boost your SEO score with the help of show notes. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, search engines are unable to decode and index the audio. So no mat­ter how much your pod­cast series goes viral, it won’t improve your SEO unless you have incor­po­rat­ed show notes.

In case you are won­der­ing what makes pod­cast show notes so much SEO-friend­ly, you need to keep on read­ing to find a com­pre­hen­sive answer to your question:

1. Allow you to add keywords

When it comes to SEO, there is no way you can keep key­words out of the equa­tion. Key­words are the pri­ma­ry source for any­one to find the desired con­tent in search engines. As spo­ken above, Google can’t index audios and there is hard­ly any chance peo­ple can reach out to your pod­cast by sim­ply typ­ing key phras­es. That’s where pod­cast show notes swing into action.

Show notes give you space to include the most searched words which go best with the sub­stance of your pod­cast and busi­ness niche. Tran­scrip­tion is one way to get the job done. How­ev­er, lat­er you can make cer­tain changes in the tran­script in order to make it more spe­cif­ic and read­able. You may also exploit the show notes software.

For many peo­ple, show notes don’t go beyond embed­ding pod­cast titles and scrib­bling a cou­ple of lines. Be sure that Google does not enter­tain con­tent hav­ing less than 300 words. So you have to put a lit­tle more hard work to get the max­i­mum SEO juice through pod­cast show notes.

2. You can incorporate backlinks

You can incorporate backlinks

Back­links play a cru­cial role to ele­vate your SEO rank­ing. They give you a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to get con­nect­ed with oth­er high-author­i­ty web­sites. The stronger your con­nec­tion with qual­i­ty web­sites, the eas­i­er it gets for search engine spi­ders to trace you. Pod­cast show notes allow you to back­link your con­tent and earn SEO score.

Google treats back­links as a rep­u­ta­tion tool. Of course, Google algo­rithms penalise you for unnec­es­sar­i­ly adding the back­links but if they are includ­ed in a mea­sured pro­por­tion then the search engine rates your con­tent as a well-researched piece. The same goes for the audi­ence.

Peo­ple are more like­ly to find your pod­cast trust­wor­thy if it is sup­port­ed by authen­tic links. Gone are the days when busi­ness­es could feed any­thing to peo­ple, who had no option but to trust what you said. It is the era of infor­ma­tion over­load. Today, your pod­cast lis­ten­ers want proof and back­links serve this pur­pose quite con­vinc­ing­ly. Make sure your links are in total rel­e­vance with your pod­cast theme, oth­er­wise Google will drop your ranking.

In dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, a good rela­tion­ship comes handy. As you back­link oth­er web­sites in your pod­cast show notes, they will also give atten­tion to your web­site and you might start to get the influx of back­links from them as well. All said and done, show notes can have a huge say in your link build­ing strategy.

3. Improves accessibility and user experience

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a fair pro­por­tion of our soci­ety sub­scribes to hear­ing loss. Accord­ing to the fig­ures pro­vid­ed by the World Health Orga­ni­za­tion (WHO), about 5 per­cent of the total world pop­u­la­tion is under­go­ing this dilem­ma. Sim­ply put, your pod­cast audios mean noth­ing to them. Pod­cast show notes are a great tool to give them access to the infor­ma­tion and if your show notes are craft­ed with per­fec­tion, they will become fre­quent vis­i­tors to your website.

If you know your lis­ten­ers, it will not be tough to get an idea about what you should include in pod­cast show notes and what you should skip.

Some­times peo­ple are encour­aged to read show notes due to oth­er rea­sons as well. For exam­ple, they want to go skim through the con­tent before decid­ing whether or not to lis­ten to your pod­cast or sim­ply because they have for­got­ten to bring their ear­phones. It leads to a bet­ter user expe­ri­ence which holds great impor­tance in the eyes of Google.

In addi­tion to that, peo­ple tend to down­load pod­cast audios and lis­ten to them at their con­ve­nience. But they have to stay on your web­site in order to read notes. It brings the SEO rule into play; the longer you man­age to sus­tain the vis­i­tors on your web­site, the bet­ter your SEO score will be.

4. Drives traffic

Busi­ness­es make pod­casts because they want to give the best pos­si­ble lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence to their lis­ten­ers. How­ev­er, the under­ly­ing object of pod­cast­ing is to mar­ket your busi­ness and dri­ve max­i­mum traf­fic. In order to make an effec­tive pod­cast, you have to con­vey more infor­ma­tion in min­i­mum time. There­fore, you can’t unveil so many things in audio that your busi­ness may be offer­ing because it can great­ly dis­tract the audience.

For exam­ple, you speak about a cer­tain prod­uct of your com­pa­ny but what if those lis­ten­ers have ques­tions regard­ing that? That’s where pod­cast show notes become very effec­tive. You can add links to your web­site in show notes where peo­ple can get the answer to their rel­e­vant queries. Or if you are offer­ing an online course, then you can men­tion the link in show notes where lis­ten­ers can sign up and become part of your journey.

The final thoughts

So if you have been won­der­ing in all these years that why peo­ple both­er writ­ing pod­cast show notes when the audio is already avail­able, the stand­out rea­son would be to get on top of the SEO game. Record­ing and edit­ing a pod­cast might seem too much labor but show notes are what actu­al­ly give you the best return on the invest­ment of time and effort. Skip­ping them will leave you far behind from your competitors.

SOURCE: Dig­i­tal Doughnut