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Ask HN: Is SEO important to consider as a podcast host?

by shrumm on 5/10/20, 6:19 PM with 1 comments

We recently launched a podcast to complement our SaaS app. We went with the default website from Simplecast which looks good but it's not optimized for SEO. Most of our listens come from our social media promotion.

[For everyone running podcasts] Is SEO friendliness something you worry about? If so, what do you do about it?

  • by davismwfl on 5/10/20, 6:37 PM

    I don't have a podcast, but when I was consulting I helped some clients with marketing and traffic. The answer is yes, SEO is important to acquire users searching for topics, but if your listeners are only getting to the podcast because they are clients (and that is your only audience) then the value of SEO is important but not as critical as if you are trying to grow your audience through organic search.

    To be fair, I know nothing of Simplecast's default website so am useless there. What we had done for multiple clients was to build tooling which would create landing pages for each episode with solid SEO. Each landing page could/should also be tailored for the ads they would run etc. It wasn't rare to have 4-5 unique landing pages for a single episode, marketing it differently to different audiences. That doesn't include the A/B testing on each landing page as well which would happen. If you are trying to grow your audience organically or even through marketing you need solid episode landing pages with good SEO so you rank appropriately.

    Full disclosure it has been a few years since I did that work so there maybe some other things to take advantage of now in reference to the SEO and specifically the metadata you can use to rank better.