When it comes to podcast strategies to grow your podcast, one strategy that often gets overlooked (because it takes time) is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Now people are starting to market a "New" thing known as PSO (Podcast Search Optimization).

Podcast Search Optimization VS Search Engine Optimization

So what is the difference? In reality not much. Tools like Podseo and PSO and Ausha show you information on how often keywords are being search in Apple and Spotify (and others). SEO tools show what people are searching for in Google and other places (YouTube, TikTok, and more).

So THE question is, do people search differently in a Podcast App vs how they search Google? For me, I don't think so. I might just type a keyword "Podcasting Best Practices" where in Google I would type "Podcasting Best Practices Podcast."

Keyword Research Boils Dow To This

Find a keyword that has a fair number of people searching for (somewhere between 20-100 searches), and see how much competition it has. Instead of trying to score for a really popular keyword, score multiple times with less popular (but still be sought after) key words with less competition. Mom said "Don't go play in traffic," but that's what you need to do - but no on the free way.

What is Your Domain Authority?

SEMRush (a great suite of tools) has a domain authority checker.

Tools To Boost Your Podcast SEO on the Web

Free Keyword Tool (That Sucks IMHO)

https://www.wordstream.com/keywords

Google Keyword Tool (Inside of Adsense Account)

https://ads.google.com

Go to Tools > Planning > Keyword Planner (Free and unlimited use)

Keywords Everywhere

Extension for Chrome and Firefox $7/month. Helps you measure traffic and competition for keywords.

https://keywordseverywhere.com/

Also Asked (see what people are asking)

1 Free search a Day or $12/month

https://alsoasked.com/

Answer Socrates

3 searches a day

$15/month gets you 100 searches a month

https://answersocrates.com

Ubsersuggest

Shows key word competition and more. It's a suite of tools to help find keywords, and write articles.$29/month.$290 Lifetime (credits thanks to AI)

https://ubersuggest.com

SERanking

A full suite of tools that helps you create content, competitor comparisons and more. $129/month

https://www.sewranking.com

SEMRUSH

Consider by many people to be "THE" suite of SEO tools (especially finding tools that your competitor is not using, and you should). $139/month

https://www.semrush.com

Page Audit Chrome Extension

A chrome extension that shows all sorts of information about a page so you can then write a similar page that will rank better.

Chrome Extension

Two Tools Dedicated For Podcast SEO

While I'm not sure there is much difference between SEO and PSO, there two tools dedicated for podcasts.

PSO from Ausha

This tool has some nice features, but it also left me frustrated. If you give me seven days to test the tool, give me access to ALL OF IT. I mean every marketer knows that you give it to the customer and let them "get hooked" so when their trial is over they will purchase.

I couldn't do that as much of the tools spotlighted required me to upgrade. Boo.

That being said it does show how much a keyword is searched for (not as specific as some tools for web seo). It also shows you how hard to competition is.

Keep in mind that you need to give your dashboard 24 hours to show some statistics in your dashboard.

Ausha PSO (affiliate)

PodSEO

This is from Andrea De Marsi (Co-founder of Spreaker) and Francesco Baschieri (Co-founder of Spreaker) and it has a similar feature set to the ausha tool.

You can save 10% using the coupon schoolofpodcasting. (affiliate)

I thought it was very cool that Podseo alerted me to the mistake that I had accidentally listed my show twice in Spotify (I moved from Libsyn to Captivate - nuff said).

It has some cool episode planners, and is cheaper than Ausha PSO. Their AI tools looks at your episodes and recommend future ideas and then helps you plan them, and has a calendar showing when the episodes were released.

They also can send you daily updates on your rankings or your competition.

Check it out at podseo.com and use the coupon schoolofpodcasting to save 10%

Because of My Podcast: Paul Colligan

Paul is a huge theater nerd, and loves the musical Chess. There was a version that was awful, but never got to see it. Then he let a library in NYC know he was a podcaster. Then he got access to videos that the public hasn't seen - because he had a podcast. Check out Paul at https://podcastpartnership.com/

Other Items Mentioned

Turn AI Into Your Personal Podcast Analyst! on Buzzcast

SEO for People Who Don't Like SEO Podcast

Podpage - Websites for Podcasters

Captivate - AI Tools Help You Choose Episode Topics

Oura Ring - Body Measurement via a Ring

Just One Tip Podcast

Big Lash Energy Episode 201

Big Lash Interview on Last Week's Episode

This content may contain affiliate links, meaning I earn a small commission if you purchase through these links at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products or services I trust and believe will provide value to you. Thank you for your support!

Mentioned in this episode:

Question of the Month

One of our favorite questions, "What are your top podcasting pet peeves? You know the things that make you press fast forward, delete, or maybe even unfollow... share your frustration with these tactics along with a little bit about your show and your website (so I can add a link in the show notes). You can upload a pre-recorded version or press record on the website. I need your answer by March 27th, 2026

Question of the Month

Want to Make Some Money with Your Podcast?

Pick up any book on podcast monetization, and you will find 90 percent of it only covers how to launch a podcast. If you already have a podcast, you have that information; you’re ready for the next step. Profit from Your Podcast provides top strategies and real-life examples of podcast monetization. This book is more than what to do. It also tells you how to do it. Go to www.profitfromyourpodcast.com/book

Profit From Your Podcast

All right, the buzz phrase here is growing your show

with keywords or search engine optimization, better known as

SEO, which means E-E-A-T, so you can get a little

AGI. And holy cow, Old MacDonald had a farm,

E-I-E-I-O. Can you— I sound like

Christopher Walken. E-I-E-I-O.

Yeah, more cowbell. How— what does this

mean? Because you can get a headache looking at this stuff, and it

can help. And I looked at a lot of tools, watched

a lot of YouTube, and I'm going to come up and tell you if you

want to get into this, because here's the good news. Are you ready? It

only takes more time. Yeah, that's all great, because I don't know about

you, I got a ton of that laying around, just bored out of my gourd.

Not— yeah, so we're going to talk about SEO. Is it

dead? And some simple ways you can find

the right keywords that not everybody's searching

for. When I worked at Lipson, I remember a guy had started a podcast

and it was something called like golf podcast. That's probably not it,

but anyway, and he had been podcasting a

good 3 weeks and wanted to know why he wasn't at the top

of search engines when somebody typed in golf podcast.

Yeah, that's not the way this works. We're gonna get into this to help you

get found, 'cause they gotta find you to hear you.

We also have a cool Because of My Podcast story, and I

did a boo-boo last week and I'm gonna fix it. Hit it, ladies!

The School of Podcasting with Dave

Jackson. Podcasting since

2005, I am your

personal podcast coach, Hall of Famer Dave

Jackson. Thanking you so much for tuning in. If you're new to the

show, this is where we tackle the technology, face

your fears, and flatten the learning curve. The website

schoolofpodcasting.com, the longest-running

podcast about podcasting on the internet. And I'm going to

start off— this is important— last week I

had the fabulous Jana Marie

from Big Lash Energy on the show. That

was the good news. The bad news is I was talking about a producer

who actually co-hosted an episode of Ask the Podcast Coach

with me, Tim Wahlberg. And Tim originally

had a show called Just the Tip, and I said,

don't name your show that because when people search Just the Tip,

yeah, they might get things that aren't exactly podcasting related.

And Jaina said, hey, just a little FYI, nobody's, you know, hot under the

collar, but just for the record, Tim Show is just

one tip from your podcast performance coach.

So Tim, if that ruffled your feathers, I don't think it did. Tim seems like

he's a pretty nice guy, but it's not just the tip, it's just one

tip. I will put a link to that as I did last week in the

show notes, which will be schoolofpodcasting.com/1027.

Also want to say thank you to Nancy because

Nancy is from the Family Tree Food and Stories

podcast. And she said, Dave, I think it was your best episode ever.

It was done narrative style. If you haven't heard it,

I'll put a link to that in the show notes again out

at schoolofpodcasting.com/1027. And I'll also put a link

to Nancy's show. If you like kind of trivia and you're a foodie,

And you like stories, uh, check out her show again, Family Tree

Food and Stories. But let's get to

getting found. I am the head of podcasting at

Podpage, which is a great tool. If you're tired of WordPress,

uh, check out podpage.com-preview and see what

your show would look like. You basically put it in, you pick your

colors, you pick a layout. So whatever you see in those templates, you can

really change. And I'm here to tell you, you can make a website, a great-looking

website, in about 15 minutes. And so

consequently, I am not an SEO, like I'm not a total SEO

guru, but I work a lot in this space, so I'm learning more and more

about search engine optimization. And we have to start at

square one, and that is, are you in Google? Now, before

we get into Apple and Spotify and all that, you should be in

Google. 'Cause everybody uses Google and we'll get into the

whole, but what about AI? Let's just, step one,

are you in Google? There's an easy way to tell.

Go to Google and in the search box type S-I-T-E,

so site colon, and then no space, your website.

schoolofpodcasting.com and you'll see all

the shows and all the links. And like, if anything

shows up, You're in Google, but

you want to have an account in what's called the

Google Search Console. Why? Because it shows you what people are

typing in to find your site. And for me, it's a lot of

anchor, which is weird because I'm not a

fan of Spotify. If you're new to the show, not a fan.

Much better choices as a media host. Love them as a, as a music service,

but not at all as a web host or a

media host. And so I can see where people have typed in

anchor reviews and then they find mine.

So, but that's why I did that. And so the Google Search

Console is a free tool that you can

see, you know, what's coming to your site, where are they coming from,

a lot of information about that. And like, I saw

where one of my most indexed top viewed sites— well,

what do you do there? You put a link or you embed

a newsletter signup, and if it's about a certain

topic, make a lead magnet for that topic. Now that

sounds so duh, but it's— I've done

it and I've seen my newsletter signups

greatly increase. One, I have

a page about how to take phone calls. Yes, taking

phone calls. On a podcast. And on

that page, because it was getting indexed a lot, I put, hey, would you like

this information, because it's long, as a PDF?

And people said yes, sure. They could have, you know, saved it in their

browser, bookmarked it, all that, but they're like, I'll take the PDF so I can

leave. And then I got their email, and then I can, you know, do

all that email marketing stuff. So that is step 1.

Are you in Google now? Let's get

into keywords. And it's not

just I need keywords, it's the right

keywords. And so I kind of explained this in the

opening. It's not just vomiting a bunch

of words that people will hopefully,

you know, search for on your site. It's getting the right

keywords. So when you first start off, you don't have a lot of traffic

there's this thing called your domain authority. I will

put a link in the show notes for a free site that will show you

your domain authority, because if

you go out there and you're like, well, what's my domain authority? So

I just went out and checked mine, and it is a

43, which a bunch of backlinks and things like that.

So I went to our good friend Perplexity and said, hey, I got a

43, is that good? And it said from 1 to

20 is kind of when you are a new site with limited backlinks,

uh, you have lots of room to grow. Uh, 20 to 30, you're starting to

develop an authority. You're starting to build some links and traction. When you get

30 to 40, that's moderate. It's average authority.

It's competitive on less difficult words.

And when you get to 40 to 60, you're officially good. You have

a strong authority for more established brands, capable of ranking for

valuable More competitive words, when you get to 60 to 80,

you're very strong authority, usually larger, very known,

well sites with extensive quality backlinks. And then 80

to 100, you are in the top tier. Here's the really sad news. Ready for

a story? I was around 87

for the longest time, and I switched my

SEO tool, my WordPress plugin,

from, I think it was Yoast to All-in-One SEO. Long story

short, and it's not the plugin's fault, I accidentally clicked the button that

said don't index my site in Google. So I just told you how

to get into Google. I just told Google, nah, it's all right, I don't need

you. Yeah, so to say my authority, my authority is

on the rise, but yeah, for a good 5, 6

months, I just told Google, nah. So I

strongly urge you not to do that. But why do I need to know

my domain authority? Because you want to find

keywords that are popular but something

you can rank for. And in some of these tools, it will

show you, hey, on a scale from 1 to 100,

you're about, you know, this, this particular keyword is X amount

of points to, you know, really try to rank for

it. And what happens, we all want to hit that

home run, right? I would love, I mean, I own the website,

I think I own this one, How to Podcast, and

that would be great. And I could use that, et cetera, and I could

populate with all sorts of blogs and such, but

a better strategy might be to find

keywords that bring value. So

what does that mean, Dave? You can go in and see

more or less, this is kind of, many of these are estimated,

and we'll talk about tools here and which ones are guessing and which ones are

not. But you can see how many times people have

searched for this. And this is where I looked at about 3 or

4 people who live and breathe and smell and poop

SEO, and I got answers from

you should go for at least 20 searches. I guess it's a

month, I don't know, up to if you're small, 100, like

anything below 100 searches. And what they're saying is you might

be able to rank and get 20 more people to your site,

or, you know, maybe 100 people to your site if you're the number one

research thing. Now we'll get to AI in a minute because AI has

really diminished people clicking on links to your site.

But nonetheless, that's the goal. I can find

keywords that I can actually rank for instead of

trying to hit the home run. I'm going to hit 2 doubles and a

single and maybe occasionally a triple. And

there's a guy from heytony.ca. His name is

Matt Diamante, and I just like him. He's funny,

he's entertaining, and he comes up with great tips like this one. Matt, what's the

sneakiest ChatGPT prompt you know? Okay, I've got a really good one. Go to ChatGPT.

And type this in exactly. I'm writing a blog post about topic. Ask

me any questions you would need to know to write the most complete information about

this topic using my expertise, experience, opinions, and case

studies. And all you have to do is answer those questions. ChatGPT

will write you a really great piece of content that is more likely to rank

than anything you're probably going to write. Bye. So when you know your domain

authority, and again, I'll have a link to where you can click this, put in

your website, and it'll analyze it. Once you know where that is, then you can

kind of see, oh, maybe I shouldn't swing for the fences. Maybe

I can score by just hitting a bunch of singles. And Matt calls that

an SEO avalanche. Now we're going to get to

tools in just a minute, but first I want to tell you about this.

The School of Podcasting. And

again, I watched a lot of videos. Some of these I actually used.

It was a lot of fun, but a lot of work. And there is

always that, well, it kind of depends, and kind of you get what you pay

for. For example, and I have links to these again,

schoolofpodcasting.com/1027.

And you might be thinking, I hope these aren't a lot because I got no

budget. Well, there was one— am I going to tell

you? I'll put it here. It's from this company called WordStream. And if you

want some really crappy keywords, yeah, use that one. It's free and you

can use it as much as you want. But I'm just here to tell you

I put in some, you know, keywords in the things it spit out. I went,

yep, my audience would never type that. So

a one that's actually good— the good news is it's good

because it's from Google. The bad news is most

of Google's stuff is not the best interface, and

they give you in many cases way more information than you

want. And this is the Google Keyword Planner. This used to be

a thing And then they moved inside the Google

AdSense dashboard. So you have to have a Google AdSense

dashboard, and then you can go to Tools and you can go into

Keyword Planner. What's nice about this is you can say, hey, my

keyword is blah, and it'll say, oh, here's the

estimated amount of people that are going to be looking for this, and

here is the competition. And it'll say something like low, medium, or high.

And what you're looking for are again

things that have been searched for, and some people say more than

100 searches, and then some people say you can go down as low

as 20. That's up to you, but you want it to where

there's enough people looking at this keyword and then

there's not a lot of competition. So that's

one. When I looked at that, I was like, oh, this is cool.

It's just You know, there's 37 million tools in

this thing and I need that one. Now, one that's a little more

easier is not actually a website, it's a Chrome

extension. I think it also works in Firefox. It's called

Keywords Everywhere, and this will again

give you, hey, how many people are searching for this and what's the

competition. It does a little more than that, and it

starts about $7 a month. The one that I

was like, hmm, this might be the winner,

is a website called Answer. And I love Steve

Martin. He made a joke once about Socrates, and he said

But I am into the intellectual thing. I went to college, I

studied the great philosophers, uh, Socrates. So anytime

I see anything around the word Socrates,

not so crates, I always think of Steve Martin,

um, and this is called Answer Socrates, and

you can use it 3 times a month for free, and

then you can upgrade for $15 a month.

And so I'm going to talk about some other tools here that help you kind

of find what people are searching for. This one does that

and a whole lot more. For if looking

for bang for your buck, AnswerSocrates

is the one you want to go with. Now there is one a little more

that you'll hear a lot about called Ubersuggest,

and it is $29 a month. They also have a

lifetime deal. Now because it uses AI, you know, we're all

about, oh, it's gotta have AI. It's

Seinfeld. Seinfeld's doing— I don't know what's wrong with this, I need more

AI. And, uh, yeah, because of

that, you then have to buy credits even though you bought a lifetime thing,

but it shows keyword competition. So here

again, how hard is it going to be to rank for this? And that's kind

of what you need. I'm going to talk about some specific

SEO for podcasters, and they kind of

show you that, but they kind of don't. And so now if you

really want to start to get into the pro stuff,

There is one that is $100 more

a month, and all these are monthly fees. If you buy the yearly

thing, it's cheaper, but it's called SE Ranking, and it's

$129 for a full suite

of SEO stuff. It's insane, all the stuff you can— you can spy

on your competitors and see what keywords they're using and all

sorts of stuff. That is SE Ranking, but

for $139 a month, that in my

book is a lot of money. And this is for people

that are really serious about being found. That's,

it's SEMrush. There's another one called Ahrefs, or A, it's

Ahrefs, and that is

somewhere in that ballpark. They're all already— there's another one called Hike that's $150

a month, but that one, again, it has AI. Look, it's got

AI. To which I always say, remember, AI stands for always

increases the price of whatever you just injected it to.

So for me, looking in these, like, Semrush has a great

feature where you say, hey, here's my competitor, here's

me, find good keywords that are missing

from my competitor. I was like, that's pretty cool.

I might actually do the free trial just to use that feature on that.

But that one, if you want to go Cadillac, Semrush,

from the ones I saw, and I realize there are 50 million

of these things, I'll talk about some more here in just a second.

Semrush is one that looked like, yeah, if I had the budget for

that. If you're not, if you're on a slow budget and you want to

spend some time with this, again, Answer

Socrates is $15 a month. That was the one that jumped

out. I like that a little more than Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest has a little

better kind of interface, but I think

Answer Socrates does more. And you can go in

again to your Google Search Console or your

Google AdSense to see exactly what is the traffic.

And some of these get a little misguided on their

estimations, shall we say, but I'm just looking for what's the

competition. They also in some cases tell you how much it would be if if

you wanted to buy Google Ads for this. But there are two other tools I

wanted to talk about before we get into a couple extensions

here. And one is called Answer the Public. You get

3 free searches a month. If you wanna

buy it, it's $20 a month. And it shows you

what people are asking. And so you can go in

and type in whatever your topic is.

And it will spit out in a very frustrating

format, a circle like a pie chart. So you have to kind of tilt

your head to read it. Now you can export that as a

CSV just to save your neck and see what people are

searching. And so what you can do is

basically use this maybe as episode ideas,

and in some cases if you can combine them, so maybe

you find a title in a question and then you see these other related

questions, you could add those questions as well

because they all are kind of under this umbrella of the first

question. Now, if you want, if you run out of

searches on Answer the Public, there's another one that does the

exact same thing. It's called Also Asked. You

get 1 free search a day. So when I say 3 free

searches, that's not a month. If I said that, that was wrong. 3 free searches

a day. Also Asked is one free search, but if

you want to buy it, it's $12 a month. And for me,

I get those, but I think you can get that

from AnswerSocrates, or you could go over,

get your 3 free searches, come up with what people are searching for,

and then analyze those keywords in AnswerSocrates

or whatever you want to do. Again, you could use the Google Keyword

Planner. Those are that. Now there are a couple other things

that you can do to spy on your

competition, and one is an extension

from my buddy Matt Diamante at heytony.ca,

and it's creatively named Page Audit. And when

you go to this, what it does is you can go

to your competitor's page. Let's say you're trying to rank for a particular

word. You can see what their title is, their description. You

can see how many words there are, because the more words, if they're good words,

that's better. How many links, how many, uh, you get

into headings, and we're going to talk about headings in a bit. And you can

get all this information. You can actually see what their headings are.

You can see what keywords, if any, they are looking for.

So there's that one, and then there's another one that is

called a detail, and it is from the

folks at, uh,

Ahrefs. Ahrefs. I don't know how to say that. Ahrefs. And

it kind of does the same thing. It does a little more, but in

theory, if you just need one, you can go with the,

uh, the audit one from Hey Tony. But they all give you information so you

can see, hey, how come I'm not ranking? Oh, because this is where

headings come into play. Headings on a

website show Google

and Bing and DuckDuckGo what the page is about.

And this is where we have to talk about your show notes.

And there are show notes and there are blogs. And going back to

2005, I've kind of said, I

think it's just write a blog and put a

player in the middle of it Voilà!

Now the blog will drive traffic to

Google when somebody finds that and

Google says, hey, go check out Dave's site. They click on and they go, oh

look, an audio player, and they click it

and they sit there and listen. And so Google goes, that's

weird, every time I send somebody to Dave's site, somebody's there for

like 17 minutes. This must be really good

stuff. That's one way. Or you could write

show notes, sometimes called an episode description,

that just simply helps someone understand this. This is my—

like, what are show notes? What's an episode description? A,

most of your audience is never going to look at this because they're looking at

the title and they're going, hmm, is that for me? But there are

new people always coming into podcasting, they

see the title and they go, huh, I wonder if this

is for me. And they look at the description and go, oh, that

kind of looks like it. And then the other thing a,

you know, episode description does is when the person

says— I just heard someone today, I heard two people today that

mentioned something, and I was like, oh, I bet they

put a link in the show notes. And so someone mentioned their

Oura ring, and I was like, oh, good for them,

because I'm 90% sure Oura— which I have one,

by the way, and yes, link in the show notes, even if there's not

an affiliate program. But if there is an affiliate program, that's a

chance that people go, oh, I want to be like you, I

want one of them, their fancy rings, and they will buy it through your affiliate

link and you can earn You know, Mountain Dew money through

that. You get enough products, there's another Mountain Dew. Now

you got a whole keg of Mountain Dew. So when you talk about

something in your show that your audience might want, if

something you mentioned has a website, it's a service

to your audience to put a link to that thing in the show

notes. Now that does mean that many times you have a

paragraph that's, I don't know, 6 sentences

and then 27 links. That's fine. And then

that's where people like, okay, that's my stuff for

Apple and Spotify, and realize no matter what you do—

let's take a quick tangent for that. Oh no, here we go.

It's time for a 10-second tangent. Dave's going to fly off on

another subject that isn't really related to what we're talking about. 10-second

my ass. Rubbish. Easy there, Nigel. Uh,

it's, it's somewhat related when you're typing your show notes and you go,

hey, these look different in Apple than they do in Pocket

Cast, Overcast, Spotify. What? Yeah, I do my show

notes, I bold stuff. And like, for

example, the bolding in last week's episode, I had a

bunch of tips from Jaina and I bolded the tip and then had

a little description and the bolding only showed up in Pocket Cast.

Both Apple and Spotify stripped out the bolding. I don't know

why, I don't care, and I don't have time to worry about it. I do

my show notes the way I want it. In theory, they should show up that

way, and they don't. And who's got time to complain?

It doesn't do any good anyway. Ugh,

finally back to the show. And with Spotify

searching the description per Ausha, which

is an SEO tool I'm going to be talking about here in a

second, if you have longer show notes, at least in

Spotify, because Apple only searches the author tag— please

don't put keywords there, they'll kick you out— the title of the

episode, and the title of the show. But according to

Asha, Spotify searches the description,

so I can put more words in my, you know, show

notes, my episode description. And also, because I'm now using

Podpage, that then becomes part of my website,

where before I might have done a smaller version of an

episode description with all the links and enough to answer the question, should

I listen to this? And then once it came into my website on

Podpage, I would then add additional

things. Well, now I've just got everything

connected and it's automated. And if you want to,

you can still write a longer post as a blog post on your

website and link to your episode. That boosts

your SEO as well. When I asked our good friends at

Perplexity, How many words should a blog post have to catch the

eye of Google? It said what I always said, which is at

least 300 words. So now that is

considered thin and it barely has enough context

and keywords. Now that's from our good friends Yoast, the people that make that

fabulous plugin for WordPress. It said for a

focused SEO post, it should be somewhere

between 1,400 and 2,000 words. That's a

solid working range. That's from a website

called Lovable. Now, they did say Google doesn't

use a word count as a direct ranking factor,

which I found surprising. That's from ROI website,

and what it mentions here is it cares whether

you fully satisfy the search content.

They say longer posts tend to rank better mainly because they cover

the topic more completely and naturally,

earning more links and engagement, not because they hit an arbitrary

number. So this is again where quantity over

quality— it always, for me, it's always

quality. Shoot for quality. And I always say

Google doesn't just love words because everybody's like, I'm just gonna puke

my transcript on there and I'll be at number 1 next week.

No, Google likes good words. Google

in the original days, back in the day,

is the fact that in the days of Lycos and

Hotbot, and there was one like Big Mama or

something. I don't know, that sounds like you couldn't name it that

anymore. But Google came along and it gave

you good results quickly.

Quality over quantity, and it took over, and now

it's absolutely horrible. The front page is nothing but ads. But

that brings us to our good friend EAT.

I've mentioned this before, when you're doing your content, not

just your show notes, this is what's going to set us apart from

the robots. I have a clip about robots here in a second,

but, uh, basically the E in E-E-A-T

is experience, showing firsthand use or real-world involvement

with the topic, better known as a story. Then

you have expertise, demonstrating deep knowledge or

skill, often via, you know, some sort of credentials or a strong

track record, like award-winning Hall of Fame podcaster

Dave Jackson. Uh, authoritativeness, being

recognized as a go-to source, so mentions, links,

reputation. So that comes in handy. And then

trustworthiness, being accurate. What a

concept. Don't lie to your audience. Being transparent.

So when you make a boo-boo and being safe, so clear

identity, sources, secure site, and honest

content. Google uses this framework in its quality

guidelines to decide which pages are more credible

and helpful to rank. Now, if you look at that again,

experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness.

I don't think it's just Google that likes that. I think everybody likes that.

So keep that in mind when you're trying to

rank. Now, in a second, I'm going to talk about PodSEO

and the SEO tool from OSHA.

I believe that's how you say that— OSHA, OSHA, something like the people with

the outrageous French accents. I'll talk about that in just a second.

The School of Podcasting. All right, I want to talk about two tools that were

made for podcasters, and the first

one is called PSO, and

I can't figure out how to pronounce her name. I'm going to say Asha, uh,

and this is a podcast hosting company that also

has this tool, and they're all about you can't, you

know, don't be invisible, blah blah blah. And so I

went over And it's not a bad tool, but

I had a horrendous experience. And I feel bad for this because

there are days when your software just doesn't work. As someone who works for a

software company, you know, sometimes things show up or

people find a really fun way to break your stuff.

And so I signed up for the free thing and it's like, oh,

we're going to send you, you know, the whole double authentication and

that. And they never sent me the email. And I was like, okay,

whatever, send me the link. You know, waited 5 minutes,

waited, okay, send it again, nothing. Now

that might be because I think I've been through their free trial, so maybe they're

like, hey, sign in, in which case it should have said,

hey, you've already used this email before. But anyway, I finally

used a second email, got in, and the other thing that I was just

like Wait, what is— I go in and it has all these

fun tools that you can go in and it will show you where you

rank and it can help you plan episodes and, uh, you can look

at your competitors and all sorts of fun stuff. But when I was like, oh,

wait a minute, what's this competitors thing? And it will rank

your titles and stuff, but under show notes, it's like

unlock full access to PSO Benchmark. Okay.

And then I'm like, show artwork. Oh wait, it's going to talk about my artwork.

Nope. It's going to say upgrade. This is a 7-day trial.

How am I going to try it if you don't let me get access to

anything? Uh, then I go into competitors and it

shows me some stuff, which is interesting. And I, I can click on

people, but it just shows me who my competitors are. And

I'm like, okay, I see where Buzzsprout is a competitor and

it's not the most intuitive thing. So I finally click on the 3

dots., and I see, okay, you know, there's, uh,

all these people that are ranking, which was very handy, uh,

but they— I went through their course, but the thing that

just kept— like, I even right now, look, I, I did

this 3 hours ago, and maybe you need 24 hours. You know what, let's

give them some grace. You're going to need 24 hours to get some

stats. And so I'm looking at my keywords, but here's the

thing, the, the whole thing about You know, when I went

into, um, just different parts of it— manage my keywords, was that another

one? There were a few places where it was like, you

gotta update. And I'm like, no, no, I don't want to

update. It's, it's kind of like from a marketing company.

Look, follow, follow the example of every drug dealer in America.

The first one's free, baby. And you give them the good

stuff and then you make them pay later. And I mean, at

Podpage, when you do a 14-day trial, you get all the elite

features. Why? Because we want you to be addicted to those.

Everybody does this. And then you're like, hey, your trial's over. And they're like,

oh, I really wanted the, you know, blah blah blah. And I was like, well,

I can't do that here because I don't get to use half the features. And

so for that, I go, what? So wasn't

a great If you're gonna give me a free trial, give me a

free trial where, I don't know,

20% of the features are like, nope, you gotta update. And I was like,

then it's not a free trial, it's a free put your toe in the water

kind of thing. It is $29. Now

when we compare that to other things like

AnswerSocrates, I'm still going to say Socrates. Ubersuggest, it's the same price

as Ubersuggest.. And when I went in

and looked, it's in the same part of where you can

go into keywords when you can see them.

And it will say, okay, this is—

and again, and this is with all tools, not just this one— it will

show you the search volume and the difficulty, which is what you're

looking for, right? So as I look at grow your podcast, even though

it's a very difficult word to try to rank for,

which currently I will toot my own horn, I am number 1 according to

this tool, uh, but there's really not that many people searching for that.

So it's difficult, but it's not really that many people

searching for it. And so where the

phrase podcasting statistics, um, there's

a 22 is what they're saying search volume. I'm assuming that's out

of 100, and the difficulty is like if you want to rank

for podcast statistics you got a good chance at it because that's what you're

looking for— keywords that are not a lot, that have

a decent amount of search volume. So for me, 20, that's something

to think about with almost, you know, light

difficulty. So that it does for $29. Um,

I did notice that there are some features here which makes sense,

it's marketing, but where you go in and they're

slowly hinting you should host your show with us because

they're actually primarily a media host, which

I get. But I was kind of like, all right. And

like, for instance, when I go to the feed, I can

see my last episode and there's a button there

that says copy to the workspace, and it then

goes in and it shows me my

actual, like,, the fact that I have

a limit of 3,900 words in

your description. And apparently I've gone over that. Yes, I've

gone 4,309. So maybe not so many

links in that. Um, it can generate a transcript. And again, all

this stuff is probably for their hosting feature. Yes, because I can see here where

I can set chapters and things like that. Um, I do have an

affiliate link for them. But I feel bad. I think I

just caught them on a bad day. But all this

optimization stuff is for their hosting, and I don't want to move my

host. I love me some Captivate. I love Buzzsprout, you know, Bluebear.

I'm not really— so I get it, it's marketing. They're, they're gonna try to

get you to switch over. So when I found a

tool, and this was, uh, one of

the guys involved is the former founder

of Spreaker. I saw them, I believe, at

National Religious Broadcasters, and no, it was, uh, Podfest. And the other

guy is Andrea DeMarci, and

these guys are really— it's

very similar to the SEO

tool in from Ausha. The interface is

a little easier Uh, it's cheaper. It's

$20 a month. Uh, you can use the coupon code POD10 and

it kind of walks you through like, here's the next step you could do.

And it does, again, if all you're looking

for is, hey, where are my keywords? It can

go in and you can develop what are your primary

keywords and secondary keywords. And so I can

see here where make money podcasting is

a keyword, is a medium search

volume and some competition. So kind of medium there. So depending on

what you want— podcasting best practices,

that's crowded as well as, uh, but it does have a

fair amount of search. And this is where the key

ingredient that we're missing is there's

no number to assign. There's no, there's no

domain authority for podcasts. You can go in and see

where you rank. Um, Ausha has a tool called Pod Wars where you

can go in and type in your keywords and see if you're in

the top, you know, 50 or

whatever. Uh, PodSEO has the same thing, and now they just introduced some planning tools

which I think are also involved

in Ausha. So they're interesting, they're good, and if you

just want to stick

to, you know, podcasting, you can go in, both

of them show you the charts. So I can see that Joe Rogan

is number one again, and Crime Junkie and Pod Save America and

all that stuff. So you can track yourself on that.

But for me, I thought about it and I was like, wait a minute, what's

going to be the difference from someone

searching on Google for a podcast

versus someone searching in an app? Aren't they going to kind of be

searching the same thing? And I realize there

are categories, and I believe it was Asha that said

24% of people search for podcasts using categories. And

I'm like, really? That seems high. Everybody I know just goes to the search

button and starts typing in words.. And

so I thought, you can find keywords that

work on the web, and call me crazy, I bet

they might work good in an app.

Now that's an opinion, but I think a good keyword is a good keyword.

I don't know that people search on the web any different than they would

in an app, and you can get a little

more detail from websites in terms of like, well, how many actual searches are there

from things like the Google tool

in their AdSense, their, their keyword tool there. So

it's not that PodSEO and Ausha are bad. In fact, I have an account

at PodSEO because I'm still playing with it. And but

I can see when I can come to the conclusion that there's really

no difference because it's the same game again. It's

find a keyword that has enough people looking for it but

not a ton of traffic. That is the name

of the game. And I'm not sold that

keywords in podcast apps are any different

than keywords in Google, in which case you could spend

the money on an SEO tool for the web and probably

get a decent tool that you could use in a podcast app.

Now, like I said, both PodSEO and Ausha,

I see now, are introducing kind of planning tools and things like

that. So in that essence, they

are a little more, you know, podcasting related. They're trying

to set themselves apart from the other SEO tools.

Captivate— I don't understand. Wow. Okay. And then Alexa chimed

in. Captivate already has some SEO tools. Buzzsprout already has

some SEO tools where they'll actually write your show notes and things

like that. Captivate has that. Uh, there was a great— I'll put a link

to the show notes— Buzzsprout just

did an episode on using like

ChatGPT to do analytics of your show, find out what's the most popular,

try to spot trends. That was interesting. This

is already existing in Captivate. If you go into episode

planning, there's an add episode idea and it looks at your

stats So it knows what's working and what's not and suggests a bunch of ideas.

And I got to tell you, these weren't bad.

So AI is not always bad. It's not always going to take over the world.

But I did hear this in an episode and it made me think. If

you just take those headlines and the timing of

it and say, okay, OpenAI has basically agreed to let

the government use their technology to

build, quote, autonomous lethal weapons. Fast forward a week, the

person in charge of robotics

at OpenAI resigns, citing

safety issues. I'm gonna

leave that there. Yeah, that is from a show called SEO for People

Who Don't Like SEO by Meredith's husband. Yeah, I

heard that, was like, what? So the other thing we need to talk about before

we get out of here is the fact

that this takes time. You can't put keywords in and then

expect to be number one overnight. In fact, I bought

years ago the lifetime access to Ubersuggest, and I'm constantly

logging in, and it's like— because it'll go out and kind of do an

audit of your site, and it's like, hey, we quit doing an

audit of your site because you haven't logged in for 6 weeks. So you

need to keep up on this stuff. Constantly

researching. The good news is, since we're talking about keywords, you

can put these into Podpage and it

will auto-link that keyword. So let's say I

put the phrase Glenn Hebert— maybe the keyword for the episode

was my buddy Glenn Hebert over at the Horse Radio Network. Anywhere else

I had the phrase Glenn Hebert, it would link to that one

page, because you really only want one keyword

for that one page. Otherwise, when

Google sees that keyword on multiple pages, it might get confused as

to which one to go to on your site. Now, in the end, if

it's door number 1, door number 2, or door number 3, who cares? Google's

still coming to your site. But that is something I heard again as I

was doing some research on this. And that can be hard because sometimes

your keyword is, well, broadcasting, and you're like, well Well, does that mean

I can't write another thing about podcasting? Well, it might be better.

And that's where tools like, you know, Answer

Socrates can give you additional words, not just your one keyword

to put on your website. Another thing you

can do is again, get these phrases because

AI is not looking at podcasts. It's not looking at

golf. It's looking at specific sentences, specific questions.,

and that's where you can find that. And that is

something that I am not educated on right now, which

is how to get AI to mention you. That might be another episode

in the future, but I do know this, that

SEO is not going away. A lot of people like, oh, it's the end of

SEO. Well, of course it is, cuz that's gonna make it click. But for

that, I will say they just came out

with another report from Edison

Research And radio in the car

is still number one. Now, podcasting had a great report.

Everything was up, and the age group that is really latching

on to podcasting right now are boomers, people over 50. I

always say, man, don't turn your back on a boomer. They can probably

out-ChatGPT you in many cases. But they mentioned that

AM radio, FM radio in the car is

still number one. And yes, technology is moving

very, very fast, but there are still

VCRs, there are still DVD players, right? We don't just drop everything

and move to another thing. So even if SEO is starting

to lose some of its juice, and what it's losing is

people no longer have to go to your site to get the

answer. You know, Copilot or whatever Google is doing

you type in a question and it will, it will give you the

answer from your website without sending them to your website, which

is kind of— yeah, thanks guys. So that's down, and the one report

I looked at, it was down by like 10%. I,

for me, I don't use Google a lot. I'm

a big Perplexity guy, and when I go to Google, I rarely have

to click on somebody's website. So that's the tricky part, which leaves

us again our good friend word of mouth.. And word of

mouth is not based on the microphone, it's not

based on the web design, it is based on the content. And by

that I mean the content. And if you didn't hear me

the first time, it's the content. So I, I started off

the show talking about that mistake with the Big

Lash Energy. She just did episode 200 plus 1,

so congratulations to Jaina on that. And she had her audience send

in messages. And I sent one in. Scott from What Was That Like sent one

in. A bunch of other people. Oh, speaking of that,

you never know who's listening. I've said that before. This is

a show for women about living strong

and independent, and the first people that sent

in congratulations on episode 200 were men. Yeah, so

you never know who's listening. Keep that in mind., and, uh, she

did her 200th episode and there were people that

were talking about how her message has saved their

life. It's inspired them to try new things and to get out

of bad relationships. And she is a huge Because of My Podcast

story. She's just walking and living. And speaking of that, here's a fun

Because of My Podcast story from my buddy Paul Culligan,

who it turns out is a theater nerd. Welcome to Because

of My Podcast, where we spotlight the results

people are achieving because of their podcast. Well, Dave, we're going to get

into some, uh, well, theater nerd stuff here. Hooray! Um, they say that the

album that is the most important to you is the one that you imprinted on

when you were 14. And when I was 14, the album that I

imprinted on was an album called Chess. It

was a concept album for a musical. It was

the guys from ABBA mixed with the guy who wrote

the lyrics for Jesus Christ Superstar. And it spawned a bunch of music that you've

heard. You probably know the song One Night in Bangkok. Still one of my

favorite albums of all time. 2 years later, I

saw the version of it in London, loved it, and printed on

it. There we go. '88, I head to college and I hear that they're

doing Chess in America, which is great, and I want to hear about it. And

so I follow it. I buy the cast album for that. It's

terrible. I read the reviews for it. They're all terrible.

And the thing lasted on Broadway for 39 days or performances or something

like that. Just terrible. But I've always been curious, like, was it as bad

as I thought it was? Well, last week I

went to New York to see the, um, the reboot of Chess.

They changed a lot of things and I was fourth row. So you

saw the spit, saw everything. But here's the about

my podcast part. The New York City

Library has an archive of almost every

single Broadway show ever that's been taped. These shows have been taped, not necessarily

released to the audience, not out of the wild,

not necessarily released to normal people. It's, it's really more of an archives

kind of thing, but you can submit the proper paperwork to

get permission to watch the recording. And I thought, how fun would this be to

see if I could leverage myself as a podcaster and

see if I could get that archival tape. And the day

before I see, you know, the revival 40 years later if I can

get access to it. And I did. It was a beautiful day, went

in, showed my stuff, filled out the forms, got everything cleared, got my New York

City library card even though I live in Oregon, and I was able to go

into the archives. I was able to, you know, put the headset on and I

was able to watch it. Now, it was terrible. It was terrible. It should

have closed in 10 performances, not the 30 or whatever it was. But I got

to see why it was so terrible. Answered a lot of questions. As a chess

nerd, it was fun. For the general public, it wasn't. But, you know, the guy

at the front desk was like, ah, so you're a podcaster, huh? And that

was what I used to get access. And it was fun. And it wouldn't

have happened without me being a podcaster. And I enjoyed it. And

again, I enjoyed the performance of Broadway. Maybe a bunch of us will go see

it in September when we do the next podcast move. But anyway, Dave,

another thing my podcast let me do. Thought I'd let you know. Talk to you

later, buddy. Thank you, Paul. I think his last one, he got to hang out

with Rob Halford from Judas Priest, Alice Cooper,

and I think Ace Frehley from KISS. I know lots of people have got to

interview people, got access to all sorts of stuff because you're considered press.

Now, if you want to start your podcast, there's only one place you

really need to go, and that is

schoolofpodcasting.com. Get access to the coaching with me, the community with all

sorts of great insights as well, and of course the step-by-step

courses, and

it comes with a 30-day money-back

guarantee. Website, schoolofpodcasting.com. Use the coupon code listener. And until

next week, take care. God bless. Class

is dismissed. If you like the show, please share it with

a friend. If you like the show, pretty pretty,

please share it with a friend right now. That's

from ROI website. And it says it cares whether you're

furly. You're furly? Yeah, if you're really cold, you're furly.

Well, there you go, kids. That's how the bloopers

start. They don't, and who's got time to

complain? It don't do no matter anyway. What does that mean? What, don't do

no matter? There should be a link in the show notes.

It's a service. It's a service? What is

that? Nobody likes it. Charlie in the Box. Wow, I've turned into Peter Brady,

and half of you don't know who Peter Brady is.