SEO Podcasts – Page 35 – Shh. Listen. SEO is talking to you

Why Discoverability Needs to Be an SEO Focus with Garrett Mehrguth [PODCAST] – Search Engine Journal

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Here’s why Garrett Mehrguth says it’s important to focus on your brand being discoverable for SEO and why the traditional marketing funnel is broken.
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For episode 170 of The Search Engine Journal Show, I had the opportunity to interview Garrett Mehrguth, CEO at Directive, enterprise search marketing agency.
Mehrguth talks about the importance of focusing on your brand being discoverable for SEO and challenges some of the traditional sales funnel models.

Garrett Mehrguth (GH): I’m going to look at it in two different ways:
And why both of these matters so much to in-house marketers or agency side folks.
First and foremost, we all know the importance of brand. There’s a reason why people do Super Bowl commercials and run these very expensive ads to get awareness for their products or services.
Unfortunately, a lot of us have … become so obsessed with understanding the KPIs to conversions and the metrics that we’ve devalued how people actually make purchasing decisions.
And so what I mean by that is the traditional marketing funnel right now in my opinion, is broken when you run it on a cash model.
And so this is kind of that financial side of it. I would love to see in a cash business a 10% cost of sales ratio.
So what that means is if you think you can generate $100,000 in total contract value in a month, if you can do that with a $10,000 spend, including salaries, ad spend, and all of that stuff, you can now create a highly efficient model.
Now, the problem is that current marketing funnel doesn’t allow that. So let me talk from exact personal experience.
I’m blessed to work with some really good advertisers at Directive and they helped me with my stuff for our own advertising. In fact, we got to the point where we were converting at 60% from LinkedIn.
So it’s hard for me to say, “OK, my team could do better.” Right? If you get to 60% conversion rate on any platform, you’re already well past the benchmark.
Now the problem is marketing – especially SEO and PPC – is entirely timing-dependent. In other words, you cannot force someone to make a purchasing decision.
And that’s what makes SEO so powerful is because you can take the keywords they’re searching and then position your brand to be discovered when you know there’s purchasing intent.
Now the problem with a funnel and lead gen is there’s not purchasing intent. So when someone’s on LinkedIn, they’re not looking to purchase.
And so what happens is, even at 60%, let’s say our cost per acquisition for a lead was still around $17 on LinkedIn, but we have a 1% qualification rate – meaning that in a given one month period, if we were to generate a hundred leads from LinkedIn, we were able to turn one of those into a proposal and then we have anywhere between a 20- 30% close rate.
Twenty percent means you’re doing well. If you’re above 30%, you should probably raise your rates.
But the problem is when you look at that funnel, if you want to get enough opportunities to hit a deal or revenue goal, you’re going to have to spend exorbitant amounts of money on your lead gen.
Brent Csutoras (BC): And so where does that tie into the brand? Do you just bypass a lot of that by having brand exposure?
GM: You delete lead gen.
Imagine if you get rid of running white papers to generate into Marketo and try to nurture leads. Imagine if you just deleted all of that spend, OK?
Here’s what you can get for $250 on GDN. You can use it for in-market audiences, find people looking for exactly what you offer, and for $250 you’re able to generate 1.5 million impressions.
For the same amount, you could generate 10 leads with a 1% qualification rate and never get an opportunity.
What I found is, if you can get above the lead area and go to the brand, so I think the new funnel has to go brand, lead, opportunity, deal revenue. And if you can go above leads and go to brand, you’re going to see phenomenal results.
Just since launching this in the last month, we were able to have conversations with five enterprise brands. By the way, our advertising says the search marketing agency for enterprise brands…
I’m talking enterprise companies that we’ve never been able to talk to before, who fill out our form.
What changed?
We started to launch a brand campaign, and it was just a billboard, that drove awareness at what Directive was.
Now here’s the beautiful part. You can’t just have awareness.
Then you go to your SEO and your PPC strategy and you say, when someone searches for the products or services you offer, do you show up?
And now the difference is you’re the brand that has seven impressions on the ideal customer persona, while the others do not.
If you have your product market positioning right, you’re discoverable, plus you’ve built brand equity, now you have a powerful combination that drives incredible revenue at a lower cost per sale and allows you to have an efficiency in a cash model.
GM: I would say podcast advertising. It’s truly actually good not only brand but also lead gen. It’s a captive audience and we still generate amazing deals from podcast ads.
GM: You find the software that your ideal customer persona uses and then you leverage their login pages. Now you know they’re an active user of the product and you run from there.
GM: I think it has to be the number one focus because it’s the one thing that’s going to increase close rate, lower time to close, and allow you to essentially create velocity within your sales department.
The reason I say that is because currently if you’re not being creative with your SEO efforts, for example, you will almost guarantee, in any vertical, not be able to rank when the timing is hottest or when the purchase intent is strongest.
At the very bottom of the funnel when people start to modify the keywords they searched when looking for you by top best reviews and other purchase-related kind of modifiers, third party review sites are showing up like crazy.
In the services business, you got Clutch.co, you’ve got TopSEOs, all these people had been there forever. Are they transparent, are they good? That’s a whole other conversation.
Either way, they’re showing up number one and getting a 28% click-through rate, which is still 10 to almost 20x sometimes the volume you can get even from a search ad for the same keyword.
And so if you go search top ERP software, we talked about this before, no ERP software is ranking because Google is saying, due to what I call the Yelp and the Amazon effect.
This means when people are searching and they have purchase intent, they don’t want to hear how great you are from you, they want to go to what they are considering an unbiased source – whether that’s true or not – and they want to look at reviews.
If they look at reviews before they buy a $5 breakfast burrito, they’re sure as hell going to look at reviews before they buy a $250,000 software.
And so you have to take that same purchase reality of a consumer in 2019 and make sure that your being discovered when those users are looking online to make a purchasing decision.
GM: I mean if you see other websites ranking, that means you could rank, you just need to write a better piece that’s more authoritative like traditional SEO. But that’s still one position out of 10.
And unless you’re number one, and if you’re outside of the top five, the click-through rate frankly won’t be substantial enough to generate any type of net new business unless it’s a very high volume term.
The second we stop thinking about websites and start thinking about brands, that’s when we become world-class search marketers.
Visit our podcast archive to listen to other Search Engine Journal Show podcasts!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita
Managing Partner / Owner at Search Engine Journal with over 18 years experience in Digital Marketing, specializing in Reddit, Search …
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Julie Joyce on Paid Links, Top Tools, Cheap Link Building Ideas & More [PODCAST] – Search Engine Journal

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Improving UX for SEO, Cringe-Worthy Social Media & More with Mary Davies [PODCAST] – Search Engine Journal

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Latest Google updates have led to massive traffic changes for news websites – Press Gazette

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Fighting for quality news media in the digital age.
An autumn of major Google changes has led to despair and confusion at news publishers.
By Charlotte Tobitt
Some news publishers in the UK, US and elsewhere have been “profoundly affected” by a string of Google search and Discover updates since September affecting traffic and, as a result, revenue.
Websites with a traditional focus on scale, often built with the aid of SEO explainer-style articles, appear to be among the hardest hit while sites with a better user experience due to having fewer adverts – therefore many more subscription-focused newsbrands – report being less affected.
Google said it has not specifically targeted publishers but that its aim is to “show helpful and reliable results”.
Since September, updates rolled out by Google have included a “helpful content update” deemed to have been “noticeably more impactful” than the last of its kind in December 2022, an October core update and another in November, and a reviews update also this month. “Core” updates are the significant, broad changes to Google’s search algorithms and systems that tend to take place a few times a year – not usually twice in two months.
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The two November updates had not yet finished rolling out at the time of writing, while a bug was discovered in the October rollout that had a significant effect on traffic through Discover, Google’s personalised content feed. That glitch has since been fixed although not all publishers have reported seeing an improvement as a result.
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SEO expert Lily Ray said: “The Google updates from September to November 2023 have profoundly affected news and publisher websites, leading to significant shifts in these websites’ traffic and visibility. This is particularly evident in Google Discover traffic and visibility in Top Stories and the Google News tab, and for many website owners, has resulted in a substantial decrease in revenue.”
Ray added that although “volatility is expected” in both Search and Discover from core updates, websites in a sample she received saw “more extreme” changes than many recent algorithm changes.
Polemic Digital founder Barry Adams, an SEO consultant for news publishers, shared a similar analysis with Press Gazette. He said: “Every time there’s an announced Google algorithm update, many publishers anxiously wait to see what the impact is going to be. Some updates pass with barely a flicker, while others have a profound impact on a site’s Google traffic and, by extension, their revenue.
“Both the October and November core updates seem to be of the ‘big impact’ variety, with hundreds of sites seeing massive traffic changes – some positive, some negative.”
One publisher, who kept their website domain anonymous, told Ray they had “simply disappeared from Discover and News with the November core update. In October we felt a strong impact, but now in November the business has completely collapsed. Six years of hard work and now everything has turned to ashes.”
Ray created a questionnaire for publishers to fill in about how the updates have impacted their sites, and received results from more than 150 publishers around the world (the biggest proportion, 31%, of whom were in the US) – although those badly affected were likely disproportionately represented due to the self-selecting nature of the survey.
Nonetheless 72% claimed they were no longer seeing their articles appear in Google’s Top Stories widget or prominently in the Google News tab unless they sorted by most recent.
A similar proportion (73%) said they had seen their Google Discover traffic drop to zero during the previous three months, contributing a significant hit to ad revenue. Many “expressed frustration” that they did not see a large increase after the glitch was fixed.
Adams told Press Gazette: “Some sites are now seeing a recovery in their Discover traffic, but others see no sign of Discover returning to previous levels, which has led to speculation that the bug may only be partially fixed or that there might be another bug wreaking havoc in Google’s systems.”
Overall Ray said many had reported a “drastic decrease in page views and traffic, with figures dropping from several million to significantly lower numbers like 1-2 million or even less”. This was thought to be often linked to a combination of the Google updates rather than one alone.
She also reported that a “frequent concern was the disappearance of sites from Google Discover and Top Stories” particularly after the October core update – and often those affected were also badly impacted by previous updates.
This suggestion was echoed by Adams, who said: “Some sites that were negatively affected by updates in previous years and that managed to reclaim much of that lost traffic are now hit again. This makes me think one or both of these latest updates are refreshes of systems that Google had introduced or updated earlier.”
Adams added: “I also see user experience factors play a bigger role: A common thread among many sites that lost traffic is that they featured advertising that intrudes on reader engagement with the content, such as ads that take over part of or the whole screen and autoplay ad videos that take up a big portion of mobile screens.”
One head of SEO at a UK publisher with multiple brands told Press Gazette they believe the results of the latest updates show Google appears to be moving away from ad-based sites that have primarily chased clicks in the past.
With the continued increase in zero-click search results – in which Google provides the answer to a question or the information sought in the search – this means news sites that have previously created a lot of SEO explainer articles will see a decrease in referral traffic.
This may explain why the expert told Press Gazette the hardest hit brands in the latest updates appeared to be those with a lot of historic SEO content that had not recently been updated. Refreshing those articles is making a noticeable difference on their brands, they said.
This appears to fit with previous Press Gazette analysis of how the search visibility scores for major UK and US news websites as measured by Sistrix were affected by the October core update.
This data does not tell the full picture, as Press Gazette has heard concerns that referral traffic has fallen further as a result of the changes that began in November. But it does appear to confirm the nature of many of the worst hit sites.
All of the worst 15 sites in our ranking for decline in search visibility by percentage were owned by Reach, which mostly has a strategy of scale to drive digital advertising revenue, with the exception of Ladbible in eighth place.
Ray also noted “frustration” from some that although they had made improvements to their sites and created original content their sites were not seeing recovery. Another trend, she said, was a “general sentiment of confusion” with the guidance given by Google not universally deemed as being clear or specific enough.
A Google spokesperson said: “We’re constantly improving our systems with updates to make sure we continue to deliver on our mission to show helpful and reliable results. None of our recent updates target specific pages or sites, including publishers.”
Google’s search liaison Danny Sullivan said on X (formerly Twitter): “Search and content can move through cycles. You can have a rise in unhelpful content, and search systems evolve to deal with it. We’re in one of those cycles.”
But he added that “we have seen some of the issues people have raised and there are all types of ranking improvements already in the works to deal with these”.
Of the Discover glitch, a Google spokesperson said: “We recently had a bug in Discover which may have caused some publications’ traffic to drop for a short period of time. As soon as it was discovered, we fixed the bug and communicated to the ecosystem.”
Adams also warned against having too much third-party commercial content such as betting odds and e-commerce, saying sites with a high amount of this “are starting to see indications that these Google updates are targeting those practices. To prevent more pain later down the line, for those sites it might be prudent to dial down the volume of commercial content and focus more on proper news content”.
Cameron Nichols, head of SEO at US customer experience company Merkle, also noted on Linkedin that third-party content has been a factor in recent rollouts such as September’s helpful content update.
Nichols said: “The recent changes in Google’s treatment of third-party hosted content signals a shift that site owners need to be aware of and consider their practices going forward. While early indications show that only those pages hosting third-party content are being impacted, the focus on ranking original and valuable content is ongoing.
“While not all search updates are created equal, and some may have more noise than news, this is one that should get your attention. If website owners are leveraging third-party content, now is the time to consider shifting these practices and prioritising efforts that produce unique, quality content and looking to invest in resources that can support these efforts.
The next thing to watch may be reviews, under the latest ranking update. Google says it aims to boost reviews that “share in-depth research, rather than thin content that simply summarises a bunch of products, services or other things”.
SEO expert Luke Budka, AI strategist at Definition, told Press Gazette he predicted this could impact news publishers’ ranking and traffic and advised they should analyse specific parts of their sites in their Google Search Console accounts to learn which sections take a hit.
“It probably means a load of publishers need to reassess their review process,” Budka said. “Google isn’t going to rank review content that doesn’t offer additional value, just because it’s on a high authority news website, anymore.”
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog
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Technical SEO, Thinking Like a Robot & More with Jamie Alberico [PODCAST] – Search Engine Journal

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13 Podcast SEO Tips to Know Before Hitting Record – Rev

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Forget meeting fatigue, missed details, and tedious tasks. VoiceHub will change the way you work. Coming soon.
Forget meeting fatigue, missed details, and tedious tasks. VoiceHub will change the way you work. Coming soon.
Forget meeting fatigue, missed details, and tedious tasks. VoiceHub will change the way you work. Coming soon.
Forget meeting fatigue, missed details, and tedious tasks. VoiceHub will change the way you work. Coming soon.
Team of one. Global operation. Everything in between. We’ve got it all covered. Rev handles the tedious job of transcripts, captions, and subtitles so you’ll get work done faster. If you haven’t found what you need yet, we still bet we can help.
Team of one. Global operation. Everything in between. We’ve got it all covered. Rev handles the tedious job of transcripts, captions, and subtitles so you’ll get work done faster. If you haven’t found what you need yet, we still bet we can help.
How can a podcast increase SEO? There are many ways, from boosted audiences to increased authority. Let’s look at some podcast SEO best practices for your brand.
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A podcast can increase SEO by expanding your audience to a new type of content format, providing extra opportunities to bring keywords into your content strategy, and giving your users more opportunities to enjoy your content on the go. All of these things will increase your authority on your chosen subject matter and increase your SEO as a result.
Optimizing your podcasts by utilizing metadata, using appropriate podcast keywords, and staying consistent with your brand will help Google index your content and will help you rank.
Let’s look at some podcast SEO tips to learn more about how you can optimize your podcasts and increase your overall presence online.
Creating a podcast is a great way for content creators, brands, businesses, and more to develop a loyal audience and create content in an interesting and digestible way. Let’s look at how SEO for podcasts can help optimize your episodes and get more eyes (and ears) on your work.
Creating a website for your podcast not only gives you a dedicated hub to house your episodes, it also can help with your rankings. On your website, you can provide optimized episode descriptions, blog posts with episode transcripts, and more, creating authority for your podcast and giving people a place they can go to learn more.
‍Get started: Look for a website hosting service that can help you choose a template and get your website up and running easily.
Having transcriptions of your podcast episodes available helps Deaf or hard-of-hearing people be able to access your content, while also helping boost SEO by providing written summaries of your dialog. These written summaries give even more context to search engines about your podcast content so they can rank it accordingly.
Get started: Transcribing podcast episodes doesn’t have to be difficult; services like Rev can do so quickly and easily! Look into Rev’s VoiceHub feature to see how you can transcribe your podcast.
Tagging is hugely important for any SEO strategy. It lets users know exactly what your content is about and directs searches to your episode, blog, or photo. Tagging your podcast episodes with relevant keywords will help inform search engines about your episode content and boost your podcast.
Get started: When uploading your podcast episode, there should be a space to input content tags. Put in SEO keywords that are relevant to your episode, and make sure to use the same category tags per episode type so listeners can easily find more of your work.
While you might not know the title of an episode of television, the titles of podcast episodes are extremely important. They help users scrolling through your episode catalog know what to expect in each installment so they can choose what to listen to. Optimizing these titles with SEO keywords can help accomplish the goal of helping your users choose the right episode while also giving search engines the ability to catalog your content.
Get started: Take the keyword most relevant to your episode and expand on it to create a natural-sounding podcast title.
Any written part of your podcast (no matter how small) is a great time to introduce keywords. With something as important as your podcast’s title, including the most relevant (and highest ranking) keyword can help boost your podcast by drawing people looking for that keyword to your episodes.
Get started: Decide what you want to focus on and conduct keyword research to pick the best keyword for your content. From there, integrate it into your title in a way that feels natural and not forced.
The metadata of your podcast includes things like: title, subtitle, authors, description, genre, podcast keywords, and tags. All of these features are great ways to insert relevant keywords and drive home your content strategy. Optimize all of these during the upload process where it feels appropriate.
Get started: When uploading your podcast, insert relevant keywords into every metadata field that works. All of these fields should be present while you are uploading your podcast to your hosting platform.
Creating a well-researched and thorough podcast episode won’t do you much good if it isn’t actually what your audience is looking for. Conducting keyword research using SEO tools can help identify what your target audience is actually looking for so that you’ll get good engagement every time.
Get started: Log into an SEO tool like Semrush or ahrefs and look up a list of topics that are relevant to your audience or niche. See which ones have the most engagement and search volume, and make a list of which ones could work for your content, then input them into the Spotify keyword feature during podcast upload.
If you want eyes on your content, posting on YouTube is a great place to start. Many podcasts have a video component that pairs with the episode (whether it’s a video of the podcast hosts recording the episode or just a video of the audio). Since YouTube is a leading platform, establishing authority on it can help boost your rankings in general.
Get started: Film a video while you record your podcast, or overlay your audio with a photo of your logo and upload that to YouTube.
Some podcast episodes can get quite long, so users who are looking for a specific section might have to play the “fast forward, rewind, rinse, repeat” game until they find it. Eliminating this back and forth can make your podcast easier for your audience to listen to, and is also a great opportunity to insert your target keywords. Each timestamp — where applicable — can include one of these relevant keywords.
Get started: When uploading your podcast to your chosen hosting software, you will be able to add in timestamps. While recording and editing, write down moments where the subject changes or key topics are brought up and write it down so you can remember where to put one.
A good SEO strategy is all about nailing down what points you make, what topics you cover, and what keywords you mention so that search engines can index it accordingly. Creating a blog post that expands on or summarizes your podcast content (hint: a transcription is a great way to do this) can help nail down your message and is a great way to repurpose your podcast.
Get started: Using a transcription or just listening back to your podcast episode, write an outline for a short accompanying blog post and publish it on your website.
Backlinks are the, well, backbone of an SEO strategy. They can help your content rank on search engine results pages and get more eyes on your content. You build backlinks by getting authoritative websites to post a link to your content on their website, which will drive users to your content.
Get started: Once you’ve recorded your episode or filmed your video, reach out to the biggest thought leaders in your industry and see if they’d be willing to listen and potentially share on their sites.
While some podcasts jump from topic to topic and succeed, most follow at least some sort of umbrella topic. Having a specific content niche or strategy can help you build a good reputation within your industry and become a trusted resource. So, being consistent with your messaging, podcast style, and keywords can help you build your brand over time and rank better.
Get started: As you brainstorm what you want to do for your podcast, make a comprehensive content strategy that you will follow as you continue to make episodes.
Cross-promoting your podcast on social media platforms (like posting snippets to TikTok or Reels, posting a video on Youtube, etc.) is a great way to expand its reach. And making sure that these other platforms are optimized can expand it even further. Instead of just simply posting to different platforms, optimize each platform by making sure your tags, keywords, and meta descriptions are all published as well.
Get started: Though it might be more work, don’t just set your podcast to automatically upload to other platforms. Manually go through each one and add your keywords, tags, etc.
When you devote your life and work to creating your podcast, blog, or brand, you want to get as many eyes on it as possible. This is where SEO for podcasts comes in. Optimizing your episodes will help you accomplish your content goals and grow your audience.
Why SEO matters:
Images don’t have a direct impact on boosting your SEO, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t necessary and don’t help move the needle at all. Google likes images, so having one is a bonus. And you can use image alt text to introduce some keywords, where applicable, and create even more authority.
Yes, video podcasts do help with SEO by continuing to build your brand, expanding your reach across various content platforms, and providing more backlink opportunities. While podcasts themselves may only be able to exist on podcast hosting platforms and social media, videos can also rank on Google’s video search and Youtube, which can increase their reach significantly. Adding a video to your podcast (especially if it comes with a video transcription) is a great way to get a quick SEO win.
Podcasts are a great way to draw users into your content. And with services like our VoiceHub, it’s easier than ever to get your podcast out there. The VoiceHub AI takes some of the hard work out of podcasting — it can create a seamless transcript, highlight important moments, and more, making audio SEO a breeze.
‍See how Rev VoiceHub can assist your podcast.
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