Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I'm sharing with you a podcast I was a guest on just the other week and this is the podcasting amplified podcast and it's basically it's a podcast that is for podcasters, but, before you think, what's that got to do with SEO? We actually talked quite a lot about SEO within it, the kind of things where SEO can help with podcasts, but it's also general around SEO as well, because most podcasters have websites and that kind of thing as well. It also talks about how I came to launch the podcast and the kind of journey I've had with podcasting, which you might find interesting in itself. I've been thinking about doing an episode like that anyway, so this kind of like kills two birds with one stone's there, so I hope you'll find it useful. Um, so yeah, I I hope you enjoyed the podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Um, and yeah, without further ado, it's over to joe's podcast and away we go could you release three episodes of your podcast every single week consistently and keep them bingeable, searchable and standing out from the competition? Well, this is exactly what Ed Dawson did with his podcast. Seo is Not that Hard. After spending many years in the SEO space, ed has consistently produced three of these bite-sized bingeable episodes every single week for years, and in this episode, he shares his SEO expertise how to find out what your listeners are searching for, and how he's managed to consistently produce these bingeable episodes so you, too, can make your podcast bingeable and create episodes you know people want to listen to. In this episode, we cover how Ed has consistently released three episodes since day one.

Speaker 2: 2:52

How to stand out from your competition with a podcast. Tips on how to come up with podcast episode ideas. The essentials of getting your content to rank on google. How to find out what questions your listeners want answered. How I'd built a pro sounding podcast setup for under 200 dollars and much more. So, whether you want to get started with podcast seo or you want tips on how to create a bingeable podcast that everyone wants to listen to, then keep listening. You're listening to Podcasting Amplified, where our mission is to help you to leverage the power of podcasting to amplify your message and achieve your goals. If you're a podcaster and you want to learn from the journeys of other passionate podcasters, you're in the right place. Ed Dawson, thanks for joining me on Podcasting Amplified. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: 3:42

Yeah, I'm good. Thanks for inviting me on Pleasure.

Speaker 2: 3:44

Yeah, thanks for being here. So Ed hosts the podcast. Seo is Not that Hard, and he's a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in building successfully ranking websites, and on his podcast, which he produces three episodes a week for, he shares actionable tips, strategies and insights to help you improve your Google rankings and create better websites for your users. So before we dive in and I start asking you questions about SEO for the listeners if anyone's not 100% sure what SEO is and why they should care as podcasters or as business owners, can you give us a brief overview of SEO, please?

Speaker 1: 4:20

Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1: 4:20

Well, seo I mean first of all, it stands for search engine optimization, and the whole idea is basically doing what you need to do to get your website to rank better in Google, to get better visibility, to get more clicks, to get more visitors, to get more engagement.

Speaker 1: 4:35

Seo kind of morphs beyond that in many respects people now it's all about user experience, getting people to take the actions you want on the page. So it sort of morphs from just purely ranking in search engines to also making sure that people get the best experience on site, because that's important again to your search rankings in the bigger scheme of things. But yeah, essentially it's just trying to make sure that you get your site ranking well, getting visitors in the search engines, mainly google. But yeah, essentially it's just trying to make sure that you get your site ranking well, getting visitors in the search engines mainly Google. It used to be, but now things are moving a little bit. People are talking about how we can rank in things like ChatGPT and the other search avenues that are now coming in strong. So it's not just Google nowadays, it's wider than that.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Yeah, it's really interesting. Actually I hadn't thought of ranking it. I know people talk about ranking other search engines like YouTube and Bing and stuff, but ranking for chat GPT I guess that's something that you're kind of maybe looking into at the moment. I know things have sort of moved fast in that area. Is that something that's keeping you on your toes? The AI stuff yeah, it's.

Speaker 1: 5:30

I mean for the past, most of the past 20 years, 20 years it's just been google, google, google.

Speaker 1: 5:35

When we talked about search engines, we really just talked about google, especially in the uk. I know it's a little bit broader in some other areas of the world, but for most of the world it just was google. But now, with chat, gpt and other large language models like that, other ai systems like that we are now starting to see just the first few drips of traffic coming through from them and how chat gpt especially when they launched search gpt just a few months ago they can actively search the web and make recommendations and cite that. They are pushing people to now reference sites and we're starting to see it come through. It's still very early days, though. I mean from probably 99% of people out there using the web and searching are still using Google, but it's the biggest shift I've ever seen and the more experienced sort of power users online are using chat GPT more and more. I mean I am certainly myself and I'm seeing that happen more and more, so I think it's going to become more prevalent and probably accelerate over this year in the coming years.

Speaker 2: 6:25

Maybe we can touch on AI again a little bit later on. I just wanted to first talk to you about the podcast. So you've been in this business for a long time and you have done a lot of other things before you ran keywords, peopleusecom. Why did you choose to start a podcast when you did Getting on for about a year and a half now, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, what was the main driver and how has it affected your business?

Speaker 1: 6:48

First of all, I've been an avid podcast listener for 10 years or more, probably very early days. You know I'm very, very keen on podcasts because for many years, all our businesses we've always had since 2007 as virtual businesses, working from home, so I've essentially worked by myself, even though I've had employees and other team members, everyone's always worked virtual. So that means a lot of time being by myself and I quite enjoy having something to listen to while I'm working or while I'm doing chores or anything like that. So I've been a real big podcast listener for many years and I've always got loads of value out of it. I'd never had the desire to go out there and push myself as like a personal brand because prior to sort of 2021, all our sites were just purely consumer facing and we were driving all our traffic from SEO. I sold our biggest site, broadbandcouk, in 2021, which obviously left me with a position where what am I going to do next?

Speaker 1: 7:42

And for all these many years, I've been listening to people online and on podcasts talking about SEO and there's a lot of misinformation out there about SEO. I call it a confusopoly a lot of the SEO industry where people make money by making it confusing so that they need experts to come and help them. In some cases some big companies, some enterprise level stuff. Then, yeah, I can see they have issues that they need experts to deal with, but for many people they could just do it themselves. But it's really hard to get into. So we founded Keywords People Use to sort of work on the philosophy that I'd always worked upon for ranking traffic, which is I won't go into it now, but it's basically around answering people's questions and not getting too in the weeds on analytics and keywords and all those things. But it's taking a simpler way of doing it and I wanted to make that accessible to people who could use it for themselves as an SEO tool. You are competing against other SEO tools which are being run by other very experienced SEOs. So it's like an incredibly difficult area to stand out in because you're working against the very best experts in the world on these things and a lot of them have got history going back years and years and years on their tools.

Speaker 1: 8:43

So it's like how was I going to differentiate myself? How was I going to get our tool noticed and also give it credibility? So that meant putting myself out there and putting my story out there and helping people, trying to position myself as hey, I've got some expertise here, I'm going to share it with you, and I felt that the best way to do it was with a podcast, because with a podcast it's so much more authentic. You know, if people can hear my voice and hear my story, then I can give them tips and advice and help. Then it's a lot less stale than just putting it on the page, because I knew if I was going to go with just our site, just a blog, it's going to be a lot harder to cut through the noise, because there's a barrier entry to podcasting which is having the balls to get up and do it, basically, and the guts. I'm not a natural public speaker, I've never stood on a stage and talked in front of people, and so to do this in the first instance was a case of right. If I can get over that barrier and just try it, then I'm kind of reducing the pool of people that I'm competing against.

Speaker 1: 9:38

And I also knew that the audience I was looking for were those that were really serious about SEO or serious about wanting to learn SEO, and I wanted to try and help demystify it for them. So I just thought a podcast was a worthwhile, at least a trial. I initially thought I'll just try this. I thought I'll do 20 episodes and see before I even look at any analytics, and see if I get any feedback. And within that period we did start to get feedback we just start to get listens and it did start to pick up customers because people would listen to the podcast. And I don't try and push the software that we're selling in the podcast. In the intro it's sponsored by and if it's relevant I'll mention it, but only as a relevancy. I try and keep it as non-promotional as possible and try to give value and then hopefully, if I give enough value, then people will, out of curiosity, go and look at what it is that was behind us.

Speaker 2: 10:25

Basically, so you have some examples of where you know that a customer's found you through the podcast. Have you, or is it more just kind of a sort of brand awareness?

Speaker 1: 10:33

Yeah, yeah, there's two ways we know sort of brand awareness. Yeah, yeah, we've got on the um. There's two ways we know. One is when people sign up for the tool, they go through an onboarding process and we are one of the places. How did you hear of us? And we've got the podcast as an option. Well, it doesn't say out my podcast, but podcasts or podcasts sometimes I've won't have any guests.

Speaker 1: 10:47

They might have heard from me. There's a call to action on the podcast with a dynamic ad. We've got a. You can schedule a demo. So if you want to schedule a demo with me, follow this link. It's a calendar link so I know that if anyone's clicked that link and come to that calendar thing, they've scheduled it from the podcast so I can pick up there when people are scheduling and we do get people through that and I get emails from people who have signed up and said oh, you know, love the podcast, I've signed up for the tool and they'll actually contact us so we know that it works. And the conversion rate compared to a website is probably really, really, actually good. Compared to the number of listeners we have, the number of people that have signed up, it's a really good rate, I'd say.

Speaker 2: 11:20

Yeah, well, that's a couple of ideas, for if anyone's listening does have something that they're selling, a call to action, they can use trackable links in their show notes. Or, like you say, you can have a where did you find us? Option so that people can choose. So do you know if any of your competitors, any of the other tools, have a podcast, or are you kind of the first SEO podcast that is actually promoting a tool like this?

Speaker 1: 11:42

Oh, there's definitely others doing it. I've not seen one doing the kind of the exact format that I've done, which is, until very recently, it's just been me talking the short podcast, just me. There are others that do sort of interview podcasts and there's others that have done series of like shorter series of podcasts. I think obviously a lot of the other bigger tools. I say HubSpot, they do loads but they're like a billion dollar company. They published a whole network of podcasts that all have feedback, the idea and mentioned HubSpot into them. But obviously we're a much smaller operation so we're not massive. But that gives me the freedom to go and say what I want. I haven't got to do anything particularly corporate or worry about stepping on someone's toes or annoying someone in the organisation. If I screw up, it falls on me and I'll take that.

Speaker 2: 12:25

Yeah, and you mentioned that you kind of just wanted to give podcasting a go at the beginning, and I think a lot of people when they're in that position, it'll be like maybe I'll do a fortnightly interview episode or one episode a month and see how it lands, and then maybe they'll continue, maybe they won't. It seems like you jumped right into it and have you always been releasing three episodes a week? Yeah, from day one.

Speaker 1: 12:48

Yeah, I sat down and I thought what am I going to do? And I wanted to do something different. And a lot of the SEO world is an hour long talking heads and you were seeing the same kind of people being interviewed, so the same story was being repeated again and again. I just felt that there wasn't a lot being taught, there wasn't a lot to take away. There were some interesting stories, some quite motivational stories and people saying how you know they'd had great success doing stuff, but a lot of the time there wasn't a lot of nuts and bolts.

Speaker 1: 13:18

If you wanted to learn about seo, what are the nuts and bolts? Where do you start? What are little tips? When I first built the tool, there's one section of the tool which takes about 30 seconds to run. So, rather than it just having the screen sat there for 30 seconds with a little thing running around, I wrote a hundred quick seo tips that display well, the tools running every 10 seconds and you want shows and so over time it doesn't randomly over time there's 100 and I thought, well, I've got these 100 quick tips.

Speaker 1: 13:39

I could start by basing podcast episodes on one or two of those tips or, you know, some of them merge together. So it's like thinking short episodes just a few minutes long, having a very high frequency, so that I appear in the feed frequently. So that was one thing I said. That's different and also, if it was just me, it means I didn't have to source guests. I could record when I wanted to record. I didn't have to schedule things. It meant I could just build a bank of pre-records up. So on the day when sometimes you probably know yourself, sometimes some days you feel better, better about you know you feel more inspired to talk than others. So when I got a day and I felt, right, that's good, I just the aim was to get a few episodes in the bank and then I could store them up, basically and then just schedule them out over time, I just thought it was worth an experiment.

Speaker 1: 14:25

I didn't know if it'd work, I didn't know if anyone had listened, but I went into it thinking, well, if no one listens, I've not lost much. The only thing I needed to buy was a mic. That's the only thing I didn't have was a decent mic. So I bought a Rode Podcaster 2. It was about 100, 150 quid or something. It wasn't. I just googled around to see what was a good, not stupidly expensive mic, but one that would be a reasonable price. And then I experimented with software, found Descript, which just makes podcast editing so easy it's like editing a document. And yeah I thought, well, okay, so all in, there's less than 200 quid to try and start and I'll just see where it goes. And yeah, I've sort of really got into it. I really got into it, I really enjoy doing. It's probably the thing I enjoy doing most compared to anything that I do work-wise.

Speaker 2: 15:06

So yeah, gotta have that to keep you motivated. So how long do you spend a week on the whole podcasting process if you're doing three episodes when I first?

Speaker 1: 15:14

started. I think the first episode was about eight, nine minutes long. It took me the best part of a day to record because I was so nervous, so wanting to get it. I wouldn't say perfect, because it was far from perfect, but I kept freezing, I kept jumbling over my words, because that was another problem, obviously, of working solo all the time is that you don't spend a lot of time talking. So for many years I felt like I'd spent whole days not saying anything to anyone and I got out of the habit of actually talking. Yeah, I know the feeling, but yeah. So the first few episodes it was a learning curve and it took me time to get it right.

Speaker 1: 15:47

But now I can do pretty much. Most episodes I can do in a round round about. I literally just sit down and record and most of them are done in one take and it's the first take. Sometimes I've discovered the point that if I get to a point where I freeze before, I used to stop the recording then wait while it all transcribed before I started again. But now I've realized actually it's just as easy. With the script you just say cut out the shortened word gaps. So now, if I suddenly forget what I'm talking about. I just stop, gather my thoughts and then start again, so you can do it all in one take if you just get used to the process. So now I can do them really quickly.

Speaker 1: 16:19

The harder thing is obviously coming up with the ideas for the topics for every single one. That's where I'm constantly all week. If an idea comes to me, I'm listening to another podcast or I've read something, or some news comes out, I'll just drop myself a quick email from my phone podcast idea and just a title. So now it's really quite quick and I've automated the intro and the outro.

Speaker 1: 16:38

I used to record that every single time and then overlay the music and then I thought why am I not just recording it once and then just dropping the files in? But these things just don't occur to you when you first start doing it. So yeah, so now if I've got some good ideas and I'm motivated and I've got something good to talk about, I can normally do three episodes in less than three hours. It can be slightly less, but I've just started this week recording some of the first interview episodes. They take a bit longer, obviously, because you've got to schedule the guest and then when you're speaking with the guest's, a little bit of a longer conversation and then a little bit more editing.

Speaker 2: 17:12

So that is going to take me more time to sort of get used to having interviews and going through that process yeah, wow, there's a lot of insight there, like I think, maybe when people when they see the short episodes or they think about starting a podcast with those really short kind of episode formats, it seems like it wouldn't take long, but each individual episode you've got to sort of produce it separately and write the show notes and upload it and schedule it and come up with a separate idea. I think some people can struggle coming up with an idea for a podcast once a week, let alone three times a week. Are there any other ways that you find out what people want, basically what questions people are asking? I know you've obviously got your tool keywords people use. Is that something that you find useful to find out what to make episodes about?

Speaker 1: 17:54

yeah, totally, I have used the tool itself for finding ideas. So I will put in SEO or I might obviously put a more narrow seed keyword to find different topics, topic areas, people asking questions about. Yeah, totally, it can come through that. But I think a lot of it is just if you just always have like some way of writing down show ideas and especially because it's short episodes and I'm only trying to get somewhere between 8 and 16 minutes, if I feel like I've gone over 16 minutes, it's generally I've gone on a bit long. If I'm under 8, I've probably not got a broad enough subject area. I've gone too tight maybe, but I don't beat myself up, I don't have an exact ideal time. If, because they're so short, the ideas don't have to be huge, you know, and the research doesn't have to be huge, and I am basing a lot of it on obviously I haven't been in the industry for 20 years of just sort of putting that, that knowledge out.

Speaker 1: 18:44

I also do things like not worrying too much about the sequencing, so my topics bounce around a lot sometimes. I have done sequences where I've had ones that do follow on from each other. When I did a sequence talking about the google webmaster guidelines and the google rater guidelines. Because that's such a big document, I broke it down into sections and over about 10 episodes I think it was. But yeah, but generally a lot of the time it's literally just whatever is occurring to me or whatever's bothering me or whatever I'll just get inspiration on is what I'll go for. So I don't try and overthink the podcast. I don't try and overthink each episode. If anything, it's quite raw, but people that enjoy listening to, I think, enjoy the fact that it's quite raw and not too overproduced and not too slick. Like I don't go through and edit out the ums and the errs, I kind of leave them in because it's just.

Speaker 2: 19:33

I want it to be like you're just sitting with me over a coffee, you know, or a beer, just having that conversation, and it being conversational rather than being like, incredibly well produced like some of the podcasts are yeah, I think it depends as well, like if somebody's got a guest on and they just don't have much experience speaking on podcasts and every other word they're saying I'm or are, then it's an hour long podcast, then it's something that you definitely need to focus on. But if you're just talking yourself and you know the topic you're talking about, then there's typically not going to be anything that's going to get in the way anyway. But you say not too slick. I mean your audio quality is very good and it's nice to you know hear what mic. I was going to ask that actually like what mic you're using, because if anyone's you know, looking to upgrade their audio quality, if you listen to seo is not that hard.

Speaker 2: 20:17

I think the audio sounds really good thank you, despite the fact that you say you're not spending too much time on it? Did you say it's the road?

Speaker 1: 20:23

podcaster yeah, road podcaster 2, I think yeah, there's 100 quid I paid so little attention to what the tech is. I had to look it up before the podcast. What I actually thought yeah, road podcaster 2, yeah, and it's just in a cheap shock mount. You know, I think the things I could do better with the audio. The script's quite good because you can help you out with the audio quite a bit.

Speaker 2: 20:40

It has a feature called studio sound and that can help with levels and things like that, so I found that quite useful yeah, well, I'm glad that that one came up, because I know there are some articles out there, some blog posts, that rank very highly and they're suggesting mics that just aren't really suitable for a lot of people or it's not amazing audio advice. So that's kind of something to look out for. But if we could switch gears a little bit. It's really great hearing about your podcast and I think there's a lot people can learn from that. You know ideas for episodes and how to come up with them and the different formats people use.

Speaker 2: 21:12

But if we can talk about SEO now, I think this is something that a lot of podcasters have thought about when it comes to episode titles what can get them to show up in Google when people search? Or maybe they haven't thought about it, but they're starting to think about it now, and I know some podcasters us as well. We put out a blog post on our website for every episode that has our show notes that typically focuses on a keyword that people are searching for in the hopes that it will show up on Google and then it will lead us to lead people to our podcast you mentioned. The whole basis around the podcast is that SEO isn't that hard. I'm sure a lot of people think that it is what made you go down that route. Why would you say that SEO isn't that hard? And what do you see people wasting their time on that they think is really hard, but maybe it's something they don't even need to be bothering with at all.

Speaker 1: 22:03

Well, I say SEO is not that hard because there's a lot of people in the SEO industry who try and make it sound hard, because I think obviously it helps them sell services. If you're trying to charge for something, making it easy is not necessarily what you want to do, but fundamentally, I mean, I've been doing this for so many years and the principles don't change hugely. There's lots of small technical things that can matter, but it's just a matter of learning what they are. A lot of what you need to do is just have good content that is well presented, that's on a secure and fast server. That's it. You know. Your website just needs to be fast, secure, have good content, have good internal linking. There's just basic things. And okay, obviously I'm not going to go through the whole of SEO now, but there's no individual parts of it that are overly complicated by themselves. You don't need to be a web developer. You don't need to be a computer scientist. You don't need to be all these things that some people would lead you to believe. You can get very in-depth on the weeds and very enterprise-level stuff where the fine margins can drive bigger results because they've got such huge levels of traffic. Then some of that can be complex, but it's still not hard. So I wanted to sort of demystify it and say to people if you follow the basics, then a lot of the time you will start to see success. And say to people if you follow the basics, then a lot of the time you will start to see success.

Speaker 1: 23:20

The key thing I always say to people is don't look for quick hacks or quick results. Anyone promising quick hacks and quick results is probably going to either lead you to nothing or, if it does lead somewhere, you're likely to get penalised. I mean, I in the past have done quick hacks, done things against Google's guidelines and I talk about that in the podcast and I got heavily penalized back in sort of 2012 2013 time and it I changed my philosophy and went right. Now I'm not going to build for the short term anymore, I'm going to build for the long term. If you build for the long term with SEO, then it isn't that hard. It's just all about making sure your content is good I can say good well presented and in a clean and fast website. It's as simple as that. There's lots of. There's lots of stuff on the margins to make the difference up, but okay, it doesn't have to be that hard yeah, it sounds like google is clever enough now that it is just a case of making great content.

Speaker 2: 24:06

Then, rather than maybe back in the early 2000s, it was maybe more focused on these hacks and things that people could get away with more yeah, it was easier to do things like buy links, and people do still sell links.

Speaker 1: 24:18

Now. Some people will tell you to buy links and it will work in the short term, but in the long run you're going to be much more likely to have problems. What Google looks for much more for now is a thing called information gain. So it's about having something new to say. That's the great thing about podcasts, because podcasts are much more intimate. They're much more based around people's stories about things people have actually done, and that's where there is a much more likelihood of information gain.

Speaker 1: 24:41

So if you're basing content upon what you've put in a podcast, ai is an issue lots of AI content out there but the trouble with AI content is it's only an average of stuff that it's seen before. It never creates anything new. There's never any real information gain, whereas people telling their stories and you know which podcasting is there is information gain there. There is something, even if the story is new. If the example is new, it's new. There's an information gain there, whereas ai can't really tell its story because ai content doesn't have a story. It can only regurgitate other people's stories rather than having something new to share very interesting.

Speaker 2: 25:17

I guess that's why it's important that people are telling a story on their podcast and if they do have a kind of long form interview podcast, like we touched upon briefly, how is that being linked back to value for the listener rather than someone's story or just sort of generic tips? But if you combine those two things, it seems like SEO as a service is quite a popular service to provide for people. I'm sure you're very much aware of all the cold emails that people get and stuff like claiming that they can do all these things and presumably they're using. Well, I mean, some of them, I'm sure, are legit and can help and some of them are probably using these tricks and black hat techniques that you mentioned. How can people tell if they do want help with their seo, getting their website and podcast ranking? How can people tell if somebody is sort of worth working with or worth listening to?

Speaker 1: 26:06

the first advice I'd give to people if you're looking for a service provider is I think you need to be a little bit clued up first before you go out shopping. And the simplest thing to do is to go to Google and search for Google's webmaster guidelines. And that is just a few short, simple documents written by Google. It's designed for the lay audience, it's not. You know, you have to be overly technical to read it. And that tells you the kind of things that Google does and doesn't like. And I'm not saying you should always follow completely Google's guidelines to the hilt. When you start pushing the guidelines, you need knowledge before you get there. But if you're looking for someone, familiarize yourself with those guidelines. It won't take you more than half an hour of reading. You will then know some of the red flags to look out for.

Speaker 1: 26:47

If people come along and they're trying to sell you a service or tell you what they're going to do, that's the first thing I'd say to do. And then, secondly, I would just ask for references. Would just ask for references. See who else they've worked with. Ask for results. You know who else are you working with. Can I talk to another customer?

Speaker 1: 27:00

You know, if someone's good and reputable, they will have other customers that will be happy to endorse them, and if not, that's another red flag, my whole philosophy with around seo, and that's what one of the reasons doing the podcast is. I don't sell seo services, so I don't do seo for people. That's not what I do. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to teach people to fish, essentially so that they can feed themselves when it comes to SEO.

Speaker 1: 27:22

So, even if you don't want to do the work yourself, if you have people working for you, if you've understood the basics and have some knowledge, you're much less likely to end up in a situation where something comes back to bite you, where someone does some work that causes you issues. So it's just having a little bit of base level knowledge. But I say in the first instance, the very best one to go to is just those Google Webmaster Guidelines. Familiarise yourself with those, and that should help you avoid sort of 95% of the red flag pitfalls that you just wouldn't know about otherwise, because why would you know what Google does or doesn't like if you've never been to try? If you familiarise yourselves with those, that's what I'd say. Cool.

Speaker 2: 27:59

Okay, so read Google's webmaster guidelines. Listen to a few episodes of SEO is not that hard, and that will hopefully get you to a place where you can at least start implementing some of these things. For the listeners, where they are in this journey is going to be very different. Some podcasters might have started considering using search terms in their episode titles to help them get showing up on Google. Some might have started a blog and they're posting regular content on there, but it seems like there's a lot of content in your podcast that could help wherever they are, because, like you say, it's not a serial podcast. You can go back like a year ago and still find something that might be a little bit more relevant to you yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1: 28:41

I try to be as evergreen as possible with the episodes and I try to be as reasonably descriptive as possible with the titles. Titles is an interesting one, though, because there's two schools of thought isn't on the titles. One is be descriptive, get the keywords and tell people what it's about, and there's another one that is like leave a cliffhanger in your title, and I've experimented a bit with both of them and the cliffhanger ones can tend to get more of your subscribers, I think, to listen, whereas they're not great for discovery, because a cliffhanger title necessarily doesn't give away what you're talking about. So I think there's always going to be a trade-off there between enticing your current subscriber base, where you're in their feed, to click to listen, versus trying to pick up new people.

Speaker 2: 29:26

I haven't quite sort of squared that circle myself yet yeah, no, I completely agree, because we do show notes and title writing for clients and we always go talk to the human first. Get the existing subscribers, nurture your existing listeners first, so write a title that you know is going to get them to click before, and then if we can squeeze in a keyword, then we will. But keeping people listening is is the first thing to do. And then, to finish off, if there's one thing that you wish you'd have known a year and a half ago, before you started the podcast, that would have made things a little bit easier for you what would it be?

Speaker 1: 30:00

I think that probably just I would have started earlier if I'd appreciated that just doing it improves you. So I think I'd obviously thought about podcasting, because I've been so into podcasting for a long, long, long, long time I always thought I will be rubbish at it and I'm still still. I'm not saying I'm good at it now, I'm better than I was when I started but I think the fact is that a everyone will be terrible when they first start. Everyone's worst episode is their first episode, you know, but they improve over time and that your audience is quite forgiving.

Speaker 1: 30:31

I think that, depending on what podcast you listen to, if you've only really listened to lots of really well-produced podcasts, really professional podcasts, you think they've all got to be like that. But actually when you are doing the more niche you're going. So obviously with seo it's quite niche. It's not for everybody. If you're going really niche, the people that want to learn about the subject will forgive a lot when it comes to production values and the quality of your speech and because especially because I've got quite a regional accent from the uk these things don't matter as much as you probably think they do and that there is an audience out there, I think for every niche and for every podcaster, and just to be a little bit more bold, and go for it, love it and, especially if you're producing three episodes a week, you're going to improve very quickly.

Speaker 1: 31:11

I hope anyway.

Speaker 2: 31:12

All right, well, thanks, ed. I think that'd be really useful for people in terms of listening to your podcast journey and how you have made your podcast unique in the crowd, and then also, of course, your seo expertise. So do you mind just telling people briefly what keywords people usecom is exactly, if they didn't already understand that from our whole conversation, and just how it might be able to benefit them, just so if anyone wants to know more. And then also, obviously, people can go to seo it's not that hard on their favorite podcast platforms and learn more there sure, yeah, so keywords people use.

Speaker 1: 31:45

It's based around my philosophy of you create great content for people by answering their questions, not by delving into lots of statistics left, right and center from other keyword tools will give you. This is all about finding the questions actual people ask online, and it mines places like google, it mines reddit, it mines reminds quora, it mines a whole bunch of places online to find the questions people are asking. And then this it doesn't just do that. The next part is it then helps you group those questions, because you can find thousands of questions but you're not going to create thousands of pieces of content. A lot of those questions actually cluster together to create content. That you will create content pieces around, whether it be a youtube video, whether it be a written blog, whether it be a podcast. It helps you cluster them, find the questions that are related to each other, so you create some content.

Speaker 1: 32:28

And the third piece is, with seo, the biggest bang for your buck. A lot of the time is actually improving existing content. So we have a third piece of the tool which connects to your google search console, which is a an area. If you've got a website, google will give you extra information about how people are finding your website. You can connect to Google Search Console and see what your content is actually ranking for and where you're getting visibility in Google but not clicks, which means you're not ranking high enough, and we can then give suggestions on how to improve your content to make it rank better. So it's like a holistic approach to creating new content and improving existing content and then coming back and re-improving and re-improving. So it's like creating a flywheel for your content to boost that visibility and traffic and, hopefully, if you're, monetising your revenue over time.

Speaker 2: 33:13

Awesome, yeah, and I think that links perfectly to podcasting about answering people's questions. That's what's going to get people to click. So thank you for that. That's keywordspeopleusecom, and thanks again, ed. I really appreciate you spending the time with us today and, yeah, all the best with the podcast.

Speaker 1: 33:28

Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on. Loved it, so I hope you found that useful and interesting. Like I say, say, if you're thinking of starting a podcast, then I really strongly recommend the Podcasting Amplified podcast. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. You know, if you're looking to get someone to help you with a podcast, then Joe has got loads of services that do that and he has a really nice bloke, so I would recommend him to anybody. So until next time, keep optimising, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics.

Speaker 1: 34:14

You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky just search for Ed Dawson. On both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority. And finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize continually, refine your content, targeted, personalize advice. Keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now, and and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.