Hello and welcome to the show. Today, we have Stephan Spencer. He is a three-time author and SEO expert, as well as a professional speaker and podcaster. He’s got two podcasts, Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. I’m so excited to chat with him. It’s 7 p.m. right now where he is, calling in from Tel Aviv. Stephan, thanks for being here.

Well, thanks for having me. This is going to be fun.

Yeah. So tell me about your day. You said you’ve been so busy today.

Well, every day is pretty much crazy busy, but I have a lot of clients in the States. So, I ended up working pretty late into the evenings. Like last night, it was till three in the morning. So it’s just one of the, yeah, just it comes with the territory being an international kind of citizen of the world. Yeah.

Yeah. We met just recently at Podcast Movement during what I would call a speed-dating event for podcasters. So, what did you think about how they pulled off this event?

I thought they did a great job. I was impressed. I’ve been attending a lot of virtual events lately. So, the biohacking virtual conference a few weeks prior to Podcast Movement, I’m gonna be doing. Genius Network‘s annual event is later this week. I am part of Genius Network, so I attended their monthly meetings. And yeah, it’s a lot of Zoom time. I’m feeling the Zoom fatigue. I tend to be on Zoom for probably 35 hours a week.

So, what do you do to keep yourself healthy?

Yeah, that’s tricky. Well, I walked for an hour and a half yesterday, so that was good. And I did recently get a weight set that is adjustable, so you can change the weights on it. Of course, I don’t have all the stuff that I normally have in California, which is where I’m normally based. Here, I’m staying at an Airbnb, so you have to kind of improvise.

So why are you in Tel Aviv, then?

Oh, because things are interesting in California and we wanted to be somewhere kind of outside of all the craziness. Not that the whole world isn’t crazy right now, but yeah, it’s a good spot to be in. It’s a cool part of the world. I have my wife’s family here, and yeah, it’s pretty neat.

So, how are things there when it comes to the pandemic?

Well, we did a lockdown for a month and a half, I think, and we’re just exiting that. But, you know, it’s not quite as stifling as it was in California. So, I do not have anything against California or its policies; it just was not. It was just kind of weird what was going on. So yeah, just having some different phases, a change of pace, and different scenery has been nice for the last couple of months.

Well, good. I feel you. I actually am also based in Los Angeles, north of Los Angeles in Woodland Hills. And I’m currently podcasting to you from my in-law’s basement in Minnesota. So I’m in the middle of the United States, where it’s expected to get really cold real soon. But also, it was just to get a change of pace because it was stifling in California. We just had to be on lockdown, stuck in our homes, and the air quality was bad. There were just so many different things.

Yeah, and we were neighbors pretty much because I was an Encino. And yeah, so it got to the point where our CVS, a mile away, got looted, and we’re like, all right, we got to do something different.

Got it. So you peaced out to Tel Aviv.

Yeah.

So that’s a bit away. So, let’s talk about SEO. I feel like SEO is something that really comes easily to some people, and for other people, it’s like this secret, mystical, magical thing that is so hard to attain. So, can you break down what SEO means in general and then what it means specifically for podcasters?

Yeah, for sure. So, I like to frame it as the three pillars of SEO. You have content, you have architecture, and you have links. The content includes figuring out what keywords people are searching for, who your target audience is, and making sure you’re using those kinds of words and topics in your content. And then weaving those topics in the right ways into that content.

Now, that is gonna get a little more specific once we start talking about podcasts and what podcasters need to think about. 

But just generally speaking, if you’re writing blog posts and you’re never using the words that your target audience is using, that’s gonna be a disconnect and a failure in your SEO. So you’ve got content, that pillar, and architecture, which includes all the geeky stuff, things like robots.txt, XML sitemaps and canonical tags. And if your eyes are starting to glaze over as I’m using these words, don’t worry. It’s not just something that you have to know all about. You just need to know who to tap on the shoulder and say, “Hey, help me with this.” So that’s all the geeky stuff; that’s the technical architecture pillar.

And then, finally, links. If you don’t have links pointing to your website, you’re not going to rank. Maybe in your name, but that’s pretty much it. So you need links, not just annual links; you need links from powerful, authoritative, trusted websites. A link from Jim Bob’s personal homepage isn’t going to cut it. You need a link from CNN or from a more authoritative source.

Yes. So, I think that when we’re talking about links, we’re talking about links to your website. For example, my website is Christine-odonnell.com. Pretty simple based on my name. But if I were to get an article or a podcast episode republished or repurposed by a huge newspaper or a news authority like CNN, and then they linked to my website to credit me, then all of a sudden, my website just beeps up a little bit when it comes to domain authority. But why is domain authority important?

Yeah, so now we can start getting a little bit into the nuances, but I don’t want to have our listener kind of zone out because it’s getting too technical. So the idea here is if an authoritative website links to you, that’s going to be beneficial to you. Google is looking at the web pages that link to you, your website, and actually your web pages. So, it’s a link from, let’s say, a home page of somebody’s website to your home page, and that’s going to convey some trust and importance to you. If you got a link from instead of their home page, it was a really deep kind of forgotten page on their site that’s not going to be worth as much.

So, even though the domain authority in both cases might be high, the difference in the link authority that’s transferred because it’s a home page link versus, I’d say, an orphan page that they’re not even linking to themselves is the difference is vast. So you need to think about the page that’s linking to you, how important it is, how trusted it is, and yeah, domain authority gives you a sense for the site, but you also need to look at the page and that individual URL’s metrics.

So, would you say SEO is really important if you’re trying to show up on Google? If people are searching for you and your content, you want them, like SEO is going to matter when they type it in and Google, right?

Yeah. So, it matters even if all of your business comes from referrals. If none of your good leads ever come from your website directly, it still matters to have good SEO. And the reason why is because this is the first impression that a prospect is gonna have of you. It’s not your website. They’re not gonna be on your website first. They’re gonna be in the Google search results searching for you first. Even if they were referred by a friend, so they Google your brand, your name, your podcast, your company, your personal name, whatever it is, and then they see some Google results.

And if you haven’t curated that appropriately like you’re not controlling the narrative there and putting your best stuff at the top of the results for that search, if it’s just random, or there are multiple, let’s say, Christine O’Donnell showing up and it’s not just you, or maybe it’s your LinkedIn that’s ranking number one and not your homepage, like these are all indicators that maybe you don’t have it all going on.

 And if you, on the other hand, have a knowledge panel on the right-hand side that has images of you and maybe your book covers and all your social chiclets and a description about you pulled from Wikipedia or Google Books or LinkedIn or whatever it’s being pulled from, and you also have a whole bunch of stuff in the main set of search results like not just your home page, but maybe also your about page, maybe you’re an author and you have an Amazon author page showing up there.

Maybe you were featured on Forbes.com at one point, and you have a feature story that’s showing up there. All of that’s going to convey your authority and social proof to the prospect. And that’s not even for, we’re not even talking about competitive, more non-brand keywords yet, that’s just for your name. So that’s critical. You have to control that narrative.

That is so crazy to me. So I’m just gonna give myself as an example, right? Because this is fun. Sometimes, we need an example to understand SEO because it gets a little. I don’t know technical, I think, but there is another Christine O’Donnell out there. She’s a politician. My background is in news reporting, so if I were to Google myself and write Christine O’Donnell, reporter, I would probably be the first thing that pops up in your Google search. 

But it wouldn’t probably be from my website. It might be from someplace else. But if you just type in Christine O’Donnell altogether, you’re gonna get ads from a lady who used to be, well, she is still a politician, but she’s not a witch. She’s you. I don’t know if anyone remembers that ad, but I cannot forget it because we share the same name, and sometimes people confuse us on social media. So, I get some interesting messages coming my way.

Yeah, that’s funny.

Yeah, it is funny. And it’s so interesting, though, because sometimes, you know, what if a bad piece of news comes out about you? If you can control your SEO, you can find a way to change the narrative online and gain a little bit more control.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s like a chess game, but you can move not only your pieces on the chessboard but also your opponent’s. You can push that negative listing right off of page one into no man’s land on page two.

Boom. That’s exciting. Just to be able to give people that control back a little bit. So how can people, how should podcasters be using SEO?

Yeah, so podcasters can, they can do some podcast SEO to specifically get more SEO goodness into their RSS feed and into the various podcast, podcatcher app websites and all that sort of good stuff for their podcasts, but they can also leverage their podcast as a rich source for content to enhance the SEO of their website. So, for example, if we’re talking about the latter, I have with both of my websites, marketingspeak.com and GetYourselfOptimized.com, my two shows each has a podcast website, each episode has a full transcript that is not like a big boring wall of text that keeps labeling the guest’s name and my name over and over and over again. Nobody wants to read those.

Will hate that. It’s turned into a long-form blog post, and it’s broken up so it’s not so heavy with text that it incorporates images with captions. Images from Unsplash, pexels.com, and various free stock photo repositories. And I have to pull quotes, and I have to click to tweets, and, you know, other elements to break up the text.

Use of bolding and just different kinds of effects and things that make it more visually interesting to consume the content. Because a lot of people don’t have time to listen to an hour-long episode if you spend the time digging in your analytics and looking where people drop off in, let’s say, your Apple podcast analytics, and you realize most people or many people aren’t even finishing your entire episode.

Like, well, my call to action, my most important thing is at the very end, oh no, half my people aren’t even listening to that part or more. Well, then you realize that your website is this untapped opportunity if you get it to rank well and convey all the value that’s locked in that audio that they don’t have the time to listen to. You expose all that as a really valuable-looking long-form blog post.

That’s ninja stuff, and that’s one aspect I think that is underutilized. Most folks that I see with podcast show notes just try to use a less-is-more sort of approach. Bullet list of five, ten, and fifteen things. That’s kind of the outline of the show, and here are the social links and all that of the guests. That doesn’t cut it.

So, how long does it take you to do that? Because that’s like a chunk of time getting your show transcribed or doing it yourself. Yeah. Then turning it into an article.

Yeah. My team does it. I have a team in the Philippines, and they’re doing this for every single one of my episodes. In fact, we started doing this around episode 150 or something like that of both of the shows. So I had 300 episodes in the back catalog to do this, too, not just from the current episode moving forward. Because it was so valuable, I saw the uptick in organic traffic from Google. I thought, yeah, we really need to go through the back catalog and do this. I actually found a contractor in the Philippines who recommended it to me rather than a per-hour price.

I just got her to quote a per-episode price. I think it was $3 an episode, something like that. Yeah, $3 or $4. She found a few images and pixels, et cetera, as part of that. She didn’t include writing the transcript, but she used a transcript that was already done because we had been doing transcripts since the beginning, but yeah, I was about three dollars an episode to take a previously transcribed episode and turn that into a long-form blog post. That’s an extreme example because we got lucky finding somebody who was very affordable and willing to do this on a per-episode basis because then I don’t have to worry about tracking their time and making sure that they’re doing the work.

It’s up to her to take her as long or as short of time as she wants. It’s just I’m paying per episode. So that was very effective. But now we’ve got a team of three people in the Philippines who are doing a lot more than just turning these into long-form blog posts. There are also the social quote card images, checklists, and PDFs of those checklists. Like we’re actually figuring out what are the main action points or kind of actionable insights from each episode and then turning that into a PDF document as well as including the text of that at the end of the show notes page, right after all the links to the resources.

So, is that PDF document a lead magnet for you?

We started out making it a lead magnet and we found that very few people were opting in for it. Like, yeah, you know, the old adage, information wants to be free. So we just decided to remove the wall, and there’s no opt-in now for any of these episode checklists.

Wow. So, the content is a really big piece for you. Just creating, creating content, and podcasting was kind of your way to that content.

Yeah, it’s a great way to generate a source of a lot of rich content that could be used in many formats. You can create text tweets from great quotes that either you or the guest dropped into the episode, like dropped an Algebaum. You can make that a text tweet. You could create image quote cards out of those and post them on social media. You can use a headliner app or one of these little video-based tools that take the audio and make a waveform of it and the still image and kind of mash that together and have a little minute-long snippet or something for social media.

You can repurpose and rejig all of this content that’s dropped into a 20, 30, 40, whatever 30-minute episode and turn that into a dozen or two dozen pieces of content that you can utilize not just on social media but on your blog and other people’s blogs. You can do something called an evil twin article. This one credit to Andy Crestodina, another SEO who came up with this idea of an evil twin, which is just the article that you were going to write or that you wrote. You just kind of flip it and come up with the opposite sort of hook. And it’s all based on the same research that you already did. 

So let’s say it’s the nine biggest mistakes that, the nine biggest SEO mistakes that all podcasters make. Okay. So I just made that up. I mean, I could write an article on that, but let’s say I already did hypothetically. I could create an evil twin of that and just flip it, and instead of the nine biggest mistakes, it might be the nine best practices that the biggest podcasters all do with regard to their SEO. You just flip it. So then you can take that and publish it on another site. So you’re not using duplicate content that you already posted somewhere else.

Other sites will have guidelines or restrictions about that. I write for Search Engine Land, and they say you cannot use content that you’ve already published somewhere else. It has to be fresh and unique that you submit to Search Engine Land. Well, here you go. Evil Twin is completely unique, but it’s not starting from scratch.

Got it. So you’re saying it’s to collaborate with other people; even if their websites aren’t huge domain authorities, it is still beneficial to collaborate with them and repost some of your content on their article with a backlink to your site.

Well, when I was talking about the evil twin, I was suggesting or kind of implying that you would find a high-authority site to publish that content on. So, for example, I’m, as I said, a contributor to searchengineland.com, which has a lot of authority. I’ve contributed to ReadWrite.com, HBR Harvard Business Review, Founder Magazine, and Adweek, like a whole bunch of these really high-authority websites. It’s ideal if you can be not just a one-off contributor but an ongoing columnist because then you can drop all this great content on a regular basis and get links back to your website. Because you can’t just rely on your guests to link to your website to boost you to the top of Google, you need to take some other measures as well.

This is something that I hear a lot from people, and I think it’s because I come from the journalism space where I was always creating content, creating content, and then letting it go.

You know, moving on to the next thing, moving on to the next thing. As a reporter, it wasn’t really my job to understand SEO and everything online. A question I get from a lot of people is, how do you turn all of this content you’re making into a profitable business? So what would you say to them? So that’s, yeah, well, first of all, I’ll begin with the end in mind and use a Stephen Covey quote. If you recognize that your podcast, for example, could be a way to generate case studies because you could interview your clients and then extract the stuff that they wouldn’t normally give you in a testimonial in the form of a conversation that’s just free flowing and you engineer it though to extract out what their objections were before they signed up with you.

There’s a good testimonial that always has the objection. So it’s expensive to work with Stephan. That’s an objection. Stephan is an expensive SEO, right? He kind of wrote the book or co-wrote the book on the topic. And this is the book right here. It’s a thousand pages, The Art of SEO. It’s actually one of three books I authored or co-authored. And yeah. Consequently, I’m not inexpensive to hire. So I want to preempt that objection that they almost certainly are gonna have about the price. So I’ll coach my clients. If they’re giving me a testimonial, can you talk about what gave you pause or maybe almost derailed the whole process of you signing up with me?

Like, oh yeah, well, we had trouble getting this push because we had a limited budget, and you were actually more than our budget or whatever. Get them to talk about that because that speaks to the person who is listening or watching and say, yes, I’ve got that very issue. Whereas if it’s just all flowery praise about you, it doesn’t do anything about, oh yeah, of course, the testimonial is going to be complimentary.

“Working with Stephan was amazing. He took us to the top of Google for all these different keywords, and we increased our revenue 10x” or whatever it was, right? That’s all fine and good, but unless it feels like, hey, this is possible for me, so they can relate to it, right? Oh yeah, so Stephan worked with Chanel. Oh, well, whoop-de-doo, I’m not Chanel; I’m Joe, the plumber, and I don’t have Chanel’s budget, so this is just ridiculous. I’m not even gonna watch it or listen to it.

You make it relatable; you make it not like over-the-top crazy in terms of the results, but it’s more of kind of an attainable, mildly impressive case study. And you bake in the objections into it. How are you going to do all that? Oh, what if it’s a free-form conversation in the form of a podcast episode? So then you just start interviewing all of your current and past clients.

And they have an opportunity to have their soapbox moment, regaling everyone with all the wins and successes; that’s amazing. And you’re extracting out what ends up being a fabulous case study for you. So that’s just one example if you begin with the end in mind. If what you’re trying to do instead is, let’s say, get a whole bunch of really cool tech gear like I have this happy wearable device. That changes your mood. You can press a button.

Is it a headband?

Yeah, you can wear it on your head, or you can put it around your neck. What this does is it helps you enhance your mood, creating positive moods like science.

Here’s this headband, wear it and be happier.

Yep, or more focused. A friend of mine, I told him to get the headband and he has trouble sleeping. He usually gets about five hours of sleep at night. This is total aside here, but the first night, he fell asleep with it on. He slept 10 hours. He’s like, I haven’t slept that long, and I can’t even remember when. So it’s pretty cool. You get all these devices for free. Here’s another geeky gadget because I’ve got the Get Yourself Optimized Biohacking podcast. So this is a Neuroon, which has a brain-tracking portion here.

Sensor that I know you’d look like a total dweeb wearing this at night. You look great. But this thing will tell you what brainwaves you’re in, alpha or theta or delta or whatever. If you’re in a deep sleep, like I have an Oura Ring too, which is another biohack. And this thing tells me about my HRV heart rate variability. I know I sound like a total geek, but all this cool stuff. Many of these things like this I got for free, this neuron, totally for free. I got a bicycle that has AI because, of course, you want to ride a stationary bike with AI. Who doesn’t? I got it for free. It’s called the Carol bike.

All by podcasting.

Yeah. A $3,000 stationary bike with artificial intelligence for free.

Do you use it?

Yes, well, not now because that’s back in California. Yeah.

So, where’s your house in Encino?

Yeah, it’s in storage now. Yeah, it’s a really cool thing. So, the Carol bike I had is not even like an ad deal. I don’t sell advertising. I just said, they pitched me, and I said, well, I’d consider it, but I want to have the bike to be able to, like, try it out before I have you on the show. And they’re like, okay, we can do that. And I want to be able to keep it. Okay. Yeah.

So, you had to have a podcast that had good reach for them to want to give you stuff like that, right?

Maybe? Not really. Because you don’t need the reach, that’s the secret here. What do you need? You need to have the street cred. Okay, so you need to get super credibility so that even think about asking you about downloads.

So, what’s super credibility for a podcaster? I’m just curious.

eah. So, let me give you an example first for a non-podcaster because this is where I first heard about super credibility. Do you know who Peter Diamandis is?

No.

He is the creator of the X Prize.

The X Prize?

The X Prize was a $10 million prize for creating a spacecraft that could take a passenger up to, like, near-Earth orbit or whatever and come back down and be able to take another passenger two weeks later or less. I’m getting the details probably wrong here, but that’s close enough. Yeah. The thing is, nobody asked him, “Do you have the $10 million?” when he announced the prize. Nobody asked. He didn’t. He didn’t have the money. It took him five to ten years, some crazy long time to get the money. What he did have, though, was super credibility. When he announced the X Prize, he had a former deputy director of NASA on stage with him. He had eight astronauts on stage with him.

Nobody thought to ask, where’s the money, Peter? Is it in the bank? Are you ready to write a check if somebody wins this prize tomorrow? Oh no, he didn’t. He didn’t know who that benefactor was gonna be. He didn’t have the money himself. So finally, five, ten years later, whatever it was, a billionaire, this lady, last name Ansari, I think. And so now it’s named the Ansari X Prize, but it was awarded.

She came up with the money. But isn’t that cool? That you can have something that doesn’t have the like you sell something and then you build it. Marketers do that all the time. They want to see if there’s a market for something. So they’ll pitch it, they’ll sell it. Nobody buys it. Nothing lost.

Get on the waiting list.

A bunch of people buy it. Yeah, exactly. A bunch of people buy it. And then they’re like, all right, we’ll better build this. But if only a few people bought it, they just refund those few people and say, sorry, we ended up having a change of direction or whatever. So, a podcaster example of super credibility for me personally was episode number 8 of Marketing Speak with Jay Abraham. He’s kind of the godfather of marketing. Well, him and Seth Godin, right? So, it was pretty amazing to get Jay Abraham on as a very early guest. Once I was able to name-drop Jay Abraham, then I was able to get other big-name guests because they’re not going to say, all right, well, so you had Jay Abraham, but what are your download numbers?

So then I get three or four big-name people, and then I can just name-drop those few people and say that the guests have included Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Dan Kennedy, and Jay Abraham. Yeah, I’ll do it. The idea of asking for download numbers or listenership or anything like reach, that just seems rude because clearly you’ve been vetted by these other big-name guests. So I’m just going to say yes.

That is something. I know this technique, but yeah, you got a $3,000 bike out of it.

I get so many cool gadgets. I mean, some I’ll get at a discount, some I get for free. But that’s not the point. That’s not why I podcast.

No, no, no. But it does answer my question.

I do it for the joy of it. Yeah. So, it’s a labor of love. It really is.

Podcasting: if you’re out there and you’re just starting a podcast or you’ve been podcasting for a while, you know that it’s a labor of love. You have put in your time and energy, and you might not necessarily see the downloads reflecting that. But what Stephan is saying is that you don’t necessarily need super downloads to start reaping the benefits of podcasting. And one of the things I personally love about podcasting is excuses to talk to people like you. Just, hey, like, let’s just shoot the breeze about SEO. That’s great.

Well, like you’re saying, it’s so cool to be able to pitch somebody to spend an hour with them on a call when you wouldn’t get that time with them otherwise. But because you have a podcast and because you’re able to name-drop the impressive guest list, you get that time.

I interviewed, for example, the former CEO of Walmart.com. He didn’t know me from Adam. It’s Carter Cast. But we hit it off. He ended up referring to a whole bunch of people like he’s no longer with Walmart. He is now a VC with a VC firm. And he referred at least three different, or maybe four now, portfolio companies to me for SEO.

Wow.

And so you don’t even have to have any audience. You could have zero audience and just have really cool conversations with just the right people who you’re laser targeting. And that could be enough to catapult you and your business to the next level.

Yeah, that could be something that can turn your podcast into a business. And I think that for me, it took me a while to get that just as a journalist. And I’m just used to objectively creating content, content, content, content, not thinking, wait a second.

Do I have an offer I could maybe put in? Is there something that I could teach others? Is there a service I can provide that I have just been taking for granted all of this time? Yes, there is.  And it wasn’t actually until I had a short stint in the marketing world that I was like, wait a second. 

I need to rethink what it means to be producing content, how to produce content, and what that can mean for me and myself and my business and my family. It changed my mindset in a way that surprised me because I really loved being a journalist. I loved it. This is also kind of like I get to still do it. Yeah. So, you mentioned the biggest mistakes that podcasters can make while with SEO. I know you just came up with that, but could we talk about maybe three mistakes that podcasters are making with SEO and how to solve them?

Sure.

So transcriptions.

Yeah, so transcriptions are a real missed opportunity that most podcasters are not leveraging. They’re not even having them done. And you can use a service like Descript or Otter, which is inexpensive and it uses AI to convert the audio into text. And it’s not gonna be perfect.

Heck, you can even upload your recording to YouTube and for free, the YouTube algorithm creates a transcript, and it’s got the timestamps associated with it, too. So you can do this really on the cheap. And yeah, like I said, you can find somebody in the Philippines to do the kind of grunt work of turning that raw transcript into something that looks a lot nicer and has imagery to go with it and is cleaned up and all the typos are fixed and all that sort of stuff. You can find people in the Philippines using onlinejobs.ph. That’s a Craigslist of sorts for the Philippines for job offers and for job seekers. Pretty cool.

So interesting. I didn’t know about that. But also just for accessibility, there could be people who are hearing impaired, but they might really want to get the information, content and quality expertise from your podcast conversations. Also, getting that transcription makes your podcast content available to people who aren’t able to hear it. So, it’s just one more reason why you should be getting it done.

Yeah, and if you want to get even more ninja, you can have somebody who’s maybe a diehard listener and fan who speaks a foreign language translate those SRT files from YouTube. If you’re going to take that route, turn it into a foreign language translation and upload it to YouTube. There’s support for that so that people who are searching YouTube in that language can find that podcast episode and watch it with Subtitles in that language. You don’t have to rerecord your episode or anything like that. It just gives them the option of choosing the subtitles in that language and whatever languages that were uploaded and translated so there’s some really ninja stuff that you could do. It’s just a question of how far you want to go.

And how much time do you have? Does it mean outsourcing, and yeah, is it interesting? So, okay, there’s one transcription. What else?

Yeah. So the RSS feed is your powerhouse, the engine for your podcast, and it reaches all the podcast directories and Podcatcher apps. Right. So, if you are optimizing that RSS feed, make sure that the name of the show has keywords in it, but you don’t want to keyword stuff it. If it’s called marketing, speak as one word; you might want to change it to two words. I actually did that. It started as Marketing Speak one word, and I changed it to two words because marketing is a very important keyword, and I wanted that word to get picked up. You don’t want to spam and keyword stuff.

In the author column, you’re not going to put like Stephan Spencer, SEO expert, three-time O’Reilly author, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because you’re going to probably get caught out by an algorithm at Apple or wherever and you might get kicked out of the Apple Podcasts engine. And that would be pretty bad. It’s not like you can pick up the bat phone and say, oh, sorry, Apple, I didn’t mean to do that. Can you let me back in? So just be careful not to go over the top with it, but the RSS feed, if you’ve never looked at it, you should look at it. You should look at the code. It’s an XML format, and it has the name of the show, the description of the show, it has the title of each episode, the author of the show, and all these different elements.

Not every element matters from an SEO standpoint for like, let’s say, Apple podcasts or Google podcasts, but the main ones are the title of the episode, the title of the show and the description of the show. Those are the most important. I always have my team in the Philippines. The head of my team sends me three different potential episode titles for each week’s episode for the two shows. And then I decide if I like any of the three, and usually. Actually, I’m rewriting it and not even using one of the three that she sent me, but I know that I’ve dialed in because I’ve had that additional thought process, and they’ve put thought into it, too. 

So, between the two of us, we end up with really great titles for each episode if you spend an extra two minutes per episode dialing in the title so that it has, like, not just keywords in it, but some intrigue or counterintuitiveness to it. Some sort of curiosity gap is created in the mind of the potential listener. So they’re intrigued to listen and consume that content because then it satisfies that curiosity. It relieves the tension that was created. Kind of like clickbait, you know, a clickbait article and number six will blow your mind and usually number six is totally a non-starter, and it’s really disappointing. 

You want to not do that; you want to underpromise and over-deliver instead of the opposite, but you do want to think in terms of how you can create some mystery, intrigue, some powerful positioning, value proposition, as well as good keywords. That’s a lot to do in a title, but you can pull it off if you put some thinking time into it. It’s going to pay off. That extra five minutes per week is totally worth it.

Do you use a keyword search, or does the person you work with in the Philippines use a keyword search engine? Is there a tool you use online that people can also use?

Yeah. We use a bunch of different tools. If you’re an SEO geek like me, then you want a whole bunch of tools because they’re all different, based in different databases, and they come up with different keyword suggestions and synonyms, competitive intelligence capabilities, and so forth. So, these are my favorites. Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs and there are a bunch of keyword tools inside of Ahrefs, like the there is a keyword gap tool.

Content Gap is actually its name. In SEMrush, which is another tool that I like a lot, there is a keyword gap. So, confusingly similar names, but of the tool, both of those tool sets are fantastic. They are paid tools. Actually, all of these so far are paid tools. If you’re on a budget and you wanna do just free stuff, then Google Trends is free, and Answer the Public is free. AlsoAsked.com is free, but it’s limited. So, for example, let’s say that you wanted to come up with questions that you can use as fodder for episode content and for things to talk about in the episode, whether it’s a guest that you’re gonna interview or it’s a solo episode, whatever. AlsoAsked.com is amazing. Asked, A-S-K-E-D. Yeah.

You know how when you use Google, and it comes up with a people also Asked Box with some questions in there, and you can explode those out and see the answers, and it keeps adding more and more questions with answers as you’re adding, as you’re exploring those out and reading the answers. This tool for free extracts all that content out of the people also Asked Box from Google and puts it into a nice visual that you can download, and also a CSV file, which you can load into Excel or Google Sheets.

Super cool. So whether you’re creating content for a podcast episode or just working on FAQs or ideas for blog posts, whatever it is, AlsoAsked is such a great repository for free information about what questions people are asking online about your topic. Yeah, and completely free. The same goes for Answer the Public, Answerthepublic.com. Similarly, you just put in a keyword.

It will give you a whole list of questions, but this one is based instead of the people also asked Box in Google. It’s based on Google Suggest. 

So when you’re typing in keywords or keystrokes into the search box in Google, you get those auto-complete suggestions, right? That’s called Google Suggest and Answer The public scrapes from the suggestions list from Google a bunch of keywords and questions, in particular, who, what, where, when, why, and how type questions, as well as implied questions with prepositions. Then, it puts it into a really nice visual display. You can also export it into a CSV file and load it into Excel or Google Sheets. And again, completely free.

So why would you need to upload it into Excel or Google Sheets?

Well, let’s say that you’re pulling data from both of those tools, and you want to dedupe and sort and group and do some clever stuff and turn that into maybe an editorial calendar. You want to not just look at a pretty visual and take a screenshot of it. You want the data.

Gosh, my brain just broke a little bit. There’s so much. There’s so much to SEO and how you can make it work for you that it blows my mind. Okay, so optimize your RSS feed with titles and transcriptions. The third thing is the mistakes they make.

Yeah. So, they’re not leveraging YouTube. That’s the number two search engine. It’s not Bing. It’s not Amazon, it’s YouTube. If you don’t have a YouTube channel and you’re not uploading every episode to YouTube, it’s like you’re snubbing your nose at the number two search engine. Why would you do that? So many podcasters do that, though.

Yeah.

So the things that I was talking about are making sure your SRT file, the transcript that YouTube auto generates from the audio, and making sure it doesn’t have any mistakes because it will not get everything perfect. So, just review that after you’ve uploaded the video. As for me, I used to not record videos. I just recorded audio only because I didn’t want to have to comb my hair or whatever. Like, so that’s so silly because I threw away a huge opportunity to capture a video of both me and the guest and then to utilize that for YouTube so it’s not just a still image.

That’s boring to watch. It’s not that if you don’t have the ability to do video-based interviews, it’s okay. Do the best you can with what you have. So, I have an episode where I interviewed Marisa Peer, a phenomenal hypnotherapist to the stars. She’s amazing. Thirty thousand of an episode with audio only and a still image. The whole episode is like an hour of content with one image the entire time. 30-some thousand views of that. So it’s possible, even if you don’t have video, to still leverage it. So, just do something on YouTube.

When you get to the point where you have 100 subscribers, you can claim a custom URL. So for me, youtube.com/Stephan Spencer. Instead of a long string of characters that nobody could ever remember, I have a custom URL that I can mention like I just did. So subscribe to my channel. Stephan Spencer is my YouTube username. It’s so simple, but I had to get to a hundred subscribers in order to get there.

So, it’s interesting to me. So I have a YouTube channel, and I have like 16 thousand subscribers And my YouTube channel.

Congrats

Thank you. Here’s the rub, but I don’t use it at all. I never use it. I have some podcast episodes uploaded there, but I stopped doing it because it was taking so much time, and I was like, oh, you know, I’ll come back to it. I’ll do this eventually. And eventually, it never happened because I got so distracted by, you know, clients, this and that. And I know that I’m leaving a huge gap where I could not be doing that. Yeah. So here you tell me this again: I really should be using my YouTube channel, but I’m not.

Well, here’s the thing: people will judge you. It’s not fair. Getting judged is not fair. But people will judge you based on you applying your own principles to your own stuff. I know. So they’ll look for SEO on my own website. And if let’s, this actually happened to me. I keynoted at the India Affiliate Summit, and I told everybody that you know you really should be on HTTPS. This was years ago. 

Not just HTTPS, HTTPS. Google wants to see that, and then some guy in the audience called me out during the Q&A and said your website is still on HTTPS. I’m like, yep, it sure is, but it won’t be next week because I’m going to reprioritize that, and that was embarrassing, but it sometimes takes that. You got to eat your own dog food, so you’re going to be doing the stuff that you tell your clients that you need to do.

If you really want to grow your podcast fast, you should also have it on YouTube.

And then they look at your YouTube channel, and they’re like, wow, that last episode you posted two years ago was a good one.

Thank you. Oh no, this is, it’s good. It’s good to keep, too, you know, eat my own dog food sometimes.

Yeah. And little nuances make such a difference. For example, if you, instead of just linking to your YouTube channel from your website, you linked with the sub underscore confirmation equals one at the end of the URL or ampersand sub confirmation equals one, it automatically adds them to your subscribers list. If they get a little confirmation box, they have to click yes, but that eliminates a step where they’d have to go and click on subscribe. It presumes that they’re going to subscribe. So, if you look at MarketingSpeak.com, all the different podcatcher apps and ways of subscribing to my show, YouTube is one of them. I don’t just have Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify. I have YouTube there. And when they click on it, it adds them as a subscriber as long as they click “yes.”

Why not just do the simple little extra thing or add a podcast, like add a category, like a playlist category for your podcast episodes to your YouTube channel? Right. So, I do have a podcast playlist. Then, you add the list attribute with the code for that particular playlist to the YouTube URL. You send them to a particular YouTube video on your channel with that appended. And now it’s going to be on autoplay through the rest of that entire playlist.

Dude. Get your watch time up and go right up in the rankings there. Whoa. I’m all of a sudden at the top of Google search. What just happened? YouTube.

And all it took was changing a URL. That wasn’t the details. Stephan, thank you so much for sharing so much knowledge with us. It’s kind of insane, and I feel like I need to sit down and go through all of my stuff now and fix it. Before we leave, I really like to do this to all of my guests because I think it just helps my listeners be like, oh gosh, okay, he is human. Please, Stephan, tell me. Have you had any struggles in the podcasting space, and what have they been?

Well, yes, of course, I have struggles. One of them is I don’t have the download numbers that I want to have. I want to have 10x the download numbers. I don’t think my download numbers are very high, and that’s why it just drives me nuts whenever I get that question from a potential guest. Can you tell me your download numbers? I don’t want to tell them because I don’t love them. They’re not amazing.

It’s like, I mean, I’ll mention it here. It’s like 7,000 downloads a month is not impressive to me. It’s nowhere near what I want, and it just drives me bonkers. So, I’ve been doing this since 2015. I actually started podcasting in 2007 or eight, and then my pod faded after a couple of years, and yeah, MarketingSpeak came.

And then, or no, Get Yourself Optimized. Actually, it was called the Optimized Geek. That was another thing I started with a different name for the show. And then I realized I was doing it wrong because I was alienating, unintentionally, a large audience of potential people I could help because it was, you know, appealing only to geeks. If you don’t self-identify as a geek, then you’re not going to want to listen to the Optimized Geek podcast.

No, I would self-identify as a nerd.

Yep. Okay. We’re close cousins. So it’s all learning. Either you’re winning, or you’re learning. You’re never losing. You’re never failing. It’s just learning. So, I learn all the time, and I just love learning. So, I’m just going to keep making mistakes, trying, experimenting, and iterating.

And learning. Got it. Stephan, thank you so much for being on the show. If people want to find you? I mean, I know you’ve already shared your YouTube channel, but is there anything else you want people to go and check out?

Yeah. So, I have a ton of resources on Stephanspencer.com. If you want to learn more about SEO, there is a lot of free stuff in the Learning Center. I also of course have the two podcasts. I really, really love those two shows, and I think you’re going to love them too. So, I’m not going to ask that you subscribe. That’s a little too much too soon. Just try. Let’s say the Seth Godin episode on our Marketing Speak and the Dave Asprey episode on How to Get Yourself Optimized. And I think you’ll be hooked.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you.