Key Post Highlights
> Both blogs and podcasts can both be optimized for SEO effectively.
> Blogs have more flexibility with keywords, but podcasts are a quickly growing market.
> Your audience’s needs should ultimately drive your decision to focus on a blog or podcast.
When creating content, you have options. One type of content can work in a number of different formats, each with its own advantages and challenges.
One aspect you need to consider is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is how you improve your ranking in organic (not paid) search results, making it the most important avenue for increasing the number of visitors to your site.
Two popular types of content — blogs and podcasts — are useful for SEO, but in different ways.
- There are more than 600 million blogs, and over 2 billion posts are written each year.
- There are over 5 million podcasts, and more than 30 million podcast episodes were released in 2022.
The competition for both formats is high, but so is the reward. When you optimize either for SEO, it can drive traffic to your website. Here’s how to optimize your blog or podcast for SEO — and which one would work best for your organization.
A Quick Review of Search Engine Optimization
If you’re not familiar with SEO, here’s a quick introduction.
SEO is a set of practices to help your site rank higher in search engines. The higher you rank, the more likely users are to visit your site.
Google rewards content that users interact with and show interest in. In order to push your website to the top of search results, you need to create high-quality content that is useful and engaging.
Both blogs and podcasts can be optimized for SEO, but the process looks slightly different for each.
Optimizing Your Blog for SEO
A blog — which is a frequently updated page or site used to fill a need for your business or personal endeavors — is a great way to build brand awareness and encourage your audience to take action. But blogs are only effective when they are read, and SEO increases those chances.
SEO for a blog includes:
- Keyword research: Find words and phrases that people search for. This will help you identify what content to cover and how difficult it will be to rank for a particular topic. (For instance, if you’re a small, fairly new company, you might want to aim for less competitive keywords. Large, well-established companies can compete more effectively for the high-ranking keywords.)
- Content creation: Write your content, including the title, headers, body, call to action (CTA), and meta description. Include your chosen keywords throughout (while steering clear of keyword stuffing — or writing low-quality content with an unnatural frequency of your keywords.)
- Link building: Include links to other pages on your site and, when appropriate, to other websites.
- Image optimization: Create graphics, use original photos and videos, and include descriptive alt text for all visual elements.
With a blog, you can take all the time you need to work on your post before you hit publish. You can spend hours or days making the SEO elements of your post line up with your digital strategy.
If you want to make updates, you can easily do that with a blog. You can re-optimize whenever and however many times you want in order to make your blog more useful, relevant, or timely. In turn, these changes will enhance the user experience and help improve your ranking in search engines.
Optimizing Your Podcast for SEO
Podcasts have been around since 2004, but many argue their popularity really skyrocketed around 2014. Five years later, in 2019, Google said it would display podcasts in search results and make them playable. This changed the game for podcasts and how they relate to SEO.
Similar to blogging, podcasts are popular. You have millions of competitors in the podcasting arena, and your SEO strategy plays a key role in attracting listeners.
Unlike blogging, however, podcasts are an audio format. This means that in order to optimize your podcast for search, you need to really leverage the short but critical written parts of the process.
SEO for a podcast still begins with keyword research. However, your content will be housed in these areas:
- The title
- The series description, which is a summary of what the entire series focuses on
- The episode summary, which describes the main points, the guest, and other essential details of the episode
Because there’s less written content, these items must be crafted extremely well to reach your intended audience. Think about what your listeners would search for in order to find that particular series or episode. Keep in mind, however, that it’s hard to change too many aspects of the episode summary without re-recording the entire episode.
Is a Blog or Podcast Better for SEO?
Both blogs and podcasts can be optimized for SEO effectively. However, a blog has a few advantages compared to podcasts, such as having more content that can be optimized and being able to re-optimize your posts easily.
On the other hand, the podcast industry is quickly growing and evolving. This means you have the opportunity to reach millions of listeners with your content, especially with the right approach to SEO.
Ultimately, whether you choose to focus on a blog or a podcast depends on what your audience will find more useful. If your audience is busy healthcare executives, a podcast might be easier for them to listen to on the go. If your audience is patients, you might benefit from the sympathetic tone of a well-written blog post.
Whichever approach you choose, always optimize your content for SEO — and watch the readers or listeners follow.
Leverage your content to establish a relationship with your audience that keeps them coming back for more.
