So you know you need to do more podcast SEO.
You know that search engine optimization is vital to generating more
traffic and indeed more fans
But as you've begun to dig into SEO you you have been phased and
faced with so many pieces of jargon you've been told about acronyms and you have
been taught about bits of information that you never heard of.
A one of the biggest things that you've probably heard of is
metadata.
But what the heck is metadata and why does it matter to your
podcast?
Let's dig into that. Metadata
simply put,
is data about data.
That's why the word 'meta' is in there. It's information about
information.
The way that this works is that we need to categorise information.
Okay,
So if you think about your podcast episode that is indeed information,
it's information around content.
You're delivering content and you write information about that.
You write your show title, you write your episode title.
You write your show notes,
you write your clickable time stamps
if you're using Captivate.
You mark whether it's explicit or not,
you give it a show number and episode number.
You tell your show
what categories to go into.
That's all information about your episode and about your show.
And metadata is information about that information. And when it comes to
search engine optimization.
metadata is very important. Because if you think about the content that you have in your episode,
that's the stuff that you want Google to show to
people. Google will,
of course,
look at your content.
It will decide how to categorize that content,
and it will essentially say "we think this content answers your question based on the
thing you typed into Google."
"We think that this content will serve your purpose"
and that is what Google tries to do.
It tries to serve relevance.
Metadata gives Google a better chance of understanding what that
information is.
It makes it easy for Google to understand what that content is
about. In particular
what it does is make sure that Google knows how and when to surface
that information.
So when someone searches for a specific keyword,
how does Google know what the heck to do with your content? Should you be number one in the rankings?
Number two?
Should you even be there in the rankings for this search term?
Metadata is a vital component of that. I'm gonna use the
illustration basically of two things that you will already know.
But maybe you don't know.
Maybe you've never seen them and really looked at them.
But I guarantee you will be familiar with them.
I'm gonna give you two core pieces of metadata that I guarantee you have seen.
That is something that we call the meta title and the meta description.
If you use your podcast host as Captivate,
if Captivate is your podcast host.
What you'll see is that every time you publish an episode,
you've got an SEO section at the bottom of the episode
and inside there,
you've got two pieces of information.
You got the title and the description and you might be thinking,
Well,
what's the difference between my episode title and my show notes?
Surely that's my title and my description.
Maybe,
maybe not.
Okay.
Your title of your episode is what will be displayed in Apple Podcasts, Spotify and so on.
The meta title and the meta description are the things that will appear in
Google.
And we've all seen this. If you search for The Podcast Accelerator
podcast right now in Google,
you'll see that my website comes up and there's a blue title,
which is the thing that you click on.
That is the meta title.
That's what I have told Google,
that the title of that content is,
and then the meta description,
(which is different to your show notes)
that is the bit underneath it.
That is,
that little bit of grey text underneath that describes that search result to
you. What we're talking about with metadata is the fact that we can manipulate what we see
there.
What users and potential listeners will see in the search results is up to us and what
we have to do we're gonna talk about this in the next piece of content is make sure that our key
phrases and our content keywords our relevantly included in the
title and the description,
so that when people search for them,
our content gets surfaced and the title makes it very clear,
and the description makes it very clear that that result is not only the right result for
that person searching,
but that they should click on it to get the right content. And that
is what metadata is.
Now there's so much other metadata.
But the things that why I want you to be concerned about as a podcaster right now is understanding
two
core things: in search engine optimization terms.
Metadata is just information about your content, information
about your information,
meta data,
data about data.
The two pieces of metadata that you're probably most familiar with.
That you will see every day without realizing are
the title,
the meta title of any given webpage or any piece of content that you can control from
your Captivate podcasting dashboard and
of course,
the description.
The meta description,
the SEO description,
the grey description that appears underneath the search result
all to make sure that the user sees that that's the right thing for them.
They're two things that you can manipulate inside your Captivate hosting portal.
If you're hosting your podcast with Captivate
if you're not,
please check with your podcasters.
And if you need a better experience with your host,
please do check out Captivate.
Alright.
SEO is not difficult as a starter.
It's an expert level thing when you get deep into it.
But you can have big results very early by understanding the basics.
And now you understand metadata.