SEO for Podcasts and More with Akilah Thompkins-Robinson

NOTE: This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool. Please forgive any typos or errors. Erin Ollila 06:49 Alright, everyone, today, we’re going to talk to you Akilah Tompkins Robinson, who is an SEO strategist, a tech founder and author and a speaker, she has worked in the IT field for 17 years now. And for most recently, the last six years has really been helping online businesses stand out and get found online with SEO. So she is the perfect person to talk with us today about how to be visible outside of your own website and to use things like podcasts, YouTube channels, or even potentially social media as an outlet for visibility, and to be strategic with the words and the phrases that we’re using. So that way, we get that benefit of SEO. What you might not know about Akilah, though, is that she met her husband in the fourth grade, but they didn’t actually get married until their 30s. So I just love that fun fact of that. You knew your spouse, since you were like a little kid. It goes to show that like we don’t know who in our life will affect our life. A side note is when I met my husband, when we first started dating, I had mentioned who my husband was to my mom, and she recognized his last name, it turns out, she went to middle school with his mother. And I think at one point, they had actually like the same boy in middle school. So I just think I mean, big, obviously, they get along fabulous. Like nobody, like held anything against each other. It wasn’t dramatic. But I just think it’s so interesting to like, think of my mom, as a middle schooler, and his mom is a middle schooler. And then here they are, they grew up and their children actually met and married, which makes me a little nervous for who my kids are gonna get married to. But you know, you know if the same goes in business, right? Like, we don’t know what type of visibility opportunities we have, how that will bring people into our orbit, and then how those people could influence our life and our business. So I think it’s a fun fact. But it’s really interesting to like, reflect that back on, like business in general. Akilah 08:57 Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t think about it in business. But you’re right, like, always in the same orbit. Because although we knew each other in fourth grade, we did not date we’re not like the one to your story. We honestly did. I mean, we dated off and on in high school, we like we separated. Then we met again. Like he was just going into college, senior year of high school, casual dating, then he went to the military, then he came back, my number never changed. It’s funny when when he when he called, I remember saying this is the last time taking a phone call, because my numbers never change since I was like a first grade. And so I kind of like old old friend calls. So we should say that, quote unquote, and and so I was like this the last time I’m answering these phone calls. And it was the last time ironically, and so yeah, so although we weren’t, we didn’t date through all those years. But um, you know, keep coming back together. And apparently we’re supposed to be busy sometimes. Erin Ollila 10:20 And like to bring this back to visibility, but like it kind of like there are people in the online space that like I might have been acquainted with earlier in my business, but never really saw a need that I could help them or they could help me that I have met now. And we have been great like peers for each other of whether it’s, you know, maybe like reviewing each other’s work or like boosting each other like I call, I’d like to call it cheerleaders in the sense of like, I might not be someone’s ideal audience, but I appreciate them as a business owner. And I’ve like know them well enough to know what their what they’re offering is a great product. So I’ll share their launches on social, I’ll add it to my email list, even though I’m not an affiliate, because I just know it’s quality, right? But it’s just not necessarily for me that I’m going to be to like use it in my own business. So I think that when we look at SEO, and we look at it outside of our own website, and like in the general business orbit, that’s an important lesson to consider like you don’t know who you’re showing up in front of. And when we are in other people’s networks were being introduced to people that we would have never known on our own. When we talked in a different episode about SEO, we talked about how when we use longtail keywords for blog content as an example, Google is introducing us to a whole group of new people who might not have found us, like elsewhere, which is very attractive to a business owner. Right. So but the same thing happens when we are using other people’s audiences. Which is why I think being a podcast host and having new people in your own, like come into your orbit is great, as well as guesting yourself and introducing yourself on other people’s network. So I think that one question that I have for you is like, why is it important? I mean, this is a general question. So feel free to not necessarily focus on podcast or YouTube or anything like that. But why do you think SEO is important when it comes to visibility? We talked about how we can be in front of people’s networks, but how can using like strategic phrasing, help people go about getting that visibility? Akilah 14:02 I think a couple of things that you you touched on. And I’ll bring in some some of the things ways that it happens. But it’s really important because a SEO isn’t just one platform. Just about every platform has some form of search or search ability, you know, to different levels and degrees. We talk about Google a lot. But Google is not the only search engine. It just so happens before I was even like hardcore into SEO as we I am. Back in college, I studied web design and it advertising and stuff. And my senior paper was always last lap and it’s valued at one day and was like oh my god, I did this whole senior paper thing on different search engines. And Google was like oblate Google was like one of the honorable mentions when I was doing this, but like one was like Netscape, and this was back when Yahoo was was big. And before Ben even existed, Yes, I’m that old guys. But it was really, the whole paper was like And funnily enough, like I went to the library to do this paper. That’s all this is. But you know, the whole paper was on the different search engines and pretty much what, what gives you the best data for getting for doing research and stuff like that. But when I look at that, and I look at, like, if you the good thing about SEO, especially if you’re putting it on your site, so we talked about going on to doing your on site SEO, if you have things going well on your site, when now all of these different search engines are looking at you, then you’re going to get that benefit and not just one place. So that’s one big thing. The other thing is like when we talk about the podcast, and we talked about the YouTube, even some social networks, and we’ll talk a little bit about that all of those have their own little algorithms, how they use search. So one of the things that’s big with podcasts, which I speak a lot to, is that they’ve got like 25 places to get bound. It’s not even just the search engines, but every single podcast player, Apple, Google Play, Spotify, all of those people can go in and search for titles and topics and words that are associated with podcasts. And so if you’re putting on your site, you got to make sure you put on your show too. So that way you can get found in one of those places. Also, there’s other sites that like pick up podcast information. They’re like podcast, aggregator kind of sites, those are other places to get found, right. And the note places also talk to Google. So it’s like, it’s this whole ecosystem of places and ways you can get found, either outside of or stemming from what’s on your site. Right. So it’s really important because the more you know about how to get found, the more you can utilize all of these different platforms, and remembering that even to social now, social doesn’t get seen by by the search engines by Google and things the same way. But more and more, they’re using search, like I was one of the first I really talked about clubhouse last year, when they first came up. And one of the things that was really big is that it’s searchable, the profiles are searchable. Now the rooms are searchable. Now, you know, the replays are searchable. So you know, your keywords that you will use on your site, you’re going to need to use them over there too. So you can get found same way on Instagram is now they used to be very hashtag heavy. And now they’re getting into search and doing more search terms and searching by search terms. So the same things, you want to be able to put some of those those keywords that you know, from your site, over on their Facebook, same thing, like I can go on and on about all of these different places that if you know the, you know the key and the core principles of search and getting found and using those correct words that people are searching for, you’re gonna do well in all these places. Erin Ollila 17:45 Yeah, oh, I loved like pretty much every single word that you just said right there. Because when I was ideating, the type of things that we could talk about on today’s show, I was really thinking even just podcast hosting of the the basic stuff, writing the titles, writing the descriptions, but the point that you bring up about the directories also being the opportunity, you know, it’s not just the one one section, right, like one description that you have, it’s all of them. So I think like, like, that’s a great thing to keep in mind how like, you know, especially when it comes to backlinks, or just the idea of where you’re showing up and how it’s getting indexed. It’s not just one area. I also think something that like something that stuck in my mind that I find really interesting is I get a lot of questions, especially when I’m writing on page website SEO about like, how do we make the choices that we make? And what if a keyword that we want to rank on one page gets ranked elsewhere, like maybe a blog that you’ve written is is ranking for the keyword but you’d really rather have that keyword on your actual website. So like, how do we make these decisions? So as an example, based on what you’re saying, when I because I do a ton of keyword research for my own business, right and I checked the ranks pretty much monthly in some of its manual checking, not just relying on like reports that we get because you know, they get there. They’re messy. Those reports. Yeah. So when I was checking my podcast name, and let’s be honest here, this is a new podcast and I don’t think people are using the title of my podcast as search intent, but I’m still checking it just in general I realized that talk copy to me it was either talk copy to me or talk copy to me podcast ranked higher on Apple than it did on my own website. So I sat and thought to myself, am I should I be competing with Apple? Right? Like, we have to look at the information that we get the results that we get, and then use that to make informed decisions. You know, and and by bringing this up as an example and mentioning like, you know how I get asked this question. The answer is it depends. I’m pretty sure that every single episode of this podcast, every topic I’ve said it, I want to drive home that there is not nothing Sara Lee an answer that works for everyone. Like, it would depend whether I adjust my keywords for my clients like there are reasons that maybe we choose to let that blog keep ranking. Or maybe we do put in that effort. So I like I think before we get into the nitty gritty details, maybe it’s just like, confirming for people like and like give yourself the grace to know that this is a process, there is no specific answer that either of us can share with you at this very moment to like, get you ranking in the highest possible place that you want to be, just look at it as a huge opportunity to be able to use the power of SEO in all of these different places. And then when you get results, you get answers work from there to figure out what decisions you want to make. So thanks for bringing that up. Akilah 20:51 No, from I love how you said that, you know, looking at the looking at where what happens, like the ranking the data and the metrics and stuff. And using that to make those decisions. It’s funny, my, my latest podcast episode was just about owning your metrics, because people run from them, because they help you make decisions. And like in a case like that, and I think it’s really important as businesses, especially is that some things are business decisions. And some things are SEO decisions. And there will be times when you’ll make a business decision. That is, you know, Trump’s the SEO decision, I’ll give you guys two examples. One, I have another retail store. And I had a greeting cards that came up for Chevron no cards, and it was great Chevron, no cards. Number six, I was excited all the things. However, the chevron note cards on the site, were very specific for one group of people when one organization, so although it was number six, and although it was getting some really good traffic, half that traffic was bouncing right off because they weren’t the organization that could buy the cards. So or that would buy the cards when everyone could get to you know sale, but who would buy the cards. And so I wind up having to almost two D that’s a D indexed but I had one of our to do things to kill the SEO, to bring it down for Chevron, no cars and do other things to get it to raise up for the group. And that was a business decision. If I just wanted to rank for anything, right, then I would have stayed up there. But that was that would not have helped my business, right. So you know, all traffic is not your business traffic. And I talk about that a lot. I have this, what I call the race method, like running a race. And the C of key is how we do keyword research for entrepreneurs. And the C is connecting it to your business. So sometimes keywords might be great, and you might be ranking, but they don’t connect to what you’re doing. So that might be one reason not to go after that. The other reason the other thing is in the example that you gave, coming up for a keyword that’s great for your business, when I have keywords that are branded keywords, meaning for your name of your podcast, and then when your business, my name or your name, specifically, those are considered branded meaning of someone’s doing that search, they generally no car, and they’re not new people to you, they’re more so researching you. So in that case, I actually want other people’s stuff to come up, right. So if someone puts in Akilah, Tompkins Robinson, I want this podcast to come up, I want my podcast ready, because they already know me, and they probably would not have a podcast and things about me. But I want now to establish my authority. So in that case, I want other shows that come up and other things about what I’ve done and other places I’ve been, because that’s gonna be like, Wow, she was there, they’re there, you know, she’s right up there. And Apple, like that’s gonna give them now and a whole other picture of me as a person to me as a business. And that’s what I want them to see. As opposed to saying, I gotta have my site first for everything. So there’s a lot of business decisions that come in, it depends. I know, I get frustrated for people when we’re like, it depends, you know, SEO, it depends. But it also depends on your SEO, your business decisions, user intent, like there are some things that you want to consider and what you go after and what you’re coming up for. Erin Ollila 24:05 Yeah, that is such a key point, right? Because it’s like you mentioning that you want your branded keywords to be on other people’s visibility like outreaches. I mean, think about the domain authority that Apple has versus the domain authority that like Erin Ollila, his website has like, I mean, I have done a decent job. I have a lot of backlinks I have like I’m building myself up. But Apple is still trumping my website at this point in time. So it’s great that it is coming up. And it is also great that is it is providing a link to my site, right? I mean, we could go into details about like, you know, nofollow links and all these type of things like where we’re really getting our traction from, but I don’t think that’s as helpful, but it is helpful to realize that other people sending in front like sending their audience to you based on these branded keywords is helpful. So like, don’t be discouraged. Like that is a great way to look at how you should be showing up No, I think that’s super helpful. So the other thing that I noticed that like when you were talking kind of really made me realize like there is, you know, when I thought about what we will talk today talk about today, I thought like, how do we make this relevant for the newbies who are like putting their first first first effort into SEO, and the people who are making effort making the effort and they want to improve and grow their SEO? And I think what you said is like you’re mentioning things that everyone can think about, right? So if you’re a newbie, and you’re trying to figure out like, the branded keywords versus the like, general keyword phrases that maybe your audience with, think of, like, bear, you’re thinking about the same things, you’re thinking about intent, you’re thinking about, like where it’s showing up, whether it should be something you focus on, whether it be something that other people focus on. And then that same advice also works for the people who have been doing this for a while, you know, I tell people that that say that they’re putting an SEO effort, but they’re not getting as results as they’d like, Will audit your work to think about intent. Intent is one of those things that I think that gets so easily overlooked. And because we think we’re making strategic decisions as business owners, but we don’t realize that like there are other factors that go into how SEO is influence. We talked about this on one of my most recent episodes that probably will publish right before this, but Meg case bought from love at first search had mentioned to me like Aaron, you don’t necessarily want to focus all of your effort on copywriter, right? Because if we google copywriter at this very moment in time, one we’re competing, I would be competing against all forms of copywriters, and there’s many different types, too. It’s not just what people who search that are not just looking for copywriters to hire, they’re looking to become copywriters. So then I’m fighting against all of the traffic for how to become a copywriter. And three, it’s it’s job searches for people who want to hire copywriters for their traditional companies. So then I’m fighting against like the in deeds and all of these job listings. So when I mentioned that, for intent, we have to like realize those factors play into it, they are out of our hands. And that can help us make decisions on either what to do from the beginning, or how to audit our stuff later, when we sit down. And maybe we maybe the auditing part is just searching the thing that we’re using and looking at the results, right. So I do I think that when you’re if you’re listening, regardless of whether you are a brand new person to SEO, and you’re just kind of dipping your toe in, or you’ve been doing this for a while, take pieces of this conversation that fit you the best, right? If we say something that feels a little overwhelming, then just know that’s something that someone’s going to be doing. If they’re already advanced, then they’re they’re adjusting their strategy. And if it’s something that you haven’t considered yet, like, dip your toe in there, right. Like, think about how it would benefit you. You know, we said that it depends, and I love that you mentioned like making business decisions. When earlier in the week, I did a training on how to edit an audit your own website. And SEO was one of those things that we that I would do for editing, auditing. And one of the people who attended gave me a great example that I think might be helpful for our audience of this conversation today. She teaches people how to speak French. And she, she wanted to rank for gendered nouns, because that’s what it would be in, in what she’s teaching. But she’s finding that’s not no one is searching for that at all. They’re searching for gendered words. So her question is like, what do I do? So my suggestion was, as a business decision, maybe you use gendered words as your keyword to attract the people who would be your ideal client, right? But then you teach them that it’s not all words, it’s the nouns, right? So that’s a business decision based on SEO as sometimes giving up a little control something that, you know, is the right way to say things, or you think that people should already know, but they don’t know. Right? Like, we have to think about what they’re searching for at their level of intelligence, or basically the their motivation to buy or change. But again, we’re talking we’re talking high level SEO stuff here right now. Akilah 29:25 Well, I mean, I don’t know if it’s always that high. I think it’s actually good to bring that up. Because a lot of people do come just like you said, the copyright example, a lot of people do come and say I want to rank for this thing. And whatever the thing is, is very specific to what they do. Like even even for me, like I want to wait for it for SEO. Right. But you may not want to you may not want to be that specific. Right? And this is where it’s not as necessarily an advanced topic. This is even for beginners. Don’t think I need to, you know, rank for exactly what I do. But you need to rank for exactly what people are looking for that are associated with what you’re doing what you do. Like I always ask my folks, what’s the one I write, if people are searching for SEO, are they really searching for SEO? Are they really searching for traffic to their website? And are they even really searching for traffic to your website? Are they really searching for how to increase my sales? So if you can get into how to increase my sales, and introduce them to SEO, you’re like, you know, 10 steps ahead of the game. So I think at any level that people start thinking outside of just this is what I do. Or this is who I work with, like, these are very specific things and broaden it a little to where are where’s that searcher before? They even got this closer? Why is that search which driving them to even search? Because you’re going to get in front of them a lot sooner than those folks who are just going for, you know, the the noun key, the noun words or copywriter or SEO, you want to get before all that stuff? Yeah, that’s so valuable. Erin Ollila 30:49 And I think that really does play into our larger discussion of visibility outside of your own network. Or, I mean, let me say this, let me say it differently visibility outside of your website, right. So when I started my podcast, which was pretty recently, I had to make decisions of like, what would the description of my podcast be like? Again, I’m not a believer in keyword stuffing, like using them as you can as naturally as you can. But but there’s that decision, right of like, what phrasing are you using, so people can find you when you want to be targeted and make good decisions? But you also want to sound natural, right? Like, I couldn’t have my podcast, like description be like the marketing brandings copywriting, right. Like I mean, like you, because if someone were to read that, they’d be like, what? Which one? Like, what is this going to be? Right? So there’s another area where you have to make like the business decision based on the SEO and and bring it back to that whole? It depends, I would say, I mean, at least for me, it’s trial and error. The answer to SEO is a lot of trial and error. You know, I went with the messaging and copywriting podcast because I wanted copywriting and podcast to be close together. But I do. I am also aware that there’s not as much of an audience who are specifically searching for copywriting. They might be searching for Marketing podcast. So as of right now, maybe for the first six months to a year of having my podcast, I will keep it as copywriting podcast. But if I don’t feel like that’s working, maybe then I adjust later. And I make it more like wider. And I use marketing podcasts. That’s how I think that like people should look at these decisions when they’re trying to figure it out for themselves on what to start with, or how to adjust. Its learning based on the information that we have. Like, if it’s not working, you adjust, don’t adjust too soon. But let it sit for a while and then you’ll see the results will tell you what to do the results will help you make those decisions. I’m so so thinking about SEO outside of our own website. I think people automatically think of like the easy stuff like the titling or the description, but for the I’d like to talk today about both hosting and guesting for podcast because I think that there are different ways that we can get that traction, right. You know, as a host, we might think about the keywords that we’re using to make our show standout. But I don’t think a lot of people put an effort into the guesting aspect of SEO and it could have such great benefits for us. So maybe like, let’s start talking by hosting, right, we’ll get some of the easy things out of the way. Because I think that there are a lot of those questions for like titling descriptions, what is your best best advice or best practices for including SEO in the content production of a podcast? Akilah 33:46 So you mentioned the title. So the title, tagline description, everything that’s going to go on to all those different sites that I mentioned before, right there, they’re going to list that. So you definitely want to have something like that. When you get to the per episode, I’m a big fan of MIDI Show Notes. We go deep into that. But show notes that essentially show share, who’s it for, like, call out your audience, because people are searching for things for themselves. So if you’re talking to podcasts and say podcasts are talking to business owners, say business owners, if you’re talking to moms who want to speak franksen moms who want speak French call out your audience, what they’re going to learn some of the questions that are going to get answered people’s search by questions. So all of that should go in your show notes. But then that show notes should also go into the description of the show that those again to all of these, all these players and all of these different places. Also, I tell people don’t wait until you’re writing about an episode. To start thinking about your SEO. You should already have like for your overall business, what are some of the key things that people are searching for? And you want to make your topics, your episodes, kind of to some of those keywords and topics. So you know that You got an episode that’s about something that someone’s searching for. So that can hook them in and you’re still gonna have some other stuff, you’re still not gonna be able to tell them what how they should be saying and all those things, but you want to be able to hook them in with the things that they’re already searching for. And so you’ve got, I’ve seen people all the time, like, they’ll have great show notes, they’ll have great all the things that on surface, it looks good. And they’re like, why am I not getting the traffic and attraction that I’m looking for? And it’s like, well, you’re not technically talking about anything, my anything someone wants, right? It looks to do on paper, but that’s because you started with what you want. You know, like if I came on to start talking about football, right, and my girls that want to get visible or like, yeah, won’t care about football, I’m never gonna get found in their searches, right. So I need to talk about whatever it is that they want first, and then put in things like keywords and stuff, why people start with the keywords. And really, I tell people to start with the topics. And same thing if you’re gonna bring in guests. So if you’re gonna bring in guests, your guest should align to those topics. If they don’t align to your topics, then they can’t be your guests right now. And sometimes, especially when we’re like doing different, you know, groups and communities and stuff, and people are like, I can’t be on your show. Sometimes you have to look and say, I don’t know how you fit. Erin Ollila 36:11 Now, that is such a valid point, right? Like you you might want, you might think they’re interesting, you might like like their story or what they’re offering. But if it’s not serving your audience, it turns people away like you’re losing people who could be consistently checking in on your show it because like you’re distracting them from the meat of what you want to give them. Akilah 36:32 And when the end, people who are consistently searching for them, people may not even be looking extra show at all. I’ll give an example a couple months ago, I decided I wanted to start using the upside or my business. And so the first thing I did, because I’m, I’m generally a podcast listener, and I noticed good information there. But the first thing I did was go over to my podcast player and put in dubsado. And I got a couple of episodes, I got some episodes from 2019, right? That had really good information about dubsado. I’m not a regular listener to those shows, stuff like that. But I listened to those episodes, I’ve now promoted him a couple times, I keep telling the story. I shared it on my Instagram, I downloaded this thing. But that’s what you want your show to do not just be about your current audience, but the people who are searching for that topic. And I personally, I’m honest people like I generally search for anything like we talked about my Sass, and your questions. And so I’m looking now I’m listening now to sass related podcasts. When I did Kickstarter a couple years ago, I listened to those. So think about the people who aren’t even on your radar yet. Those are the people you want to really create some topics for them, so that they can, like I said, get hooked into what you’re doing, by mentioning the things that they may or may not be looking for, if they don’t know you yet. Erin Ollila 37:49 Yeah, that’s so valuable, you know, and it really even just goes to the idea of like marketing and how we talk to people in general. You know, when it comes to launching, I think people, you know, they might get discouraged if they find that their actual audience isn’t interested in whatever they’re offering, let’s say, right. But then if we talk, if we approach it by the idea, like, of that people aren’t necessarily ready for what we need, or what we’re offering, or they don’t have a need for it, right. So if we’re being strategic with our SEO for our content, that speaks to what people need, we’re attracting those new people who are immediately ready for what we’re offering, right? Like, we don’t have to prime our current audience. We’re literally offering our services or goods or products to people who are ready for those things right there ready for the topics that we’re sharing. So they’re going to care more, be more interested, and then, you know, be easier to nurture in our sales funnels? Because we’re speaking to the right people. That’s such a great point. I have a question based on something you said before. One thing I’ve wondered myself, and I’ve actually gone back and forth on and I’ve I’ve heard in the podcast community that I’m in is, should our descriptions be the same as our show notes? And if not, how would you recommend adjusting our app? And when I say show notes, I mean, our show notes for our own website? How would you recommend adjusting them? So that way, they are different? If you think that they should be different? Akilah 39:18 Um, I don’t think and I’ve had this debate myself, but I have not seen any like, generally Google does not like duplicate content. So that’s why the question comes up for those who are just like, why is it important? It comes up because generally, like, I would not put the same thing on multiple websites. But for some reason, I have not seen a lot of pushback on having the same thing on multiple, like on your, on your website for your show. And then in these players and these aggregators and stuff. Now, I will say that I do pare them down. So I don’t ever have exactly the same. I don’t necessarily rewrite them but I do pare them down just because my show notes are longer on my site, and I might go into more detail and stuff so I’m May, if I told a little story about why this is important, I may just say, you know, it’s important for people to know and, and keep it going and take out the story just to pare down the words, because also keep in mind how people are seeing on a podcast player. It’s like one little screen worth of stuff. So you just can’t put all those words at one point in time. And I know Lipson just changed this, I’m assuming Apple changed, which is why Lipson changed it. But like, on, when I used to put in for Apple podcasts, on my show notes, they had their own criteria, which was a lot less words than the normal description would take. So I literally had to it was like doing this, it was more than a tweet. But imagine you had a whole story, you got to get it down to a tweet, that’s how much needs to go. So you do want a pared down version, I don’t think you need a completely new version. I’ve not seen what I would see if there was like a duplicate website with the same information. They seem to at least understand that this podcast is compared to just two websites with the same information. Erin Ollila 40:58 Yeah, no, I think that’s great. And I honestly, that’s how I’m approaching it as well, like my description is in my show notes on my website, but my show notes are a lot more dynamic, I have the room to add more. And just think about like, you know, you you touched on this, but think about how people consume content, right, you’re looking at your podcast player, you want either bullet points, or tiny like broken down sentences, sentence like paragraphs, right, you do not want to read chunks and chunks and chunks of text in a description on your podcast player. Whereas your website, if someone is coming to read your show notes, or they find your show notes by searching social media, they automatically assume that their content they’re going to be consuming is longer. So you do have more opportunity to explain yourself, share a story, have some paragraphs of text in there. So I alright, I’m glad to know that I’m on the right track, you’re at least when you’re doing the same thing. But similar question is when it comes to specific SEO, meaning like the shorter or long tail keyword phrases that we’re using, do you think that what you put in your podcast description should have the same keyword that you’re using on your show notes? Or should we be using different keywords so that we’re not competing against ourselves? Akilah 42:14 I personally want I go after the same keywords. I know. And this is where I differ from the SEO community. So I know that fields are listening in to say something right, feel free. But I’m okay with cannibalizing of different keywords. And I’ll tell you why. Especially when I first started doing SEO, that was one of my sites, I literally used to take up half of page one for different words. And part of it was one of my the name of the site was online boutique stores, which in itself was my keyword, right? Or one of them part, the part of it was online petitions my keyword. But so I would like take up the whole page one and the response I used to get so here’s the business decision again, the response I used to get from people when they would contact me like I look for wholesalers and all I saw I was saying from online boutique stores, or you are I mean one person I never forget she AEMT messaged me and she was like your godson, I went on Google, I was looking for information. I saw all these things about you. I came on Facebook and I happen to be running a retargeting ad and moment I went on I saw something from you. She’s like your godson, you’re the person I need. The reason why is because she did not see any other options. And she’s not see any other options, because I took up the whole front page, right? So I right I mean, there probably were other things there. But it was enough of me. And different. It wasn’t the same thing for me like wasn’t like, repeat, repeat, repeat. But it was like this one post this one topic about it. This one post about it, that podcast episode. And it was just it was an abundance of my content. And I think as businesses, while I understand the cannibalization part and understand it can, it can cause a little bit of harm, I think it’s worth it for you could really convert people faster, because they see you as the resource, that source of the information that they really need. So I’m one of the people go after all the keywords, you can go after as many as many ways as you can. And if you got a few that come up on page one celebrate. Erin Ollila 44:10 Yeah, no, I love your answer. And I like that you’re saying right out that it’s different than from what other people say. But the reason why I think it’s perfect that you say that is this is another It depends, right? So if we talk about intent, think about when people are searching on a podcast player, so like using that search engine, they’re going to be looking for what they want what they need to hear. So sometimes ver the way that we phrase it in our titles might need to be different from the keywords we’re going out against for our blog content, right? Because it’s that difference of maybe we’re answering questions on our blog content. There are people who don’t necessarily want that exact answer, meaning like that exact episode that they’d hear but they have like a more general question could find it right. Whereas in the podcast player, maybe that’s like you said you were looking for dubsado. Maybe your question was how to set up dubsado? We Yes, you want the podcast episode specifically about setting it up? Right. So I think intent plays a role. Which is why I think the answer to the question that I asked is either and we have to make a decision based on the information we have, maybe we use the exact same keyword, or maybe we just be okay with the fact that we’re using different keywords, because the intent might be different. One of the podcast episodes that I launched recently, I use different keywords, because I wanted to have a play on the title. It was about about pages. So for my podcast player, I just went with a very vague about page for my keyword. And I use that in my description and everything. And my title was, I bet you thought your about page was about you, because I was playing on like that, like, you’re so vain, right? So and then for my show notes, I was very particular about the keyword phrase that I used, I had done some research, I had had found some decent amount searched keywords with very low competition. And what I found was a lot of them in my keyword list were things like about page examples. And I knew that wouldn’t work right now for the content I was sharing in show notes. But one of the very, like, decently searched and low competition keywords was about us page. So that’s what I used on my blog, while I spoke to all types of business owners in the actual episode, meaning like not someone who has a team, like I could be talking to a solopreneur, or people with team, I thought that using that phrase, on the show notes would be more helpful. So I’m just sharing that as an example of why I chose different things. But again, it’s based on that business business decision and the intent of what we think people are searching for. Akilah 46:56 And I love that example. Because people that you said they would be looking for it differently, and differently depending on where they’re looking. So that’s good. Erin Ollila 47:03 Thank you. Um, so the other thing I want to touch on briefly before we start talking about how to use SEO as a guest is, you know, we write these show notes. And I think that the podcast hosts that are currently doing this understand the value of using keyword phrases, or even similar phrasing throughout their show notes. But one thing I don’t notice people doing often enough is interlinking with content that they already have on their website. Do you have any recommendations for people to do that? Like how why? Or maybe you can explain why that is helpful for people to do? Akilah 47:38 I think, Well, I think it’s really helpful for a couple of different reasons. I’m big on internal links, one, the links, you can control one and control them, right. Google does like the links, they like backlinks, they like internal links, they like to see a connection. And so when you’re thinking about it in your in your, your any anywhere in your show, your show notes, you know, you want to build connections, how these topics go together, get people to the older episodes, when I’m teaching my podcasting, SEO and growing your show, I always say your old episodes should be doing at least 50% of the downloads for for your for the month, right? That’s how you know that you’re optimizing optimally growing the show, we spend a lot of time on our new stuff, and forget that our old stuff should be working to put it to work. Okay, so and the internal links linking from show to show is one way you do that. And so making sure you put that in also going back out to those players, when those players and the players may not give you a backlink. But those aggregator sites when they pick up when they pick up links in your show notes, that can be considered a backlink to your site. Right. And like you said, we’re not gonna get into nofollow do follow all the stuff, but it counts, right. And Erin Ollila 48:52 that’s so valuable. And I wasn’t even thinking of that myself, right. Like, as people have asked me, like, oh, how many links should I put in my description? And I’m like, Yeah, don’t worry about it. Because like, you know, at least let’s say the apple player for a directory, they’re not, they’re not recognizing links. But you’re right. That when you when it’s being aggregated to like a site such as like, Listen notes, or something like that, that link will be present there. So it is actually helping you to include that in the description to that label. Akilah 49:18 So you can definitely always link link between those. And what I do, I generally have a good kind of index of my content in my head. So I generally as I’m talking, I’m always like we talked about that in that episode. We talked about that in that episode. Some of them I actually plan like how we were talking about your planning series. Some of them I do plan a series together, but sometimes like I just did one recently on habits now I do one on boundaries. And last year, I did one on burnout, and I put them together like last year we talked about burnout. This year, we’re talking about boundaries, and so I just mentioned it enough to now put that link in there. And so I do a lot of that but I also if I put something on my site have like one day a month. And I just go and look through my like I use a little search box through and look throughout my site to see where else that I mentioned it, I have one where I just talked about is blogging dead for 2022. And I went back to my site and look for where mentioned blogging anywhere else in the last few years. And I linked those to this new episode. So I do like a backwards and frontwards to make sure that everyone is got a little bit of linking going on not too much. You don’t want more than about three to four links per page. But you know, making sure like I said, Everybody’s got a link to it, link from it. And there’s a bunch of really great interlinking throughout your site. Erin Ollila 50:38 Yeah, that is so important. And I will say that to people all the time. Like, I think the common sense, they understand the fact that when they’re writing something new, they should link to previous things. But one thing I think that people never consider is to go back into the previous content and link to what would technically be the future content, like the the newer content you’re in. You know, I’m using the example of my blog, because we attract my excuse me my podcast, we were talking about it earlier, the first four episodes were about the pages of your website. So yeah, when I was writing the show notes, I could link to each other. Like maybe if I did my homepage, I could link to the about page because it wasn’t there. But you know, into the future. If I start talking, like I’m having like a blog post or a podcast show notes, and I start talking about home pages, but it’s a completely different topic like brand messaging, let’s say, well, I should or the opposite is actually the point I’m trying to make. If I mentioned Brandman brand messaging in that homepage, shownotes. I did way back in the day, well, I can go back into that old post and link it to the new brand messaging, right. So we think to link backwards, but we’re never really going backwards and then linking forward. So if you are doing SEO, you kind of feel like you’re a pro at it. But you’re looking for tips to continue to improve. That’s an easy one, right? Go back into your old stuff and then link your old stuff to your newer stuff, because most likely you’re probably not doing that. Such a valuable point. I’m just to talk quickly about the guest guesting because, you know, I think it’s easy for us to think how we control our own podcast, but but a lot of us are using podcasts or even YouTube shows or anything like that as a way to increase our visibility and other people’s networks. And I don’t think people are thinking about SEO. So what can you do as a guest to use SEO to your advantage? Akilah 52:35 So a couple of things. It’s funny, because it’s one of the videos, I was just talking to you about. A couple of really quick things that I know people don’t normally talk about, think about is one when I pitch, I pitch based on my keywords and topics, right? So I’m gonna pitch people to be on their shows about things that I know that are good to come up, because whether I whether they come up or I come up for it, if it’s me talking, it’s me, right. So that’s that whole building authority thing that you definitely want. Um, the other thing is I generally, and I don’t do it always on purpose, or you guys have an index of my own content. But I usually mentioned another, something else that I can link to. So if I’m talking about the race method, if somebody wants to go deeper into that, I’ll say, Well, I’ve got a whole blog post on that if you, you know, I can give you that and you can put into your show notes. So that gets now another link or two, and back to how that now goes into the players and then goes into the aggregator sites. So now you’ve got some additional links coming from other places. And then the third one I can mention is making sure when you’re choosing who to pitch, right, yes, I’ll probably say yes to most being on most things, right. But if I’m actually going to go out and do the work to pitch somebody, I’m going to make sure that they have a podcast. I mean, they have a website for their podcast, I’m going to make sure that they link to people. I was in a really big SEO site last year. And they linked to my Facebook, and I’m like, no better. But, um, but even though they did, that’s what they did. So I now again, I’m going to put the work and effort into going out to get this link and going out to like pursue this person. I’m going to make sure that they’ve got everything in order that I’m going to actually at least get the backlink right, even if it’s not, you know, a super popular show at least one. Yeah, so those are something that I do. Erin Ollila 54:27 That’s important because the show itself could be unpopular, but their domain authority or like the way that like their potential website where you’re where their shownotes are living, and they’re giving you those backlinks from could be a great opportunity for you to like have that connection in Google’s mind. Right? Akilah 54:46 So they won’t be unpopular forever. Everyone starts somewhere, but if you’re growing and they’re growing and you guys grow together, that’s That’s amazing. Right? So I rarely say no, it’s got to because Over time, good friend or something, but like I said, as long as I’m gonna get the backlink and get the, you know, authority, why not? So yes, it’s an hour. Erin Ollila 55:07 Yeah. And the difference between SEO and social media is that as long as it’s an evergreen topic like this, like, that’s what you mentioned, like they’re not going to be small forever. Well, even moving it past that, like if the topics evergreen it will serve you for a very long time, right? So maybe their site improves, maybe their podcasts improves, or maybe just new people find that, you know, I brought this up in a different episode. But like, pre pandemic, would you think that like sourdough starters would be like the biggest search term, right? And I don’t remember what it was. I feel like I’m totally making this up now. But I, I vaguely remember that it went up like 9,000% for search terms during the pandemic when people were at home. So think about all of those bloggers, or little little town Baker’s who wrote guides on how to make sourdough starters, in 2017 2015. Well, guess what 2020 came 2021 came and people were at home and breadmaking became a thing. Their blog posts started to get tons of traffic. So I mean, I know where right now we’re dialing it back to talk a little bit more about your own website again. But in that case, if you’re already doing SEO, what do you do, if something like that happens, you go into those posts, you optimize them, you add calls to action, you direct the traffic on your website, to maybe a shop, or different things that ways people can work with you. So if we’re looking at the outside visibility, and we’re talking about how we’re showing up elsewhere, well, if that site begins to get more traffic, or that show notes blog that the podcast host shares begins to get more traffic in the future, they’re going to direct it to us, right. So like it will serve you in the long term. One thing I started to do as a podcast guest is I started to write my own show notes for my own website based on the podcast that I was in. And I want to point out here, I am not copying what they’re doing. I’m not like you know, adding like the episode player in and putting like timestamps or anything, but I try, I kind of treat it more as a overview of what was discussed. And I do that one to share a backlink with the podcast host, so helps them as well to to target that keyword. Because if it’s something like my own keyword choice, if it’s something that I’m talking about, then obviously, it’s something that I want to rank for, right. So it gives me an opportunity there to just share more content around the topics that are valuable to my audience. So I don’t I haven’t seen that done so much. I’ve seen some people do it. But I think that’s a potential opportunity for people who are willing to go that extra step on their own content to create similar content to that just gives them a chance to go to the podcast and learn more. It doesn’t have to be the longest form blog you’ve ever written. But you know, a short introduction to why it’s important. Maybe talk about the podcast and the podcast hosts and why why they’re valuable, could be another way a guest could jump in and share SEO with the people that they’re there. They’re speaking live. Akilah 58:26 Yeah, I’m so I’m shaking my head as you’re saying all this because I definitely recommend especially in the beginning, when you’re first starting out there to be be a guest, because now you can also share that with the next person who you pitch. Instead of sharing a lot of times we share the actual episode we were on. But you can now share these posts that you created about the episode you were on. And they’ll see how you help to promote them. I don’t do them for I would not recommend them for everything that you’re on. Only because Google does do a little bit of looking at if it’s always a one for one link, they’re sending you a link and you’re sending them a link. So you don’t want to over saturate that every link you’re getting has a reciprocal link, because then that might look a tiny bit spammy, or like you’re just switching links with people. So but I definitely think especially in the beginning, like I said, you want to kind of show your audience that you’re doing things, you want to show them that you appreciate it, you will show the next people that you’re appreciated right when you let them on. So I think that’s a really good, a really good switch. And then as you get further into doing like a lot of shows, you can have a page that shows the links to some of the things that you were on, as seen here. I sprinkled some things throughout other parts as we’re talking a lot about your blog, but throughout other parts of my site. So I’ve got a what I call a be your guest for when people bring me as a teacher, I got a whole sales page for that on that page. I have some links to things that I thought right or been on shows and talk. I’ve got it on you know, my as seen on page I’ve got on the homepage like you can sprinkle in those links, other places, and so it looks you know, it all looks good and people get to see some of the things that you’ve done. to kind of build that authority space, a lot of being a guest, if you haven’t figured it out already, is also growing your authority and grow your authority in Yes, in SEO, but also, you know, just overall in the online space. And I have to tell you, one of the one of the big changes last year was Google looking more at what they call eat, which is an I was gonna get the whole thing wrong, but the A is for authority. It’s got the authority trust, but they’re actually looking at not just what’s on sites anymore, but they’re looking at kind of that sites, and not just their domain authority, but overall, looking at how much they are a trusted authority in that space. And the more things that you have, you know, references to stuff even like I said, if it’s a reference to up on another show, and more, you have references to things more, you have citations, more links you have coming to you, all of that stuff helps contribute to that authority and trust that they are now starting to look at more and more, especially with all the different topics that we know, some may or may not be, they may not be the truth on the online, you know, anyone could write something on the web. So now they’re starting to do more things to look at what is the trust? Have those those specific items, or those specific sites that are giving us that information? So keeping that in mind? Erin Ollila 1:01:18 Yeah, no, that’s so valuable. I think this episode has just been awesome. I’m so thankful for your time today. Akila, I think that anyone I, I love that when people listen to this episode, they can come from different experience levels and still gain something that they can immediately put into practice, and that we’re covering both the outside visibility right, like other people’s podcasts, our own podcasts, but but not just that, that we’re taking it back and talk about how to use that on your own site as the most valuable way. So I think this has been from my from my own opinion, I think this has been an awesome episode. And I’m so appreciative that you were here today, and you shared all this valuable stuff. One thing I’ll say, you know, this will be in the show notes is Akilah is offering a lead magnet for us. But it’s so valuable because it’s the 101 most searched blog topics to boost SEO rankings. So we talked a lot about like what we’re doing for our show notes, right. But I think that it, we can’t just stop on shownotes, we really need to think about the other things we’re sharing through our site. So if you are not sure what to share, this is the perfect place to start when it comes to looking at an SEO approach on your website. So thank you for sharing that. I will link to it in the show notes. And again, thank you for linking to it. Akilah 1:02:36 You’re welcome. And I appreciate your time. This has been such a great conversation. Thank you.