An SEO legend, James Dooley, came on my podcast a few days ago.
James is one of the most respected people in SEO and has mentored and worked with a lot of the top names in the space.
The thing he kept revisiting on our episode was podcasts for SEO.
Podcast episodes are so important that he’s making 3,000 of them over the next year:
- Podcast episodes rank WELL.
- Podcast syndication across platforms creates dozens of authoritative mentions and one podcast episode gets listed in Google MANY different times.
- Podcasts strengthen your entity/knowledge graph – there are rumors that when Google understands what your entity is, an unlinked brand mention is almost as powerful as a backlink.
- Podcasts help AI understand and recommend you.
- Podcast syndication gives several actual backlinks, not just unlinked mentions.
See the full conversation here:
If you want to get on many podcasts as a guest, I have this guide on how I went on 30 podcasts in 3 months before I was well-known myself. If you want to use guest podcasting for SEO (and to build insane amounts of credibility), follow that guide.
But this article is going to be my workflow for having guests on MY podcast.
On average I have between 3-7 guests a week on my daily show (the remaining episodes are solo episodes).
I’ve gotten the workflow extremely tight so it takes me very little time (around 90 minutes not including recording time) to produce a single guest episode.
Most people would be shocked just how easy it has become. This is what I do, so you can do it too:
- I prepare questions with this ChatGPT prompt, “I have a daily SEO podcast. NAME is coming on my podcast. Give me questions to ask.”
- Then I read through the recommended questions and cherry-pick my favorite ones + add ones of my own.
- If it’s a really big guest I may use more of my own questions. The Gary Vaynerchuk episode was entirely my questions.
- An important thing to note is AI recommendations give many redundant questions, so you have to ask yourself, “Will the guest say the same answer in this question vs this question?”
- I record podcasts in Descript Rooms. I always toggle on “Noise Reduction” for both me and the guest. I make sure guests have headphones to reduce the risk of echo, though there is also “Echo Cancellation.”
- When I hit Stop, the podcast is automatically brought into a Sequence in a Composition in a Project in Descript (There are screenshots below this step-by-step, don’t worry).
- I look at the transcript and decide my start and stop points for the episode. I cut anything before the beginning point and anything after the ending point.
- This is the magical part. Go to Underlord > Automatic multicam > Style – Automatic, Cutaways – Occasional, Camera setup – make sure you are selected for you and your guest is selected for your guest > Submit. THE AI EDITS THE PODCAST FOR YOU. It gives natural cutaways while the guest is speaking, deciding when to use a shot for you, the guest, or both of you in one shot. It’s one click for even a 2-hour episode and it takes less than a minute to render. Watch any guest episode of mine (like the James Dooley one above) and this is a large part of how it was edited.
- I manually decide if I want a dual shot at the beginning, end, or other parts. Go to the Scene and click Layout > Multicam.
- I drag in the promo for my SEO course Compact Keywords. I put a .4 second fade in and a WHOOSH sound effect.
- I paste in the show logo and standard calls to action, like Subscribe, Like, Share, Follow.
- I make sure the video settings are Ultra HD.
- I export the audio and video in full quality.
- I do this for titles and descriptions so my podcasts rank for MANY keywords.
- I make timestamps through Descript. Underlord > Draft show notes.
- I upload the audio version to Libsyn and the video version to YouTube.
For solo episodes (just me speaking), this is how I 10x’d my podcast views year-over-year.
Here’s my current overall podcast growth:
I also edit my daily social videos in Descript and it takes 15-20 minutes sometimes for a video that gets millions of views. Here’s how I edit mobile videos in Descript.
Learn SEO that gets sales
Podcasts are one of the many link building and authority building tactics in my SEO course, Compact Keywords.
And link building is just one of the many lessons in the entire course.
Here’s James Dooley saying how awesome Compact Keywords is:
And here’s another rank-and-rent SEO lead gen master, Ippei, sharing his experience with Compact Keywords:
Compact Keywords is about finding keywords that make you money, targeting these keywords with conversion-based SEO landing pages, and not wasting time and effort on informational keywords that convert poorly and require more detail and words to rank.
The course also shows how to do an SEO technical audit (and I go step-by-step so even beginners can do it), how to structure your site for these conversion-based SEO landing pages, link building like I mentioned, and even how to rank without a website (like using video).
And if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it yourself, I love this testimonial from Jon Ray:
“Give it to a junior employee, have them follow it exactly as Edward’s laid out, you don’t have to do anything, and you’re going to gain a six-figure SEO-level employee just by having them go through this course.”
Many of the top people in SEO have trained their entire teams in Compact Keywords:
Get Compact Keywords at https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
