Rand Fishkin on how to optimise your podcast show notes so you rank on page 1 of Google | #380

Tim Reid:
Rand it was episode 262 in September 2015 that you were last here and I’m guessing that a lot has changed in the world of a SEO since that date. So, is it reasonable for a small business owner to think that they can still get page 1 Google rankings?

Rand Fishkin:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean depends on the keyword, but certainly possible. Lots of small businesses are doing it every day.

Tim Reid:
Is it a lot harder or you just need to know what you’re doing?

Rand Fishkin:
It is slightly more difficult, but there’s also actually more opportunity than there’s ever been before and we can talk about that. But some of the reasons why are there is actually more people searching than there ever were before and more searches being performed by those searches. So, you know today ranking number three or four might be the equivalent of ranking number one four or five years ago.

That’s how much traffic is going to lose into those search results which is pretty awesome and then the second thing that’s exciting is that there are lot more different kinds of results in Google’s first page than there have ever been.

So, you know five six years ago, you might have performed a search and you’d see 10 blue links. Today, you perform a search you’re going to see local results and maps. You might see Knowledge Graph results which are those big boxes on the right-hand side with all the information, you might see something called a featured snippet which shows like an answer and an instant link up at the very top ahead of all the rest the organic results and there is you know 30 other different kinds of results that you can show up in.

So today, you might not have to do just SEO for those classic 10 blue links. There’s other ways to show up.

Tim Reid:
Love it. Love it. By the way, I do love those featured snippets. I think I’m I pretty much click on that one every time.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. You’re not alone.

Tim Reid:
Well, we’re not here to talk about featured snippets. We’re here to talk podcast. show notes. But I’ve got I have to ask as we go. Is there a tip to getting a featured snippet?

Rand Fishkin:
Two things are important. One you have to rank somewhere in the top 10. It certainly helps to be higher up. We see that featured snippets more often go to results number one, two, three than seven, eight or nine, but we’ve seen results that feature snippets that come from result nine, result number 10 and not just page two.

The second thing is a lot of it is about sentence structure and formatting. So, if you see that a that a featured snippet is showing up and you think to yourself you know what I bet I could write two or three short sentences they would do an even better job of explaining you know the answer and delivering that to Google searchers than what the results are already showing or if you think gosh you know that looks like a future snippet that could really use a list.

I’m going to make an ordered list or an unordered list that’s bullet points or numbered items to help Google you know answer that query with a list and those formats actually work really well to capture featured snippets. There’s a great blog post from Dr. Pete on Moz that will walk you through it.

Tim Reid:
OK. I will link to that in the show notes. Is there something you have to tick to tell Google hey can you consider this for a featured snippet or you just got to make best efforts with the information you provide them?

Rand Fishkin:
In future simple cases, there’s not actually specific markup but you do need to make sure that the content that could appear in it is at the top or near the very top of your pages content. So it should be kind of just below the headline in your navigation.

Tim Reid:
OK. So, Rand what kind of mindset does a small business owner need to go into SEO with these days?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, I think it’s look it’s important to set expectations. SEO like content marketing, like building a community, like a lot of social media practices is a long-term play.

You’re not going to start your Facebook page and tomorrow have 10,000 people who read every post you put on Facebook then that will never happen, but you might say hey tomorrow maybe I’ll have five people and a year from now I might have 500 and maybe 4 years from now I have 5,000 and that will make my business much more successful with Facebook as a marketing channel and SEO is the same way.

The best time to start was 5 years ago. Second best time to start today.

Tim Reid:
Love it. Love it. You’ve always been a glass half full kind of guy. I think while we love you. Tell me. I know Google in one of their major algorithm releases updates a couple of years ago talked about how we want relevant unique helpful content produced regularly in fact and that’s what I’ve been doing for many years. That’s what I suggest my listeners do. Is that still the case?  and if it is or if it isn’t what’s been updated around what Google are looking for?

Rand Fishkin:
I think there’s two important caveats that I would add to that. The first one is the regularity or frequency of publishing. It’s actually not that important.

So, for example, if a small business came to me and said look, Rand and Tim, I do not have the bandwidth to publish something once a week. That’s just not going to be possible.

I would say: hey don’t worry about it. Can you publish something four times a year? Maybe I can do something every quarter once a quarter. Great! Let’s aim for that. Let’s look for keywords and terms and phrases that really matter to your audience that are going to help you accomplish your goals and where you can put in you know a significant amount of effort but only maybe once every three or four months and get a ton of value out of that.

I know small businesses that only publish basically one piece of content a year. There are small publishers but they do something remarkable they update it every year. Their customers and you know the media around them their blogosphere look forward to that piece of content coming out from them each year.

Sometimes, that’s an annual survey of you know all their customers or everyone in their field. Sometimes, it’s a big data collection or a release of information that they have unique access to. Sometimes, it’s their perspective on how the industry is changed over the last year right that they only produce once every January or something like that and this just can work out just fine.

I think it’s really about saying: hey what can I do, what can I accomplish what I have bandwidth for, and what can what can I fit into that bandwidth that’s still going to get me some traffic opportunities.

Tim Reid:
So is that Google saying: Hey listen! Stop feeling as though you have to publish, publish, publish, because what we’ve noticed is that the quality drops with that pressure.

So, do what you can. But when you do it, make it considered high quality useful content.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. And that goes to our second you know to the second caveat that I have around that initial statement which is Google is not just looking for unique content they’re looking for unique value from the content.

So, what I mean by that is for example, I could write an entire article because I you know I use a lot of whiteboard pens. Whiteboard Friday is obviously a big thing that I do like and write a whole piece about my favourite whiteboard pens right. And I could do that. You know whatever updated every year or what have you. But if someone if I were to create that and basically just have you know whatever is ranking number one for best white board markers today but I rewrote it in my own words. That provides no unique value.

Right. All it is, is unique content. It’s technically different words and phrases. I wrote the sentences instead of somebody else.

But it isn’t providing a different form of value.

What if instead, I spent you know a significant amount of time seeing how much relative ink levels each type of whiteboard marker has from each manufacturer and how long it takes them to run out of ink and how well they are race and how well they show up when they’re filmed on video on a whiteboard. Now, I’ve created not just unique content but unique value. Value that says: Hey anyone who’s ever filming against a whiteboard Rand will tell you which market to buy and that value is far beyond just the best whiteboard pen.

It’s a different kind of value of value you couldn’t get from any web page until Rand put that together and that unique value is something that Google is really seeking out so you can go look at the results for the top 10 for a keyword that you care about and you can identify a whole gap something that no one else is filling. Where you can provide the value that no one else has, that is a great opportunity to get ranking in Google.

Tim Reid:
Okay so. So, two things. Go ahead and write that blog post could be quite interesting to see how you do that. Secondly, this goes back to the first point of small businesses can still rank well on page 1 on Google is what you’re saying though that you seem to use the term we need to really use longer keywords because the blog posts you just mentioned is not just about what’s the best pen for a whiteboard. It’s what’s the best pen for a whiteboard based on how long the ink lasts and whatever else.

So, are you drilling down firstly and secondly does that mean you’re going to get less people searching for that, but the ones who are closer to doing something with that information buying from you, contacting you signing up.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah! It goes both ways right. So, if for example you could intuit that there are features of best whiteboard pens that people determine the criteria that would say: Hey this is what best means best is not just one person’s subjective opinion, best is a series of six criteria and I’m going to grade depends on all of us.

You can probably rank for just best whiteboard pens right now. You might say you know the key word is super competitive. I think I can really provide a lot of unique value there. I don’t want to go after such a hard to target keyword.

So, I’m going to go to best whiteboard pens for video and say there there’s only a handful of people who search for that every month. But you know what my white board pen company is pretty small. A handful of new visitors and new buyers every month would mean a lot to me. Great. Now you can target a more specific searcher intent a more specific set of keywords and your content will be a perfect match for those visitors.

Tim Reid:
Love it. I want to get stuck into the podcast show notes as we do. Talk to me about how far is Google off from actively indexing and accurately indexing audio.

Rand Fishkin: Still a long way but as best as we can tell it is it is pretty. I don’t even want to say half assed. I’m not sure they’re making a real attempt at this point to index podcasts and shows and show those highly in search results.

The only times that you’re going to see podcasts are one, when they are extremely well link to and very well covered and an extremely authoritative and two, when they have superb transcripts and you do see some podcasts do quite well and videos actually quite free to be a good example because they provide not only that multimedia format but also a text content accessible, readable, browsable, parsable piece of content underneath the video or next to the video or next to the audio clip that will walk you through the whole thing and that’s why you see a lot of podcasters today.

You know putting up not just show notes but really detailed descriptions of what’s in there and you know all the different sections a lot about their guests all those kinds of acts.

Tim Reid:
Well let’s get stuck in. So, what we’re going to do now is we are going to real time search engine optimize this actual episode that Rand and I are recording. You laugh. That’s an evil laugh.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Let’s do it man.

Tim Reid:
Correct me if I’m wrong, Rand. The learnings that listeners are going to get here applied just as equally to any webpage of their website already blog post of their website, correct?

Rand Fishkin:
That’s right. Yeah absolutely. We’re going to try and we’re going to try and do a universal approach to small business SEO.

Tim Reid:
Love it. Just so listeners know I use WordPress to manage my website’s content so that’s what we’re working in. I use a plugin called Yoast. Rand, you can challenge that as we go. But that’s what allows me to put in the metadata into that page of the blog posts. I am screen recording this so people will be able to view that later.

Now, let’s get stuck in.

Rand Fishkin:
Tim, I love Yoast. I don’t know if you know, but I actually gave that blog its name that plug in and that blogs. So, when Yoast first introduced himself to me. This is Joast of all great from the Netherlands. So, he said you know my name is Joast. It’s J-O-O-S-T and I said Yoast like toast with a Y. And he said toast with a Y. I love it. And that’s how we started oh my Y-O-A-S-T.

Tim Reid:
Well it’s one of those plug ins that’s been around forever and a day and from what I can tell it continues to do what it needs to do very well. So why changed.

How important are show notes and how long do they need to be now before you answer that, Rand. I have a love-hate and I think I represent many podcasters here. I have a love-hate relationship with show notes. I mean I love recording audio. I love these conversations I have on my podcast but when it comes time to constructing those show notes it sometimes feels like pulling teeth. I sometimes wonder whether anyone’s using them.

So in your view, how important are they?

Rand Fishkin:
They are critically important. I mean I’m sorry to say, Tim. Yeah, I know I know it’s frustrating. So, here’s the way I would think about it. Think about the show notes as being less it is less about making detailed notations of what we talked about and more about attracting people to click that play button. Right, you want to create an incentive you want to create almost a tease right a mystery like: Hey, these are things that you’re going to find out.

These are questions I bet you have the answers are inside. Right. And so, you’re really trying to do what advertising and conversion rate optimization always do which is to entice people to click that play button to take that action and for any small business out there any time you’re putting up multimedia content or you have something behind a registration wall right here you get our latest data set, give us your email address. Man, that better be a sexy call to action something that really gets people going oh man I need that. That’s exactly what I want and that’s what show notes should do. Let’s describe exactly what they’re going to see and more sell them on why you should click play.

Tim Reid:
Love it! already I’ve got a mindset shift. Is it about clicking play do you think on the media player within the show notes or is it about getting them to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or Google Play button?

Rand Fiskin:
That is really up to you. So, I think it depends on what your goals are. If your goals are in a raw listener’s vs. you think that anyone who clicks that play button is very likely to be a subscriber and you’ve seen data in your analytics to suggest that’s the case and so maybe you know you want to probably push one thing above everything else and maybe that’s the play button. Maybe it subscribes on iTunes maybe it’s Stitcher but whatever you know whatever platform you’re going after.

Whatever call-to-action you can make. That is a single one. And then maybe have some you know okay you’re not in Itunes or not an Apple user. Here’s some alternatives.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. OK. I love it. Mindset shift. Now I’ve broken this discussion up Rand as you know. On-page SEO of the show notes and off-page SEO so we’re going to talk on-page first. As I said to you in an e-mail in the lead up to this I don’t know what I don’t know. So, I need you to got to go.

Have you forgotten this or you’ve forgotten that or that’s not important so I’m going to start off by saying how do we determine the focus keyword that these exact interviews should rank for?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. So, you’re going to need to do some keyword research. And luckily this is a pretty fun easy process.

There are some free tools out there you can certainly use just Google themselves straight or Google for your AdWords tool. I really love a tool called Moz Explorer keyword explorer. And that is free for the first few queries a day, but Tim I’ve actually given you access to my account so that we can run as many queries as we want here. So, the way to get started with this is just to think very broadly.

So, when this show goes up, what is it going to be about?

Tim Reid:
The ultimate show notes for a podcast episode.

Rand Fishkin:
Ultimate show notes for a podcast episode. So, we’re trying to help people optimize their podcast show notes?

Tim Reid:
Correct.

Rand Fishkin:
OK. All right so why don’t we take it in.

Tim Reid:
What do you think so? That’s why I contacted you.

Rand Fishkin:
Well so that is I think that’s a very specific one. We could go broader and say something like we are trying to help small businesses do SEO. We could say we’re trying to help with SEO for small publishers. We could say we’re trying to do SEO for podcasters or we could go all the way down and say: Hey we’re just trying to create the ultimate guide to show notes for podcasters.

Tim Reid:
What do you think?

Rand Fishkin:
Well I like being specific and I think it’d be interesting to see what sorts of searches I have no idea what will happen if we type in podcast show notes to keyword explorer, but I think that would be great.

Tim Reid:
Doing that now on the screen sharing. I’m going to go Australia because most of the cities are in Australia so I’ve got podcast show notes search.

Rand Fishkin:
I do warn you because Australia has a smaller population and a smaller search population. I sometimes recommend for non-geo localized queries that you use the United States. The reason being just because there tends to be so much more search volume and search variation and we all speak the same language roughly.

Tim Reid:
Okay. Done. All right on the screen, what are we doing?

Rand Fishkin:
All right so let’s scroll down and check out that list of keyword suggestions down there.

Tim Reid:
Okay so we’ve got remembering this but primarily this is an audio interview. So, I’ve got now box with five keywords suggestions. Podcast show notes, service podcast show notes, podcast show notes template, podcast show notes iPhone and podcast show notes examples.

Rand Fishkin:
So, when we click that link below there to see all 1,000 suggestions because that will give us a lot of keyword information and now we can sort of see: Hey, you know there’s a few with some with some monthly volume so looks like most people when they search for podcast show notes, show notes is actually two words not one. Which is an interesting, right and that’s important as well because we want to structure our content in the way people search for it.

So, podcast space show space notes will probably do better for us as a focus keyword than podcast show notes or one word.

Tim Reid:
And what Moz keyword explorer telling us is that it’s of all the keywords showing its monthly volume the word the keyword podcast show notes have the most monthly volume, correct?

Rand Fishkin:
This is actually sorted right now by relevancy. But you can change that to sort by volume. So, you if you click that top column you can sort by volume but you’ll probably get some you know very far field keywords like podcasts straight if you want we can scroll up to the top and see where it says include a mix of sources. So, underneath podcast show notes say yes there you go. So, why don’t you choose something that’s sort of closely related.

There are some options in there like only include keywords with all the query terms. And in this case, we probably want a break-up to put that space in there because it’s being very literal. So, you can do a search bar.

Tim Reid:
All right. So, doing a search for podcast show notes in the United States only include keywords with all of the query terms.

Rand Fishkin:
This is the most complicated part right now.

There you go. Now, I’ve got a list so show notes service not a ton of search volume around this term but there you go. I think we should make podcast show notes essential keyword

Tim Reid:
Okay done. We love that. So yeah, I would. I mean and the fact that there isn’t a huge search volume I mean how much search volume, is that 11 to 50 literally 11 to 50 searches per month.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. And that has. So it’s pretty accurate 95 percent of all keyword volumes that we’ve tested fall into the range that are reported here.

Tim Reid:
So, do you think that despite the small volume do you think that’s what we should go with?

Rand Fishkin:
Well, I mean if you were able to rank number one and let’s you know let’s be optimistic let’s say there’s 50 people searching for this every month and we think it’s rising right because more people are doing podcasts and more people are creating show notes. I would say that you know 50 people searching and potentially 25 to 30 of them clicking on our link every month. That would be pretty worthwhile. I mean that starts out up.

Tim Reid:
Happy with that. OK. So, we’ve got our keyword and why is that so important, Rand?

Rand Fishkin:
If you don’t know which keyword or keywords you’re targeting with a blog post or with any type of piece of content. It’s very very difficult to optimize for it. You don’t really know what is the searcher want from this and what information do I need to provide. You don’t know what keywords to include in your title, your headline, your meta description.

You know these important places to place keywords but you don’t really even know what other words and phrases should be including and how should I be helping this person because you feel like you can’t get inside a searcher’s head until you know what they typed in.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. All right let’s move on.

We’ve got a lot of ground to cover here because there are so many component parts to optimising a page on a website and hence I think that’s why a lot of small business owners either don’t do it or don’t know how to do it. What’s the headline for this episode then now that we know what the keyword is.

Rand Fishkin:
Well, we want to write something that is going to be sexy enough that people want to click it. It’s enticing but it includes these three words podcast show notes and preferably altogether preferably somewhat close to the start of that headline.

So, for example we could say: The Ultimate Guide to Podcasts Show Notes. We could also alter that if we thought hey this is going to be less of a big big guide and more of a specific we’re going to try and give you a quick and dirty version we could say: How to Optimize your Podcast Show Notes to Get More Traffic. So, you know those there’s options around that we could even have something like a Podcast Show Notes: What to Do to Have SEO Success.

There’s a lot of options available. We could test different things. It’s really up to us and what we think is going to resonate with searchers and visitors as well as how we want to angle our content.

Tim Reid:
Okay. What would you do. I would have to keep asking you that.

Rand Fishkin:
Sure sure. So, for me, I feel like we are not necessarily doing the Ultimate Guide. I think we’re more doing a little bit of how to. So, I think: How to Make Podcast Show Notes Successful or How to Make your Podcast Show Notes 10 Times Better. Maybe that one.

Tim Reid:
I’m moving on to content now. The guts of the show notes if you like now the overall question is what to include right now for an episode of the small business big marketing show. I have a lengthy guest bio. I talk about what topics are covered in bullet point form. I share the top three learnings from my interview. I link to any resources that are mentioned during the discussion and I have some sponsored links and that’s what feels very laborious.

Now that you’ve told me upfront that I should be more actively concerned about the whole aim of these show notes is to get people to as you said either click on the play button or subscribe on iTunes whatever I choose to do. I’m feeling that my current structure is not doing that. I write those show notes because I think my listeners are going to go there to find out all the stuff that we’ve talked about

Rand Fishkin:
So, I might try and do like a little bit of extraction. Maybe take one really powerful exchange that you and I might have during this podcast and write that up. You know verbatim you know your question and my answer your response my response right and take that and say like there’s a lot more like this you’ll get more tips like this one that can tenax your podcast show notes results. Click here to play the full version. And so that way you’re sort of like enticing them into oh my god that is such a great idea. Look at what Rand and Tim were talking about. I got to hear the rest of this and then you could go into right then you could have.

Here’s what else you’ll learn. And now here’s a little bit more about who Rand is and who Tim is and now here is the rest of the notes.

Tim Reid:
So, what you’re saying. To be clear is first and foremost identify what I consider to be the most powerful part of our interview. And are you suggesting have a have a transcript of that and an audio clip?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah and I also display that visually so I would take you know perhaps icons of us write our avatars. Put those next to the quotes and have that section right that exchange between us below two other elements. First, at the very top of the page the headline.

Second, a brief description maybe two to three sentences that could potentially be a featured snippet for Google right. When someone searches for how do I make better a podcast show notes and you have a you know this podcast will walk you through how to create better podcast show notes including X, Y and Z.

Check out this. Whatever it is 45-minute interview with an SEO, Rand Fishkin and write that kind of thing and then. That call out right then that the visuals there and then you go into the rest of the show notes.

Tim Reid:
How long are we talking? Because what I’m identifying a 10-minute exchange or literally a 30-second exchange because the transcript over.

Rand Fishkin:
I’d go for more like 30 seconds right. You really want that teaser.

Tim Reid:
Yeah. Gotcha. OK. So then, below that I’m still here I’m still doing the bio, the links to resources mentioned, my top three learnings, or not so much you.

Rand Fishkin:
I like the top three learnings a lot. I might even put those directly below the you know the play button so that someone could sort of have that idea of like oh yes I’m to learn those three things. That sounds great. I think that works great though. I think that bios can be you know pretty standard and those are copy and paste that should be pretty simple. If you do a full transcript, I think that’s a fine thing to include you can use a service. We use a service here called speechpad.com and I like them a lot they’re very inexpensive. I think it’s two dollars per you know 10-minute episode of Whiteboard Friday and they do a really nice job.

Tim Reid:
Wow that’s inexpensive.

Hold your thought on transcript because I’m. Well, actually you do because I just want to finish this discussion around the overall content so I’m clear now. Is there any other content that you would include besides what we’ve already mentioned?

Rand Fishkin:
I actually like your idea of links to external resources. Google looks out and appreciates when there are citations and sources and so are external links are well correlated and I don’t think just correlated.

I think there’s some causality there where Google looks at pages that link out to other pages and rewards them.

Tim Reid:
To voice a fear I have, I know I like to interlink between pages of my website so internally link. Tell me if I’m wrong, but what I’m thinking there is: Hey at least I’m holding them within my website. I do link externally but I give it good consideration because I see them as doors out. I see every link to another website as a door out of mine and then I’ve lost people. Am I wrong?  

Rand Fishkin:
So, here’s the way I think about it just philosophically. If you and I have a conversation and I for example tell you about a great service like speechpad, I think that actually earns your trust in me better than if I say: Oh Yeah! My brother works on this or moz actually offers a service. I think when you recommend a third party whether it’s you know as a source or a resource, a citation, a recommendation, I think that actually builds trust in you as the place to go. So, rather than a door out, I think of it as a way to build trust between the partners.

Tim Reid:
So, two questions around that. Should every link open in a new tab?

Rand Fishkin:
I like opening them in new tabs. I think that’s not a bad idea.

Tim Reid:
And the anchor text. So, the words that you used to link, how important is that anchor text?

Rand Fishkin:
It’s very important when people link to you. It’s somewhat less important when you link out to other people. But critical piece, make it obvious. So, make it obvious. Any visitor should be able to look at a link and say: Aha! I know exactly what I’m going to get when I click there.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. Gotcha. Rand, I’m loving this! Getting quite excited. I mean, I’m getting excited about writing show notes again after 378 episodes.

Rand Fishkin:
I mean what’s going to be super cool, Tim is when you publish one of these. And I don’t know if it’ll be the first when you publish it in this format, but when you get this idea, you start practicing a little and then you find yourself ranking on page one and then you find yourself ranking number one and then you find all these new subscribers coming because they search for something and they found you that is such a fun experience. I love SEO for that reason.

Tim Reid:
Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Tell me. Ok, so we’ve covered links there. I know the content. Get back to content. I used to include Tweetables which I thought was very cool and sexy but I didn’t see that many people tweeting what that meant is well I’d extract a quote from the episode 140 characters or less. Put it in a cute little box if someone came to the show notes and clicked on it, it automatically tweeted it out through their account. Is that just too clever for too cool for school?

Rand Fishkin:
Not entirely, but I like a format slightly different. So, what I liked to encourage is rather than making people you know sort of compose the tweet and send it out. I love crafting that tweet yourself sending it from your Twitter account and embedding your own tweet that promotes it.

The reason I love that?

Two things: one, it can get you more followers on Twitter because people retweet you and they’ll see your Twitter account and so, they’re more likely to follow you if they do use Twitter and clicking retweet is way easier than having this you know click to tweet open a new window. I’m not logged into my Twitter account you know all that kind of things.

Tim Reid:
It’s just I understand that you’re saying still grab a quote 140 characters or less. from the interview, tweeted it out under my account, are you then saying grab a screenshot of that and embed it?

Rand Fishkin:
Not the screenshot, the embedded tweet. So, you can embed a tweet on a webpage, you can embed your own tweet on your webpage and then if people click your profile they can follow you and they can easily re-tweet with one click on the page.

Tim Reid:
Is there a plug in for that? How can I embed it?

Rand Fishkin:
Twitter does it themselves. So, any tweet you click on there is a little option to embed it.

Tim Reid:
Wow. Wow. Pretty. That if someone goes to that on my show notes and clicks on it it’s going to go out under their account.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.

Tim Reid:
Nice. Nice. OK. Keyword density within the whole context of these show notes this concept of how many times does the keyword have to appear, is there a rule?

Rand Fishkin:
Nope, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. That is some old school SEO. That is no longer applicable. So, long as you make sure that your content solves the searchers problem and you know uses words and phrases intelligently. You do not need to worry about keyword repetition some certain number of times or what percent of the text, some other keyword. You can write creatively and freely.

Tim Reid:
So, how does that. That’s a relief. I’m now getting a bit anxious and going. But how does Google know that if I don’t put podcast show notes which is my keyword for this episode in more times than everyone else.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, so think about it this way. What kind of search engine would Google be if one of their primary components was how many times did an article repeat a keyword and they would rank the spammiest, scuzziest, the most useless craft at the top all the time and sometimes they used to the early 2000’s you got a lot of that.

Thankfully, Google’s you know engineers are some of the smartest in the world they have natural language processing capabilities that are vastly beyond what virtually any other company on the planet has.

They have machine learning systems to be able to determine whether searchers found content useful or not. They know whether in certain words and phrases are correlated with content being relevant to a subject or not. They can look at sentence structure and phrasing and paragraphs. Trust me! These guys have spent decades perfecting this and they’re really good at it at this point.

Tim Reid:
Talk to me about best use of headings. I know in WordPress, I have the option to choose headings 1 through to 6. It’s a drop-down menu. I highlight some text and I can make it a heading 1 through to 6. What do I do with that?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, So, for the headline of the piece that the title which appears also in the webpage title and shows up in Google as the title of the page. You should make that the headline or H1 and there should only be one of those. That’s the one that goes at the very top.

For the other pieces, for sub headlines. I generally say you know if you have a very complex piece of content maybe you’re going to use each H2’s and H3’s or headline 2 and headline 3. Headline 2 is slightly bigger Headline 3 is even slightly smaller. I would rarely ever use anything other than those two. And a lot of times you probably wouldn’t even need headline 3.  

Tim Reid:
Is this headline thing telling Google something saying hey this is more important than the.

Rand Fishkin:
It’s a little less for Google. It does give them a slight bit of contextual information about like here’s the subsections of the piece of content, but it’s mostly for visitors. It’s to help separate out just like when you’re reading a book and there is now a new paragraph or a new chapter or a new section of a chapter and it’s helpful to segment those. It’s really about visitor user experience.

Tim Reid:
Rand, let’s move on to it, By the way, guys I’m talking to Rand Fishkin who is the founder of Moz.com which is I would argue the world’s leading source of SEO information. He does an amazing thing on Fridays called whiteboard Fridays. I’d sign up to that.

Rand, I found you two and a half years ago when I searched for world’s best SEO expert and you were number three behind Matt Cutts at the time. Who was the Head of Google so like it you know we put it aside and then there was some other random who I think might expand his way there.

Okay. So, let’s talk metadata. Could you please for the great unwashed amongst us. What is metadata and how important is it?

Rand Fishkin:
So, metadata is basically information about the content itself and the title tag which is what shows up in Google as the page title and what shows up at the browser that is technically metadata. It’s a very important piece of matter. Then in fact the probably the most important thing in SEO for on-page, but it is metadata.

The meta description, that’s another piece that’s what shows up in the search results under your title and sort of says what the content is about. That’s another important piece. You don’t need to keyword stuff but you do want to write something juicy. Something that’s going to get people to click. Think of it as ad copy. It’s like trying to draw the click.

Tim Reid:
OK. So, let’s be clear here. So, and the third part of metadata the Permalink.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. The URL itself technically the URL is its own thing it’s not metadata, but you can think of it that way.

Tim Reid:
All right. Well let’s just tick that one off so I’m guessing the permalink for this show is: smallbusinessbigmarketing.com/podcast-show-notes. Correct?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. We could use that or we could use the full headline that we’re doing. So, we could use you know how-to-make-your-podcast-show-notes-10-times-better. Those would be fine.

Tim Reid:
With any, Is there a better one? Headline or Keyword?

Rand Fishkin:
To a certain extent, I like using the full headline, especially when the URL itself is fairly short. When the headline is much longer you know when it’s a sentence a full sentence in length, it would wrap around and it would get cut off in the search results. Then, I like cutting it down a little bit, but I think in this case, I may go for the full thing.

Tim Reid:
OK. So now we’re going to move on to page title. I think we get 60 characters. That’s what Google allows before they cut us off. Correct?  

Rand Fishkin:
It’s actually a little variable right now. So, it’s less about the raw number of characters and more about the width of the characters. So, we use pixelwidth meaning that for example an I which is a very thin character will not cost you very much but an M which is a much wider character will cost you more. You don’t need to worry about that. You’re generally right. You stay under 65 characters you’re going to be fine.

Tim Reid:
I’m going to be fine. Okay. So, a page title, just so we know is in the Google search results. This is the blue sentence the blue copy that sits right above it and I think the important part of this, Rand and correct me if I’m wrong, but getting your page title and your meta description copyright as you say this is like writing an ad and the better you do it, the more likely you are to have someone click on it.

Rand Fishkin:
Absolutely. That’s right. The title and the meta description are the two big elements along with your URL that are going to drive people to click or not.

Tim Reid:
Like, OK what’s the page title for this episode?

Rand FIshkin:
It should be our headline. The headline and the page title should match and the reason that’s so important is because if someone clicks on a title and they get to a page that doesn’t have those words in the headline, they’re often going to click that back button.

Tim Reid:
OK.

Rand FIshkin:
And that is really bad.

Tim Reid:
OK because that’s bad right. You’ve got a high bounce rate.

Page not relevant. Don’t like it. Back to the search. Well that’s websites. OK. I’m having conniptions because up until now I’ve had quite long I’ve had headlines that longer than 60 characters and that haven’t necessarily been they haven’t mirrored the page title. So, what you’re saying is, are the headline now for show notes or a blog post or I think needs to be 60 characters or less.

Rand Fishkin:
Not necessarily, but the first part of it definitely should. So, for example if you wanted to make the title of this piece: How to Make your Podcast Show Notes 10 Times Better and 15 Unusual Tips from SEO Guru Rand Fishkin. You can do something like that and I actually hate the word guru, but regardless of that you could cut off the headline at ten times better and that would be the part that appears in the search results but you still have this longer headline. So, the way to think about a headline is just make it flow such that you know the first 60/65 characters can get cut right there and still make sense to a potential searcher.

Tim Reid:
Okay got it. Got it. Wow. This is good stuff. OK. So, now we’re on to the meta description.

And by the way, oh well if the page titles mirroring to certainly the first 60 characters the headline then, we’ve got the then we’ve got the keyword in there. So, tick meta description as I understand it which is the two generally two lines of copy in grey that appear under the permalink in Google search results. We’ve got 156 characters to play with putting aside pixel width. Is that correct?

Rand Fishkin:
That’s right around there. We’ve seen it be as high as 200 and as low as 140, but yeah right around there.

Tim Reid:
Okay. What is the meta description for this show note?

Rand Fishkin:
Let’s see if we were to come up with something on demand. I would say: we would probably play around with that right. We train optimize it but I might say something like: podcast show notes are one of the most critical pieces to earning traffic and subscriber. Learn How to Make Yours the Best they can be. Something like that.

Tim Reid:
Okay. So OK. So, what you’ve got there you’ve got keyword upfront not you’re not stuffing it but again someone search for that.

Rand Fishkin:
And Google will take that keyword and make it bold in the results which is another nice thing.

Tim Reid:
That’s cool. So, in writing that copy you have you describing what the page is about and also putting a call to action in there?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah exactly. So, you’re trying to draw the click. In addition to describing the content.

Tim Reid:
OK. Got it. That’s something we need to play with them. You know for the sake of this interview we’re not going to go back and forth trying to matter. Tell me one thing I’ve been doing of recent times. I’ve noticed other kind of digital marketing sort of specialists doing this is in in the page title.

They’ll put a, What is that? Not a forward slash. What’s the little it’s the vertical line that sits above a 4.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. The pipe |.

Tim Reid:
The pipe. It’s just a straight vertical line. So, they do their page title then they do that space straight vertical line space and then they put their business name more like for me I can’t put small business big marketing it’s too long but I’ve been doing SBBM.

Rand Fishkin:
I think that works great.

Tim Reid:
Is it something around authority? It’s like it’s just this kind of weird perception of all these.

Rand Fishkin:
Right. Right. Right. So, that is really about trying the click. If I put something from Moz, I want to have Moz in the title so that someone knows oh yeah that’s from Moz. I like those guys. I know them even if it’s the first time I want them to say because I haven’t heard of them then, come to my website then have a good experience and then think to themselves you know when I’m searching for SEO information in the future, I’m going to look for Moz.

Tim Reid:
Yeah. So, you do that moz strong brand in the world of SEO. So, you’d be mad not to. SBBM, it’s the acronym for my show.

Rand Fishkin:
You could consider using Tim Reid very short name brandable, memorable, It’s you. I don’t know if you want to associate the business brand with your personal brand but if you do, that would be something I consider.

Tim Reid:
Yeah right. So now we’re starting to use up a few characters, right?

Rand Fishkin:
Sure, absolutely. You know you have to balance the stuff out so we might make our headline a little shorter. We might make the title a little shorter or to compensate, but yeah this is an art and a science just like headline writing in the newspaper. They give you a certain amount of column inches they tell the journalist. This is how much room you got that kind of thing.

Tim Reid:
Do I need to make a decision around that and stick with it, Rand? or do that little thing at the end with a pipe and Tim Reid or Timbo or SBBM when I can fit it.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, you can absolutely do it sometimes or others. That works great.

Tim Reid:
OK. All right.

Rand Fishkin:
No need to be consistent 100 percent.

Tim Reid:
I love it. Let’s talk. I think have were done on metadata, correct?  

Rand Fishkin:
That’s right. Yeah.Technically there a metal robots tag, but I would urge you not to do anything in there. 99 percent of time you don’t have to worry about especially small businesses don’t have to. You can control some indexing aspects if you want. For example, you could tell Google don’t index this content because they don’t want you to show it in your results but do follow the links for example.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. Gotcha. OK. I’m back inside the actual show notes content itself. I was a bit naughty to cut to metadata so quickly. Let’s finish that discussion around transcription. Transcriptions mission critical, correct?

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. For any multimedia content, Google still can’t parse fully what’s in the media and so you want to have a at the very least a description and sometimes a full transcript usually full transcript.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. Okay use as you suggest the best service is speechpad. However, you choose to get your transcription get it done. When putting the transcription inside the show notes, Rand. Do you literally copy and paste? which sounds to me like the wrong thing to do because it would just be this incredibly long.

Rand Fishkin:
The formatting gets gross. Yeah. You want something that is easily parsable and provides a good user experience for visitors and the best way to do that is you know if you use a service like speechpad they’ll help break it up for you into subsections or you can do that manually yourself.

You could even consider saying hey you know what, my transcript is not going to be a full transcript, but it’s going to be a partial transcript or notes only transcript and therefore I’m going to pull out.

You know these are the five sections that we talked about. Here are the bullet point highlights from each section in that said I’m not putting in the flag.

I think that’s okay.

Tim Reid:
I know what everyone listening is thinking that sounds like that’s just a massive amount of work to do that.

Rand Fishkin:
Well, it depends. For some people, right. They list they’re going to listen to the podcast itself. After it’s done to make sure that the audio quality is high and so you know having a scrap of paper in front of them or their posts open and just writing down hey here’s five bullet points in each of the three sections we had. That’s not good. Sometimes for some people that’s not terrible not so.

Tim Reid:
So, I’m still not clear. Mean do we put the transcription into an iframe?

Rand Fishkin:
You’re not going to want it on that URL itself you want it on that page that Google associates that content with that page. Otherwise, if you put in an iframe or you put it on a separate you are URL, Google will associate that content with a different URL. You really don’t want that.

Tim Reid:
Okay, so I’m not clear as to how to most effectively present a transcript in the show notes. If we choose to go down the path of taking the whole transcript.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, It’s up to you and you can format it you know how you wish some people put it you know kind of a full transcript and you make it clickable, right so WordPress has a number of plug ins that sort of show hide content and then you can make it you know oh you click this and CSS basically in WordPress changes to display that text. So that’s one way of doing it or you know if you look at whiteboard Friday the videos on top and then the full transcript is below.

Tim Reid:
The full transcript.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Reid:
It must scroll for a very long time.

Rand Fishkin:
You can scroll but it tends to work well. It is something where I think something on the order of If I remember correctly 60 percent almost 60 percent of visitors to whiteboard Friday read the content as text rather than video. Just pretty wild.

For podcasts, I have heard that is quite similar especially to NPR National Public Radio here in the United States is a very popular podcaster and when they do transcripts those transcripts are much more read than their audio is listened to.

Tim Reid:
Wow. Do you give people in whiteboard Friday or any show notes, should you give people the opportunity to print the transcripts? I also have like a PDF download.

Rand Fishkin:
We have not generally done that because we have rarely rarely seen demand for it, but if your audience is a very you know print heavy type of audience I mean you could consider it.

Tim Reid:
Yeah. Okay. OK. Love it, mate. We’ve done transcript images within the show notes, Rand.

Rand Fishkin:
Those are very important if you can get a visual. So, for example, Tim do a search in Google right now for a podcast show notes.

Tim Reid:
Done.

Rand Fishkin:
Think you’ll see the same thing I do. Do you see that feature snippet at the top?

Tim Reid:
No, I don’t. I’m just going to refresh. No, I don’t have a featured snippet the first thing I’m seeing is nine steps to better podcast. Show notes and seven benefits.

Rand Fishkin:
So, I’ve got a feature snippet in mind maybe it’s because I’m in the US and you’re in.com.au. I don’t get it. So, go to .com and delete the .au. You go google.com and what you’ll see and it’s OK if you don’t see it, but you know what I see is basically that same post, but a featured snippet and it includes a visual image, right.

So, this is the guy who’s ranked number one right now which has the audacity to podcast.com. It’s an old post it’s from 2011 and I think we could. I think we could be that guy out. But do you see how he’s got that visual up in the top right-hand corner there. This is why visuals images are so critical because they can be in the featured snippet and they’re even more popular on mobile and as you know mobile now has more than 50 percent of all Google searches.

So, getting that visual to be something that’s relevant that is going to entice the click. Think of it as part of the you know sort of snippet the part of the thing that’s driving the click.

Tim Reid:
OK. So, embed images in the show notes. If you have more than one I mean we’re just leaving it to Google to decide which one to grab.

Rand Fishkin:
You really want a feature you want to really want to choose one that you think is kind of the most important most featured one and you probably want to give that one a name in the alt attribute and the image filename. That is the keywords. So, for example you would want to say you know better podcast show notes and you know have a have a visual maybe a screenshot of something we did or you know an example of a great show notes with call outs or whatever it was, right. It could even be just photos of you and me chatting.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. Tell me just to this. We’ve done a search for podcasts show notes in Google. The fellow who’s got the number one position. It’s from 2011, September 2011 to three down three search results down, there is a search from March 2017. Maybe. Why is something so old getting top position?

Rand Fishkin:
I mean I think in this case it’s because the content does such a great job of answering the searcher’s query and also because this is a pretty well linked to website and a well link to individual URL. So, lots of people have linked to audacity to podcast.com and lots of people have linked to this particular post over the years.

One of the nice things is when you earn in that top ranking result a lot of people find you in Google and end up linking to you which is sort of that like you know it’s the late stage capitalism thing the rich get richer and then people who are on page 2 get nothing. and so, this is something where if you start doing SEO five years from now you can have big advantages over people who didn’t start.

Tim Reid:
Gotcha. OK. That’s images. That’s the only way to optimize an image right. We fill out the alt text information and have used the keyword.

Rand Fishkin:
The image file name and the alt attribute are the critical pieces and please do be careful not to game or manipulate the alt attribute. Google does validate and check those every so often. And they’ve got some pretty good learning devices visual learned basis to see if you’re manipulating that If you do, not only is it bad for Google and it can get your site kicked out but it’s also really bad for screen readers. So, folks who are visually impaired and using a screen reader device for podcasters that is huge because podcasts are too big big part of how the visually impaired consume the Internet.

Tim Reid:
OK. Moving on Rand, I keep saying this. I appreciate it. You’ve breathed life back into me writing show notes. I’m excited to write the next one. We’ve nearly finished with on-page then we’re going to move to off-page. How important on-page is a social share button that button that you see on my website for example down the side that has Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google Plus logos allowing others to share the content.

Rand Fishkin:
Off-page SEO is pretty much still all about links and distribution. So, social media is a great channel for that. E-mail is a great channel for that. Reaching out directly to people is a great channel for that and certainly, building your brand and your presence through conferences and events through in person connections through advertising or any broadcast channels that you want.

The key there and the difficult part for a lot of SEO’s is getting those links getting people to actually link back to you and so, finding a hook a reason why people need to site your work and source what you’ve talked about is a really great one and I think that you know the most successful podcasters tend to publish stuff that earns those direct links that people want to include in whatever their weekly roundups and their citations and their sources when they’re when they’re talking about what happened.

Tim Reid:
Brilliant. So, that’s a whole we’ve had this discussion on this show previously about partnerships identifying people who have the eyes and ears of our target audience that we also want to get in front of. Strike a partnership deal where they share your stuff you share their stuff and it’s a match-made in heaven and so what you’re also saying there is the backlink. The external backlink on someone else’s site is also very important, right?

Rand Fishkin:
Huge part of SEO.

Tim Reid:
And try and control the anchor text on that backlink. So, when I ask you Rand to share this episode, I hand you the link and ask you to make sure that hey it’s that the anchor text would be you know ultimate podcast show notes or something to that effect, right.

Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. The headline is a big part of that, right. So, by calling your piece something a lot of other people will call it that too and that’s how you get that anchor text.