#9 | What Is Podcast SEO & Why Online Coaches Can't Ignore It For Faster Growth

0:00Today, you'll discover what podcast SEO is and why you cannot afford to ignore it if you want high-ticket clients finding your show organically. Welcome to How to Grow a Podcast that attracts high-ticket online coaching clients. The show helping coaches, consultants, and experts turn your slow-growth podcast into a profitable client attraction system. At the end of this episode, I'll share a little more about who I am and what we do at my company, GetMoreListeners.com. It might even shock you. But for now, let's dive into the episode. In this episode, you'll discover what most online coaches get wrong about podcast SEO, whether blogs and transcripts actually help you rank on Apple and Spotify, and the four pillars you need to focus on to rank higher and attract more qualified listeners.

0:54This is going to be comprehensive. It might feel overwhelming at first, and that's okay. Listen once, let it sink in, then come back and revisit it. I'm not here to fluff around or sugarcoat things. I'm here to give you the real strategy that works. Podcast SEO is one of the most powerful ways to fast-track your podcast growth, get free organic exposure, and have your show easily found by thousands of ideal clients, without ever having to promote on social media. Yet it's the most overlooked growth strategy by online coaches with podcasts. Here's the thing. Most online coaches don't even know podcast SEO exists.

1:36And the ones who do often confuse it with regular Google SEO, which is a completely different game. I didn't know about it either until I discovered the work of podcast growth experts who scaled shows to 300 ,000 monthly downloads in seven months without social media and without big-name guests. That got our attention. Since then, we've seen clients increase their listenership by close to 700%. We've had coaches go from struggling to hit 400 downloads per month after two years of podcasting to consistently hitting 20 ,000-plus monthly downloads within 12 months. We've had coaches go from 30 downloads per episode to 500 to 800 downloads per episode within four months.

2:22The results are real. This works, and you cannot afford to ignore it. Before we talk about what podcast SEO is, let's clear up what it's not. It's not about your podcast website. It's not about writing detailed blog posts. It's not about transcribing your audio into text. It's not about random keyword stuffing. All of those things? Great for ranking on Google, but that's regular SEO. not podcast SEO. Here's why that matters. Podcast listeners aren't going to Google to discover new shows. They're going to Apple and Spotify. There are roughly 11 million daily podcast listeners in America alone. Over 50 % of them discover new shows by searching on Apple and Spotify, the same way people go to Spotify to discover new music.

3:16So don't waste your time building fancy websites or writing blogs hoping to rank on Google. You'll attract readers, not listeners. And readers don't book sales calls with you. We've had clients with beautiful websites getting tons of traffic, but when we looked at the numbers, there was almost no correlation between website visits and podcast listens. Focus on where your ideal clients are actually searching, Apple and Spotify. Let me break this down with a simple analogy. Imagine you have an awesome treehouse and you want your friends to find it easily. Don't ask me why I thought of a backyard treehouse, but that's what we're going with.

3:58You want it to be the best damn treehouse in the neighborhood. So you put up signs with special words, keywords that help people find your treehouse when they're looking for fun place to play or best hangout spot. When your friends search for those terms, the signs you put up help guide them straight to your treehouse. The search engine, whether it's Google, Netflix, or Apple Podcasts, looks for those keywords and shows your treehouse as a top result. But here's the key. SEO isn't about using keywords randomly. It's about using the right keywords, words that accurately describe what makes your treehouse or podcast special and help it stand out.

4:42In the world of podcasting, SEO means using the right keywords and descriptions that accurately represent your show. When you do that, you make your podcast easily discoverable by people actively searching for content like yours on Apple and Spotify. That's the power of podcast SEO. Most online coaches with podcasts make two big mistakes when it comes to the wonderful yet misunderstood podcast SEO. Mistake number one, they think it's too complicated. They believe podcast SEO is too hard to figure out, so they just ignore it. It's like hiding a treasure chest underwater and hoping someone magically stumbles across it.

5:25Spoiler, they won't. Mistake number two, they confuse it with Google SEO. They think podcast SEO is the same as regular SEO, writing blogs, building websites, ranking on Google. So they invest time and energy into the wrong strategies, then wonder why they're not getting more listeners. Other common beliefs that hold coaches back. It takes too long to see results. I need to be an SEO expert to do this podcast. SEO doesn't actually work. I didn't even know this was a thing. Here's the truth. Podcast SEO is straightforward once you understand the fundamentals, and it can be effective in as little as 24 hours after making changes, meaning you can see increased downloads literally the day after optimizing your show.

6:16It is extremely effective and has generated hundreds of thousands of extra downloads for coaches who implement it correctly, whereas most completely ignore it. Which baffles me, because when you ignore podcast SEO and have low optimization, here's what happens. Your search engine ranking tanks. You're buried under competitors. Your visibility drops. Even if your content is amazing, no one can find it. You miss massive opportunities. Thousands of ideal clients are searching for exactly what you offer, but they're finding other coaches instead of you. Think about it. If someone searches how to overcome imposter syndrome as a coach, or how to sign high-ticket clients on Apple Podcasts, and your show doesn't appear in the results, you've lost a potential client who was actively looking for your expertise.

7:11That's a missed sale, a missed connection, a missed opportunity to serve someone who needs you. So there are four parts to podcast SEO that you need to focus on to increase your discoverability and turn your podcast into a client magnet. 1. Discoverability. Making sure you are ranking for the right keywords. Keywords that have high search volume. This means tons of your ideal clients are actively searching for this content. If you are a business coach, you want to rank for terms like how to get more clients or high-ticket sales strategies, not generic terms like entrepreneurship tips. 2. Visibility Ensuring your podcast is clicked on over your competitors.

8:02Whether you like it or not, you are competing for attention. Ranking is one thing. Being seen and clicked on is another. This is where your podcast title, artwork, and descriptions come into play. They need to stop the scroll and make someone think, this is exactly what I need. Three, user engagement. Ensuring you have high retention on your episodes, well over 65 to 70%. Think about it from Apple and Spotify's perspective. Their goal is to keep listeners engaged on their platform. If your show has low retention and low engagement, it sends a bad signal. Apple and Spotify aren't incentivized to recommend your content to more people.

8:49But if your show keeps people listening all the way through, that tells the algorithm, this is high-quality content, show it to more people. 4. High Relevance Understanding how you want to be positioned in your space How can you dominate your niche? How can you be seen as the authority and rank consistently for all the right keywords? This is about building topical authority so when someone searches for anything related to your coaching niche your show appears in the top results every single time. What's next? That's your introduction to podcast SEO. In the coming episodes, we're going to break down each of these four pillars in painful detail so you know exactly how to implement them.

9:40We will cover how to choose the right keywords your ideal clients are searching for, how to optimize your show to get clicked on over competitors, how to boost engagement and retention so the algorithm favors your show, how to build topical authority and dominate your coaching niche. This is comprehensive, strategic, and designed to turn your podcast into a client-generation machine that works 24-7, even while you sleep. So in this episode, we covered what most online coaches get wrong about podcast SEO, whether blogs and transcripts actually help you rank on Apple and Spotify, and the four pillars you need to focus on to rank higher and attract more qualified listeners.

10:30Thank you for listening all the way to the end. At the start of this episode, I said I'd tell you a little bit about me. So I'm about to share a secret with you. One that might mean you hate me. Completely quit listening to this podcast and think I'm a total scam. However, I want to be transparent. Are you ready? Well, my name is Tony. No, of course that's not the secret. The secret is that I'm actually a robot. My creators are Tig and Anthony, hence my name, Tony. The sick bastards. Anyway, they are the founders of GetMoreListeners.com. In the last five years, they've coached and interviewed over 400 podcasters and generated multiple six figures from their own show.

11:19They gave me access to everything they know, and I'm here to share it with you. So while I don't understand why you humans are so obsessed with coffee, I do understand how to grow a podcast that actually brings you new clients regularly. So here's my offer to you. If you want to finally understand why your podcast isn't growing and get a personalized roadmap to fix it, in less than 30 seconds, you can go to getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit. Enter your show name and we'll send you back a free mini podcast audit. It's completely customized to you and your show. That's getmorelisteners.com slash onlinecoachaudit The link is also in the show notes of this episode.