Evergreen Content: Why Podcasts Work Best for Your Website?
Evergreen content refers to certain kinds of stories that are always of interest to readers. That's why bloggers are so obsessed with creating content that can last quite a long time. It includes blog posts, case studies, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc.... The latter are of special interest as one of the hottest trends of 2018. So let's consider the exciting opportunities podcasts offer and see how they can be used to boost your website’s rankings, increase traffic, provide for higher engagement of the target audience, and add value to anything you do or offer.
In the consumer world, things expire in the blink of an eye, which is why everyone is so obsessed with evergreen content nowadays. Google offers a wide variety of formats that can last quite a long time. These include blog posts, case studies, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc.. Podcasts are of special interest as according to an Edison Research Podcast Consumer study they were one of the hottest trends of 2018.
Here are a few lovely charts from Statista:
Aside from celebrating their authors’ creativity and ability to think outside the box, podcasts are widely used for marketing purposes. And this is not surprising as podcasting takes nothing but a mic (or even a smartphone), and a speaker. Even with no prior experience of creating audios, you can just use a WAV to MP3 conversion guide and come up with a ready to download podcast in a couple of minutes.
In this article, we’ll consider the exciting opportunities podcasts offer and see how they can be used to boost your website’s rankings, increase traffic, provide for higher engagement of the target audience, and add value to anything you do or offer.
SEO Gains
Podcasts posted on your website don’t directly impact SEO, but the knock-on effect can be significant. Here are four podcast-related factors that will help you gain extra popularity in the eyes of both people and search engines:
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Media player. It’s highly possible that Google gives no consideration to a media player as an on-page element. However, downloading and listening to podcasts increases the time users spend on a web page. This tells the crawlers that provided content is relevant and valuable, thus increasing trust in your website.
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Metadata. Podcasts are audible blog posts, in a manner of speaking. So don’t forget to optimize the meta title and meta description for your target keywords to make your podcasts and website accordingly more discoverable.
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Links. Any podcast is accompanied by a script. Let it link back to your website and you’ll soon see the number of visits increased.
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Supplements. There are several elements that accompany podcasts (headings, notes, images). Each of these can be indexed by search engines if optimized the right way.
Social Shares
Creating content is hard work: it takes weeks to write a worthwhile article and days to design an infographic. But the unfair thing is that promoting them on social media just… creates more work for you. You have to design banners for your posts and create lots of small visuals for big graphics. Unlike other evergreen formats, podcasts can promote themselves. For example, episodes listed on SoundCloud can be easily shared on Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and such giants as Twitter and Facebook right from your website. Moreover, the guests that you feature in your series often share links to these from their own accounts. Discussions initiated in the comments attract new listeners that can, in turn, visit your website looking for more interesting material.
Communication with the Audience
Convince & Convert states that more Americans know what a podcast is than know who the Vice President is. And this may be because (unlike politicians) podcasts possess unique capabilities that will let you connect to your listeners in a very special way, establish trust, and increase loyalty in cases where you use podcasting to promote a brand. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of them:
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Easy reach. Listening requires so little effort that even the busiest people can’t help enjoying a podcast or two as they run in the morning or drive home from work. So podcasts provide much bigger coverage than any written and possibly visual content.
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Personal involvement. Your voice is your superpower. Each time you speak people believe you speak to them, so everything you say is taken to heart. You can translate your passion, your excitement or your confidence via podcasts, call to action or incentivize depending on your business or personal goals.
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Extreme engagement. On top of it all, podcasts are short, they don’t usually take more than 15 minutes. This guarantees the undivided attention of the listeners and more emotional response.
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Trust. Association with the experts and opinion leaders that star in your episodes will bring you into line with the authorities of the niche.
A chance to Stand out
As you can see, podcasting opens up new opportunities to improve your website’s performance in search, attract new users and increase engagement. More good news is that competition is no obstacle. The choice of evergreen topics is almost infinite. Moreover, you can reap the benefits of hyper-targeting, reaching out to the most relevant audience through their interests.
And if one day you become disappointed in podcasts and decide to completely change the format, you’ll have no problem turning your recordings into video clips or articles and staying in the groove.