AI Search Optimization: Simple Tips for Podcasters!

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Welcome to Podcast Website Tips, the ultimate guide for podcasters who want to level up their online presence with no coding required.

Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, this show gives you practical, actionable advice to build and optimize your podcast website.

We cover everything from design and content to SEO and monetization.

Get ready to attract more, more listeners and take your website from good to great.

Here's your host, Dave Jackson.

First up, we are talking about how to get found in AI search.

More and more people are using things like chat GPT.

I know, I'm a big fan of Perplexity.

There's Claude, there's a million of these things.

And we want to optimize our websites not only for Google and Bing and such, but we also want to be found in these AI tools, which is tough.

I mean, if you look at Google, there are times when the top result is a paragraph with maybe a link to the website on the right hand side, but many times, and this is what makes people mad, that paragraph at the top answers the question that the person doing the searching is asking.

So there's no reason to go to your website anymore.

And so I found I've been following Matt Diggity for about a year.

I like his stuff.

He seems credible in the fact that I remember when Google changed something, he actually had a course and the change was so massive that his course was no longer relevant.

And so he shut it down and was like, yeah, I'm not teaching that anymore because it, you know, this, this is no longer relevant.

And I was like, well, that's kind of cool.

And so I like him.

And he has a video now.

This will be out in the show notes or if you're listening on an app, go to the show notes there and you can actually watch him do this.

But there's one thing I want to add here that he did not.

And so there are a couple things.

Number one, you want to make sure your content is direct.

And so this might be hard for me because I always try to be a little funny, little sarcastic, and I may not really be thrilled that you're trying to make things funny.

They want it direct, concise, but they do want it in a conversational tone.

In fact, he points out that if you have just a direct question versus one that an actual person might ask with a little more specifics to it, that the kind of conversational tone question may actually show up.

And so, but that really, if you think about it, make your content to the point, making concise and make it conversational.

That's how you get found in SEO as well.

Right?

And then use proper heading structures like H1, H2 and H3.

And again, I say that's kind of what I've been doing.

In fact, I've had people in the past go to the school of podcasting website and when I was ranking well, they're like, wow, you're ranking well, what's your secret?

And I said, well, I write these blog posts and I write them for people.

I don't write them for to, you know, maximum keyword stuff and all.

Like, I just write it for people to make it helpful.

And consequently people would then share it.

So that's nothing new.

This was new.

Add a TLDR summary at the beginning of the article.

So you would just put, you know, tldr and if you never heard that it's short for too long, didn't read.

And then you could just maybe put a dash and then a one word set.

A one word sentence.

Yeah, a one sentence description of what the article is again, dealing with being concise.

And apparently AI loves that.

In fact, in some cases that's what they'll clip.

But the other thing they mentioned, and again, I don't think this is new.

Basically go to things like trustpilot, go to your Google business profile and make sure you claim those.

And they say, take control of your brand narrative because these are the things that show you have authority.

And I was like, okay.

And then Matt mentions in the video that he uses a service called Simply Media Digital.

It's a good source for high quality backlinks.

I've never heard of this, but we all know that backlinks are a big part of SEO.

And then the other thing, and this is where using AI can actually come in handy.

If you've ever used perplexity, it will show you your sources.

Well, again, we've talked about this before.

If you want to be seen as an authority, you have to put where the content came from.

And so Google loves it.

If you like, this was my experience when I did this because it loves that experience, especially when it's from you personally.

But if you're quoting somebody else, put those sources because again, it makes you look credible.

And so keep that in mind.

So use and make them credible sources.

I guess that was the other one.

You know, you can also use expert quotes and any kind of.

If you've done your own research, that's huge because the idea is to demonstrate your expertise.

Well, again, isn't that what we've been doing for SEO, you know, and then he's.

His point was you can track this in Google Analytics.

And I'm not even going to try to explain because Google Analytics, the good thing about Google Analytics is you can track anything in Google Analytics.

The bad news is you can track anything in Google Analytics.

But as I watch that, because I've heard like, hey, you know, AI's taken over.

We hear that over and over.

And I'm like, it doesn't really sound like I'm going to be doing anything differently.

It's kind of the same thing.

And I can go in, I use Fathom stats.

I think they're a little easier to understand.

And I can see where I'm starting to show up in AI search results.

So those are some things to keep in mind as we are putting together our website.

The other thing I will point out here is, and this isn't a hard rule, but if you really want to have Google, at least sniff your stuff.

I was working with a podcast client and I'm going to guess he had maybe a hundred words in his episode description.

And I realize if you're doing a nine minute episode, you know, maybe there's not a whole lot because everything I've seen says around 600 words.

Not to like rank number one, but just to be found by Google, you need at least 600 words.

And that is something I always try to do.

And it sounds like a lot of words, but if you write a couple paragraphs, you can get to 600 words pretty quickly.

For everyone using PodPage for your website, want to just point out something?

This is not even really an update, it's just a couple little tweaks.

It used to be if you went to Settings and Advanced Settings, one of the settings was for mobile.

Well now if you go to Settings, you'll see there's a section called Creatively Enough Mobile Settings.

It's the same thing.

There isn't anything new.

We just busted it out because people occasionally were like, where's the mobile stuff?

So there's that.

And also when you go to Advanced Settings, you will see a new item and that is items per page on list view.

So when you go to your episodes page or your blog page, by default it's set to show the last 24 and then you go to page two and you see 25 through 48 and then you go to page three.

Well, now you can set what's the default number of items on that list View.

So if you want only to show 12, or maybe you wanted to show 100 before.

There's a page two that now is under Settings, Advanced Settings.

And again, it's labeled items per page on list views.

Normally, I will play the audio from our monthly meetup at PodPage.

And this last month, I did a presentation on using the survey tool.

It's built in.

It's based on questions from a phenomenal book.

If you haven't read it yet.

It's called the Audience is Listening by Tom Webster.

I highly, highly.

And by that, I mean highly recommendation that you read that book.

It's funny, but it's also, I told Tom, I go, you should have renamed your book your baby is ugly.

Because that's really a lot of the times the problem.

But when I saw that we were going to put together a survey, we reached out to Tom, because I'm like, he's already got the questions.

Tom has been surveying audiences for probably 30 years.

At one point, he was working with Howard Stern, and a lot of that presentation was visual.

And so the one thing I wanted to just point out, which is what I talk about at the beginning of that webinar and I'll put a link to that, is that you have to really figure out, why am I doing this?

And many moons ago, when I worked as a customer service rep, when people were bored, they're like, hey, let's do an audience survey.

And I'd be like, okay, okay, but what are we going to do with.

Because there's nothing worse that you can do for your audience than to ask them for their opinion and then ignore it.

Now, this does mean that you have to know, why are you doing this show?

Because you may get people that give you suggestions that have nothing to do with your why.

I'll give you an example.

I do a live show every Saturday.

If you're up at 10:30 Eastern in the morning on Saturday, you can check out Ask the Podcast Coach by going to askthepodcastcoach.com live.

And it's just free podcast consulting.

And it was made kind of with the old Phil Donahue show in mind.

Where Phil would go, is the caller there?

Right?

And I always wanted to do that.

Long story short, after trying multiple tools and configurations, I had an actual phone line that people could call.

And it turned out that my audience didn't want to call.

They wanted to leave the question in the chat.

And so I do that.

It's basically, like I said, free podcast consulting.

And I had somebody send in, literally, pages of feedback on, you should do this, and you should interview people, and you should do this and that.

And back Last February, the 4 minute 36 mark you said this.

And then in March, I mean, insane detail.

And I was very honored that this person had given me so much feedback.

The problem was it's a call in show, it's live podcast consulting.

And his ideas for the show were not going to fulfill my why.

And so we have a name for that person.

It's called not my target audience.

I can't really shape the show in a way to make that person like it and still get me to my why.

So I thanked him profusely for his feedback.

But then in the end, we didn't implement any of it.

So you have to figure out why am I doing this?

And that's why in some cases, like right now, if you go to podcast website tips.com survey, you'll see where our survey is.

What do you want to hear us talk about in this show?

Not so much how do you like it, but what do you want in the show?

And so you have to kind of figure out what am I doing this survey for?

What's the main thing I want to learn from this?

And then what am I going to do with that?

Another example, I found out for the school of podcasting that a large chunk of my audience hangs out on LinkedIn.

And you know, the one place I don't hang out at almost at all LinkedIn.

And so that was one that I was like, hey, I should probably be hanging out more at LinkedIn.

And I am.

And that's the whole point of the survey is to find out where your audience is, what do they want and how can you give it to them.

And so in my case, I do hang out in LinkedIn a lot more than I used to because I'm the whole point of that show is to get people to sign up for my membership site.

And the people I'm trying to reach, the people that are listening, if I want to keep my brand in front of them.

And we talked about the 7114 rule, if I want to get those up, I need to go where my audience is.

So these are things you can learn from doing a survey with your audience.

And when I have people come to me and they say my audience isn't growing, and I ask them, well, what did you learn when you use your survey?

I'm here to tell you, 98% of the time they go, what do you mean survey?

And it kind of doesn't make much logical sense to go, I wonder if people like my show.

And when I ask you, well, did you ask them?

And then you go, no.

Well, the first step is to go ask them.

And I understand completely why we don't want to do that.

We are, because of our imposter syndrome, we are convinced that we're just going to ask them for their feedback and they're going to just rip it to shreds.

And while we may get some constructive feedback, we're probably going to find out a whole lot more that people like our show because if they didn't like our show, they wouldn't listen to it.

But you might find those little things that you go, huh?

Never thought of it like that.

Like, in my case, I was like, I should probably be hanging out on LinkedIn.

So I'll have a link to that presentation in the show notes along with the video from Matt Diggity about how to rank on AI search.

Our website is podcast websitetips.com if you know somebody who's got a website for their podcast, feel free to send them over there.

And of course, if they don't have a website for their podcast, tell them to go over to podpage.com preview and they can easily type in the name of their show.

They can put in their RSS feed.

Heck, if they're just a YouTuber, they could put in their playlist.

And we will build a website for them to play with for not.

Not three days, not five days, not seven days, 14 days.

You can kick the tires on Podpage before you decide to buy it.

And if you decide you don't want to, you can actually still play with it longer than 14 days.

It's just you're the only person that can see it.

I'm Dave Jackson.

I'm the head of podcasting over@podpage.com.

thanks so much for tuning in.

We'll see you again real soon with another episode of Podcast Website Tips.

Podcast Website Tips is part of the power of Podcasting Network.

Find this and all of Dave's shows at powerofpodcasting.

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