Using podcast interviews in blogs is becoming increasingly popular. In fact, just like vlogs (video blogs), some blogs specialize in publishing podcast interviews: InnovatorsMix.com is a great example.
This article will address two key issues:
- The rewards of incorporating podcast interviews into your overall blogging strategy
- How to create SEO-friendly podcast interviews
The Rewards of Incorporating Podcast Interviews Into Your Overall Blogging Strategy
- Heightened Credibility People love interview blog posts in general as they tend to have a huge credibility factor, especially if you managed to interview influential figures in your industry. It goes without saying that blog credibility boosts blog visibility. Still, you may argue that textual interviews would serve the same purpose but I beg to differ: the vocal effect of podcast interviews makes it far more "humanly appealing" than plain text.
Interestingly, some people are more into listening than reading and vice versa. Your best bet is to include a textual transcript of your podcast interview. On the one hand, you will broaden the scope of your audience and satisfy all tastes, while enjoying some SEO benefits on the other hand. (I will discuss this point in details later on)
- Network Expansion
When you interview people on your blog and give them a chance to shine like pros, they will spare no effort to spread the word about your interview to their network. In other words, you will instantly become visible to their entire network and if they happen to have large number of advocates, your blog traffic will skyrocket effortlessly.People enjoy sharing their expertise. That's a fact. It is so easy to convince people to be interviewed in your blog, assuming you researched them well and came up with intelligent interview questions that they would love to answer
If you wish to master the art of blog interviews, I invite to read 11 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts With Interviews.
Also, if you decided go for podcast interviews, here are some audio recording tips to help you out.
So far, we discussed the visibility rewards of podcasts interviews from a social media standpoint. Let's add the SEO ingredient to the mix to get the best of both worlds
How to Create SEO-Friendly Podcast Interviews
- Make sure to include relevant keywords in the title of the podcast episode. Also, It is highly recommended to have the exact same text in your blog post title. The following screen shot clarifies this point:
- You may include a keywords-rich summary of your podcast interview. In addition, creating a textual transcript of your entire interview will give your page a major SEO boost. There are professional transcription service providers that you can hire. You will send them the audio file and they will deliver the textual content in a Word document.
- Submit your podcast site to podcast directories such as audio.weblogs.com and podcastdirectory.com
- Make sure to tag your podcast with relevant keywords and share it extensively on social media
- Here's a no-brainer tip: you need to generate backlinks to your blog post. However, most of the old link-building techniques are not effective anymore. Make sure to stay up-to-date and apply the Top 10 Link Building Tips for 2011
That's it! As you see, it's easy to create SEO-friendly podcasts but more importantly, I would love to know your take on using podcast interviews in blogs. Do you think they are worthy of your time and effort? Are you planning to give them a try on your own blog? Please keep me posted when you do :).