 Welcome to The Journey. Today we're talking about 10 ways to improve your podcast website. So question, are you building or maintaining a podcast for you or one of your clients? With more than a million shows and 30 million episodes, podcasts have become a favorite content consumer. If you haven't built a podcast website yet, you're bound to at some point. Unlike Apple podcasts where the show sits among thousands or on Facebook where the content is subject to the whims of an algorithm, a podcast website is the only platform you or your client own 100%. That's right, no rules restrictions or limitations. It's a central place for you and your client can say anything you want to listeners and potential listeners. And a great podcast website doesn't have to be fancy, doesn't have to be expensive, but it needs a few critical elements to be effective. And in this video, we're going to cover 10 best practices to improve a podcast website. Starting with the first one, host your audio files with a dedicated podcast hosting provider. So platforms like Google Play and Apple Podcasts are directories that use an RSS link to display the content. They don't actually store any of the actual audio. So podcasters need a place where they can host their episode files that provide them with an RSS link. Now, most traditional website hosts aren't configured to handle podcast audio files. They don't have the right optimization for audio content and can't handle all the down the requests from listeners. You or your client will need to publish the episodes with a dedicated podcast hosting service. And hey, by using a separate host for your website and the podcast, both the website and podcast files will run fast and smooth, which is important for SEO and the total user experience. It also tends to cut down on costs, even though you're using multiple services. That's right. And number two, install the right podcasting plugins. Now, once you obtain hosting for the website, we strongly recommend installing WordPress. It's fast and it's simple. And you'll have no trouble creating new blog posts for each episode. You might be wondering which plugins should you install? And it totally depends on your needs. But here are our recommendations for a powerful podcasting stack. So I'm a WordPress guy. So I have got the plugins for you. Starting off with seriously simple podcasting. This one lets you manage your podcast right from WordPress, including one click imports, a beautiful embedded audio player, integrated analytics, multiple show support, and free add-ons. Next one is Yoast. Basically just to optimize your site for search engines, create those SEO optimized pages. Third, we have co blocks. It's used to design a website using the native Gutenberg editor, just the normal block editor as it's called now. Next up, we have security. Basically protect the site from hackers. Updraft plus is another great one. This is just to protect the content of your site. Most of the time, your host will have some type of backup service. You can go one step further and create those backups to safeguard the site even further. Next up, we have Google analytics. Basically see the analytics of the site. What shows are being listened to the most? What pages are they going to? Things like that. Then lastly, probably your podcast host plugin. To replace the seriously simple podcasting, there's a chance that whoever you're hosting your podcast with has created a dedicated plugin for that service. Now I've used Podbean in the past and I know that they offer a plugin where it easily imports my audio feeds right into my website. Check out with your podcast host to see if they have anything that makes your life a little bit easier. Nearly so knowledgeable. That takes us to the third way to improve a podcast and that's number three. Offer links to the podcast on different apps. Not everyone wants to listen to podcasts off of a website. Many people prefer to use their favorite podcasting apps such as Apple podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, etc. I love Spotify personally. But it's important to give them links to the podcasters episodes on each of those podcast directories. So make the experience as frictionless as possible by adding these links throughout your site. So our fourth way to improve your podcast website is designed with SEO in mind for discoverability. Now, when someone searches for the podcast, you want your website to appear first, not someone else's listing on Apple podcast, Spotify, or Google Play. This means that the website should be built with SEO best practices in mind. Now SEO discoverability is a big topic. We've covered tons of videos on it with the journey already. Make sure to check it out our channel for more. So we won't go into the different nuances here, but here are some critical ways you can design a site that's SEO friendly. I'll go over the first few and I'll have Emma take off the rest. So first off, optimize your site speed so it loads as quickly as possible. After two and a half seconds, people are bouncing on the website. They don't want to wake that long. They've got other stuff to do. Next up, we have make it mobile friendly and accessible on all devices and browsers. Most of the time, I mean me personally, I'm on my phone listening podcast. So if I can't visit your website and it doesn't look nice on my phone, chances are I'm not going to want to take the time to listen. And the next step, create a crawl friendly site map to help search engines catalog pages. And this is super popular if you're going to use Yoast. It's going to do that for you. Other website builders will have that capability as well. Number four, create lots of interlinking opportunities. Number five, use heading tags in proper hierarchy. Six, optimize for voice search. It's growing in popularity. I'm a huge fan. I'm always talking to him on Google. And number seven, improve machine readability with structured data and limiting hard to read languages like Flash and Ajax. Our fifth way of improving your podcast website is to set up a unique page for each podcast episode. Yes, it's nice to have one page that has all of it easily accessible and I can listen to it right away. But you also want to have each episode have its own dedicated page with show notes and comments and links to what is mentioned on that episode. So the title should match the episode title. And if you're building with WordPress, each episode should be a blog post. You can use the standard post type or create a custom post type for your podcast episodes and use the standard post type for other content. Fortunately, an episode's page is pretty simple. So a couple of things that should go into this are a podcast player that's touch friendly and queued up for the pages episode. Just sit at the very top of the page before a visitor has to scroll. Again, like I mentioned before, those show notes that highlight the importance of the recording, ideally with timestamps. If you have the time, it's definitely a helpful tool just to say I talked about SEO at minute four minutes and 37 seconds. And I talked about content strategy at seven minutes and 32 seconds. That way, if I only care about content strategy as a visitor, I can jump right there. Also a complete audio transcription is great for SEO and accessibility. There are lots of great websites out there that will transcribe your website either automatically, or you can hire people to do so as well for relatively inexpensive for what you're getting back and offer other marketing assets like audiograms and shareable images. If you forego everything else, it's just important that each page includes at least the podcast player. That way new listeners have the ability to sample an episode without downloading an app or visiting another page. Absolutely. And the sixth way to improve a podcast helped new listeners get started with a curated playlist of the best episodes. Listeners, you know, they might decide to listen to every episode eventually, right? But in the beginning, they just want to know what's the best stuff first. And plus, in the interest of building a strong relationship, it's important to hook the listener quickly with great content. So create a page on the site specifically for those new listeners. And this page should briefly explain the podcast, introduce the host or host and provide links to the best episodes. Oh, yeah. Emma's all about those curated playlists, whether it's podcasts or YouTube videos. But our seventh way here of improving that podcast website is to create an archive page for the product's back catalog. Now, even though each episode has a dedicated page, it's helpful to have an archive page that links to each of those pages. You should have an archive page for each category of episodes as well as an archive just for all of the episodes. Now these archive pages help listeners find the type of content they're looking for in a nice organized manner. Now, the eighth way to improve your podcast include email lead capture and links to social media. So you or your client probably intends to start an email list. So new listeners have a way to receive notifications about new episodes, upcoming content and other promotions, all the good things. And an email list is important because it's a direct line of communication to the audience. And to join that list, however, the website needs lead capture opportunities. So add signup forms in reasonable places like sidebars, footers and on the contact page. Our ninth way is to implement Google's recommended structured data. This gets a bit technical, but Google can expose your podcast to users across its entire ecosystem of products. So this includes Google search, all browsers, desktops and mobile devices. Users can actually play episodes in the browser, which I thought is pretty cool. The Google podcast app, Google home speaker systems, content actions for the Google systems on your phone as well. But you can help the podcast appear on Google by making the RSS feed and the homepage point to each other. This is called reciprocal linking. However, if there's no link element in the feed or if it points to a site other than the website, ask your podcast host how to specify the website's homepage address. And this brings us to the 10th way to improve your podcast. So create a consistent brand that relates to the podcast subject. So for a professional podcast website, a generic wordpress theme just won't do. You need unique branding that's consistent throughout the website. It should relate specifically to the topic. And if the podcast is about the paranormal, it should be dark and spooky. And if it's about kids and parenting, it should be bright with primary colors. Choose complimentary fonts and if possible, custom photography. And these design elements help visitors connect with the podcast quickly and they help potential listeners understand the show without reading a word. It's like a visual elevator pitch, if you will. I love that. But yeah, these best practices we covered in this list will help you design a professional podcast website that's accessible, aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. Keep in mind, however, that all shows and brands are different and don't be afraid to experiment with new ideas and creative techniques to make your site unique. But that's a wrap. I hope this helps you improve your podcast website or the one that you're about to make. Make sure to leave us a comment below and don't forget to subscribe to our channel. And be sure to ring that bell to be the first to know when we upload more videos. This has been The Journey. Thanks for watching.