Turning your blog into audio will increase your SEO in 2020
With the rise of AirPods and other bluetooth headphones, audio consumption is continuing to rise exponentially. In the past 2 years alone, audio consumption has increased exponentially. Consumers are bombarded with more and more blog posts, articles, email newsletters, and other forms of text and don’t have time to get through it. Audio is a companion medium and allows consumers to listen to content on their commutes, during exercise, or other downtime when they may not be able to read a screen.
At Google I/O 2019, they announced that beginning in late 2019 they will begin surfacing audio content in search results. As i’m sure you know, it is critical to show up in Google search results for relevant searches to get your product, services, or content discovered and to drive organic traffic. To get ahead of the curve and set yourself up for an SEO advantage in 2020, converting your text-based content such as blog posts, email newsletters, case studies, and more into audio content will immediately double the SEO opportunity as Google starts to surface audio in search results. How will this work? Essentially when you perform a search in Google, they surface the results that best answer your query. Up until now, it has always been text-based content that comes up as results. They have already started tests with Youtube content where they show search results for videos or even clips of videos that best match your search query. As they expand beyond Youtube to podcasts and other audio content and likely start to recognize which users prefer to consumer audio over text, there will be a massive opportunity to use audio as a tool to drive organic traffic to your site.
To give yourself this SEO advantage and reach many more potential users, you can use a tool like Soundspot to automatically convert your content into high quality audio. For blogs, in only a few minutes you can select the voice you want to use to read the content and all of your posts will be turned into mp3 files (don’t worry, nothing changes about your written blog content! This is just additive) that you can embed on your blog, send out in an email newsletter, or syndicate to podcasts networks as a standalone podcast (for all of you who have been thinking about doing a podcast, this is a MUCH faster and MUCH cheaper way to do it!!) In addition, all new posts will automatically get converted as you publish them so it’s a set it and forget it tactic to drive traffic and increase number of visitors.
For those of you that want to start a podcast from scratch, it is not as daunting as it may seem. For ~$100 you can get yourself a decent microphone like the Blue Yeti. Recording software like Zencastr is freemium and also offers basic post-production, and many hosting services like Red Circle or Anchor are free and will automatically syndicate your content to all major podcast players. The hardest part is creating high-quality, differentiated content… and that part is on you :) If you’ve already invested in a blog, I’d recommend you start there and leverage your existing content and then decide if a full podcast is necessary.
