Why Timing Is Key In Podcast Content Syndication

Your podcast episode audio is widely distributed to podcast listening platforms on day one. But this might not be a good idea when it comes to syndicating your podcast show notes. Learn why timing is key, and how drip feeding your show notes content over a few weeks, to multiple websites, can improve the visibility of your show.

The timing in which you publish your show notes to different websites can be very important. You want the timing of the release of your show note content to send Google steady ranking signals over a period of time. The increased rank this produces will improve the visibility of your show in the Google Search Result Pages (SERPs).

Let's continue our series on podcast content syndication as a method for podcast and website growth. Today, we'll explore why drip syndication and the timing of it is key when distributing podcast show notes.

Why Timing Is Key — Table Of Contents

• Quick Podcast Content Syndication Recap [00:30]
• Distributing Show Notes As Widely As Possible [01:16]
• Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties [03:15]
• The Role of SEO Optimized Show Notes Articles [04:01]
• Why Staggered Timing Is Key To Success When It Comes To Google Rank [04:50]
• How Google passes backlink rank to your site [06:11]
• It's about more than traffic, it's about SERP visibility [08:04]
• Coming Up Next [08:29]

Quick Podcast Content Syndication Recap

So let's get started with a quick recap of content syndication and how it works and what we talked about the last time, how ranking factors are influencing podcasts and website growth, including domain authority.

We talked about the importance of incoming links and also how long form episode show notes content, when SEO optimized, is a contributing factor. Finally we covered engagement on your website and social media signals. All of those are factors where content syndication for podcast show notes, articles, contributes and basically improves them by building back links and sending those social signals to Google.

Distributing Show Notes As Widely As Possible

We'll go in a little bit more detail today, but basically the idea is, is that we want to widely distribute the podcast, show notes articles, not only to your own websites, but onto content hubs and other network related sites, as well as through referral and social marketing.

What we're trying to do is to basically build a series of back links by distributing these show notes widely. So it's not just about the traffic, it's about creating a number of incoming links that Google recognizes in importance of pointing to your website. So what we're trying to achieve in the end, is to identify as many places as possible to syndicate your show note articles, kind of like what's happening with your podcast audio already.

Platforms supported include all modern CMS based websites

We support all of the primary modern content management systems or CMS based websites.

Of course, WordPress is one of the most popular ones, but we also support modern platforms like Webflow, for example.

Ghost is an interesting platform because Ghost also has a newsletter and email syndication platform built in. But even if you don't use it for that, it can be very good just as an additional affordable platform to publish on. William is the free blog with a high domain authority that you get back links from that is built into StoryChief, which is our content syndication platform. We will cover that in greater detail in an upcoming episode. Also, we can publish to custom websites and Drupal, Joomla, Fork, Craft CMS as well as HubSpot. So these are all destinations in a multichannel strategy that we can publish to.

So the more sites that you can publish to the better.

Additional sites and channels are always welcome. Keeping in mind that this is done in a way to avoid any duplicate content penalties from Google.

Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalties

For those of you familiar with SEO, there's a technical term called “Canonical Links or Tags”. All of the articles that are getting published to other sites basically point the rank  that Google attributes to your primary website to your business website. So the more sites, then, the better. There's no concern about having any duplicate content penalties.

The Role of SEO Optimized Show Notes Articles

What we're publishing, just as a reminder, are your podcast episode in the form of SEO optimized show notes articles. We're going to show a couple of examples in the future, but they basically are augmented show notes based on a transcript, but not where the transcript is pasted in on the bottom. Instead, what we do is add and augment this with headings, subheadings, images, quotables, pull quotes, and a number of other things that make it appear to Google like these are authority, high quality articles, and they usually are because they're based on the conversation and the topic that you and your guests or you in a solo episode covered.

The only platforms that we cannot support with this system are closed ecosystems like Squarespace and Wix, because these aren't true content management platforms that accept publishing from third parties.

Why Staggered Timing Is Key To Success When It Comes To Google Rank

With that said though, what I want to focus on in this episode is the fact that dripped released timing is key, when syndicating episode articles. So I wanted to explain why and how this works. So basically what we are trying to achieve is to drip the syndicated content to multiple teams candles, but not all at once.

So we don't publish everything on day one to 30 or 40 websites, or 10 or 15 websites, we're trying to drip this out over a period of time. Now you may ask why, and there's a good reason for that. On the first day we published to the primary website, and then this is an example of schedule. We customize these schedules depending on what platforms our clients are interested in or already have. But let's assume that on the primary website, that's the first place that we publish. But on day two, we publish on the William blog. As I mentioned, that is the blog that you get that has a high authority, produces a higher domain authority back link, and it sends that signal to Google and Google says,

"Ah, look, there's this article, must be important because someone’s linking to it already."

How Google passes backlink rank to your site

It passes that rank along to your primary website and that process repeats itself. So if you have a secondary site, if you have a partner site, if you even have a site where you can deploy the content in a way that's not necessarily visible on the homepage or even the navigation, it still helps you because it earns you a backlink from Google.

Many people have more than one website. Some have a business website and a separate one for their podcast, and maybe even a private or personal blog. The more the better.

The syndication process then continues through referral marketing. For example, if you get your podcast guests to link to you from an article on their own website that produces another incoming link. We also feature something called “Ambassador Networks” of people who have agreed to share your content, something we explored in previous blogs.

We may also publish to some content hubs and networks, like for example, on a Blogger and Medium account. Again, a week later or so you're starting to see regular signals to Google that wind up accumulating, and that illustrate to Google that this is an authority article that you have just launched.

So a week or two later, we might publish to Ghost, we might publish to Medium, a huge content hub with a large existing readership. Here, for exmple, is a link to our own Medium presence.

Social signals contribute as well

And while this is going on, there are also continuous social signals being sent, because our content syndication process also publishes to Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, and pages and Facebook groups and Twitter and so forth. So these social signals of your content being shared contribute as well. They're not quite as important to Google, in Google's parlance as direct incoming links from high domain authority sites, but they do matter.

The point is, a constant drip feed of incoming links basically contribute to delivering the results in weeks, not months or even years. So content published can show up on page one and we often see results after only a few days or weeks.

It's about more than traffic, it's about SERP visibility

So that is why we are following this concept, and that is why your overall website, your overall podcast, the visibility and traffic as well, this isn't all about traffic. I don't really care whether there's a lot of traffic coming in from some of these sources. What's important is that it's coming in, are these ranking signals. So that's basically today's episode.

Coming Up Next

Up next will be how content syndication works on social media and through influencer marketing.

Where To Join Us

In the meantime, please follow the Podcast Growth channel if you're watching this on YouTube, follow us on Facebook @Polymash,  on Instagram, we are at @Polymashdesign.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment below, or join our Facebook Podcast Marketing Group.  See you next time.