SEO News You Can Use: Google Makes it More Important Than Ever to Optimize Your Podcast

Editor’s Note: Today we’re introducing “SEO News You Can Use,” a weekly blog post that will be posted every Monday morning rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.

Google sent an indirect message to all business owners last week. Did you miss it?

Here’s the short version: If you aren’t already using podcasts as part of your SEO strategy, you better start considering it.

Google announced it was “making it easier to find and listen to podcasts on Search.” Google says there are more than two million podcasts on the web now. To make it easier for searchers to find the topic of podcasts they’re looking for, Google will display playable episodes in Search results alongside web pages, news, images and videos.

Google will show the podcasts based on “Google’s understanding of what’s being talked about on a podcast,” a better way to connect the user with the exact content he/she is seeking. Google also added that you soon won’t even need to use “podcast” in your searches to make it easier to find your favorite podcasts.

So, if you’re a business looking for a way to get ahead in the ever-changing, always-competitive SEO race to reach the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s time you start thinking about recording podcasts. But make sure your content is focused and you touch on particular keywords that also are displayed in your titles and meta descriptions. And for you digital marketing agencies, make sure you’re considering hiring someone who has experience producing podcasts so you’re better equipped to help businesses grow with new forms of content and information.

Other SEO News You Can Use

A Google Images Update: Google made another announcement last week, saying it has “overhauled Google Images on desktop.” Basically, when you select an image it will now appear on a side panel on the page next to your search results. And it stays there as you scroll, providing a way for you to easily compare the image with others displayed on the page.

Googlebot JavaScript Update: Googlebot can now detect JavaScript redirects, according to Search Engine Land. This should allow you to use modern JavaScript features without your SEO being negatively impacted.

Nofollow Links: Google webmaster John Mueller recently said in a hangout chat that there is no ranking benefit to marking outbound links as nofollow. Read more about that here via Search Engine Journal.

SEO Case Study: Here’s an interesting SEO case study to review. This is from Moz.com about outlines how a media company grew 400% and used SEO to get acquired by Outreach.io. This media company grew from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to more than 100,000 in about 14 months.

Find SEO Content Writers: Here’s another helpful blog from Moz.com that dives deep into how to screen and recruit the best SEO content writers. This blog gives you great tips and outlines what you should look for when reviewing writers’ previous work to know if they are an advanced SEO writer.

Google Sites Indexing Issues: Google tweeted last week that it was aware of reports of indexing issues impacting some sites. Google also added it was seeing issues in the URL Inspection tool within Search Console. Google added later that the URL Inspection tool was working normally again but it was still working to resolve the remaining issues. And then on Friday morning, Google tweeted that all issues are fully resolved, with the search engine giant once again able to crawl, index and rank new content.

Let us know in the comments section what you think about our new weekly blog post rounding up all the latest SEO news. We hope this blog post will provide you with one destination each week to get all your SEO news to stay up to date on industry shifts and trends.