How to Use Podcasts for SEO and Link Building in 2025
This post outlines the strategies and tactics of using podcasting as an SEO & link building strategy. If you’re looking for our daily SEO podcast, brought to you by SEO.co’s team click on the previous link. Podcasting is having a moment. More than half of all Americans over the age of 12 have listened to podcasts in the past, and 32 percent of Americans listen to podcasts at least once a month. In addition, there are more than 750,000 active podcasts right now, with a collective 29 million episodes to listen to in more than 100 languages. It’s a landscape ripe with opportunities for savvy marketers. There are many good reasons to start a podcast, including entertainment, education, and pure personal interest, but in this guide, we’ll be looking at the utility of podcasts for a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy (and link building by extension). With the right podcast link building strategy, you can use podcasting as a way to expand your link building (and improve your rankings in search results), while simultaneously generating more search traffic to the podcast itself. Let’s take a deep dive and explore how to use podcasts for SEO and link building in 2025 and beyond. The Symbiotic Relationship of Podcasts and SEO First, we need to address the symbiotic relationship between podcasts and SEO, since it’s definitely a two-way street. In case you aren’t familiar, podcasts are pieces of audio content, usually episodic in nature, distributed for free via a highly accessible podcast network. You can make a podcast about anything—there are comedy podcasts, informative podcasts, review podcasts, interview podcasts, and even serialized fiction (like radio plays). For our purposes, we’ll be focusing on informative and/or entertaining podcasts, since these are the most likely to generate traffic for a business. If syndicated properly, podcasts can improve your brand reputation and visibility, and provide new opportunities to earn and generate links that boost your SEO strategy. In the opposite direction, organic traffic from your SEO strategy can bring more traffic and more listeners to your podcast. This is especially powerful if you’re monetizing your website with the help of your podcast as a separate stream of revenue. Eventually, you’ll have a self-sustaining feedback loop—a content engine that consistently yields more results. The SEO Benefits of Podcasting Let’s start by touching on the SEO benefits of podcasting. Merely producing podcast episodes and distributing them to an audience isn’t going to increase your domain authority or improve your SEO—but there are some distinct advantages and opportunities afforded to you through the art of podcasting. Let’s take a look. The relative ease of podcasting. One of the reasons podcasting has become so popular is its friendliness to newcomers. The audio format and ease of publication means you won’t have to invest much time or money to get started—yet the potential audience you can build with a podcast is practically unlimited in size. Compared to other link building strategies, this can be incredibly affordable, meaning it can actively increase your ROI. Syndication. If you use sites like Libsyn or Podbean, your podcast episodes can–at your request–be syndicated across a myriad of high-authority websites. And, more importantly, many of the syndicated links are dofollow, which means the links provide some SEO juice. Personal brand development and guest posting opportunities. Podcasts are typically hosted by one or two people, who serve as the charismatic leads for the show. If you’re trying to fit your podcasting strategy with your SEO campaign, it’s ideal to have your primary guest authors as your podcast hosts. Remember, the best way to build links for SEO is through guest posting, and guest posting is at its most effective when you have strong, personal brands to author new works for high-profile publishers. If you can build up the perceived authority and reputation of your guest authors through podcasting, you’ll gain access to much more lucrative publication opportunities. Relationship building and content collaboration. Podcasting is also a fantastic gateway for relationship building and collaborative content development. By networking with other podcasters, conducting interviews, and guest hosting on other podcasts, you’ll expand your network of content collaborators and partners. As a side effect, you’ll trade links with a wider range of industry authorities, and you’ll open the door to more co-author and co-publication deals. Linkable assets. Think of your podcast episodes as high-quality articles, or whitepapers; they can serve as high-quality, linkable assets on your own site. If you have an amazing interview, or if you discuss some original research or unique thoughts on a podcast episode, you can cite it in your offsite content, linking back to your site. Podcasting as a social media channel. You can also consider your podcast as an alternative social media channel. Just as you might syndicate and popularize your best content through channels like Facebook and Twitter, you can talk about your best content on a podcast, increasing its visibility and capacity to earn links. Medium transformation potential. Podcasting is also unique because of its ability to serve as multiple mediums simultaneously. For example, let’s say you interview people on your podcast. You can film the interaction between your host and your guest, then release it simultaneously as a YouTube video, a podcast episode on various networks, and a written transcript on your blog; this way, you’re creating video, audio, and written content all at once. Now you’re starting to see why it’s so popular. Podcasting Fundamentals For a podcast to benefit your SEO strategy, link building strategy, and brand reputation, you need to adhere to these important podcasting fundamentals: Invest in quality equipment. Your podcast is only going to be listenable if you invest in decent equipment. That doesn’t mean you have to go out and buy the most expensive microphone on the market, but you should at least strive for mid-range territory. Make sure you’re recording in a location that’s acoustically favorable, and monitor yourself with good headphones. It shouldn’t cost you more than a few hundred dollars