Matt Hepburn is interviewed on the opportunities of podcast guest appearances

With us today is the one the man, the myth, the legend we have Matt Hepburn. Hey Matt, How the heck are you? Hey, Mike. Long, long time, no talk. So, for those people who don’t know who you are and I know I’ve given you a little bit of an intro here and, and, and maybe a little bit of exaggeration in some respects but, in no reality, who are you and what is it that you do?

So, I’m an SEO professional. I’ve been doing this now for about 13 years and when I first started, I started like most of us do on our own sites and then went into consulting and freelance and then into large and small agency and then graduated into enterprise level, SEO. So, I’ve been doing that and so I’ve really had the breadth and depth of the whole genres of SEO and it’s been great. I really enjoy it. It’s something that I’m extremely passionate on helping people rank higher in Google and just converting more business.

That’s great. So, what I wanna do is let’s just kind of dive right into it, man. Our, our listeners, they’re really eager to learn about the connection between being on a podcast and off page SEO.  Lots, of people talk about all the on-page stuff and all, optimize text and all the things that you can actually control. When we, we talk about podcasts, we talk about link-building. I want to talk a little bit about how being a guest on a podcast and receiving backlinks from that podcast can really contribute to improving the overall E-E-A-T scores, which is something I know that you’re really passionate about.

Now we love talking about E-A-T, which it’s now E-E-A-T. So it used to be expertise, authority and trustworthiness and now it is expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. And those are really big words, but they really are a framework that Google has used and it’s not an algorithm, there are about 200 plus baby algorithms underneath that, that are all kind of connected to that as well as Google’s core algorithm. They’re all part of that. And so these are all things that they look for and by fixing these things on our site and signals from off page signals, it really helps Google see you as the authority in the space. And that’s ultimately what we want to do, right? When we have a website, we want to be seen as the authority locally. To take it a step further, with interview bookers, when you’re helping get people on other podcasts or helping them use their podcast even to generate that,  that expertise and that authority and the trust and, and all of that, how does, how does being a guest on another podcast enhance your, your SEO on your site? So it, it, it’s actually a wonderful thing.  There’s so many benefits, but let’s just start with topical relevance, right? So if you’re going to be a guest on somebody’s show, typically you’re the one who is giving the questions out and saying, hey, these are topics that I’d like to talk about and you can really align the questions that you’re actually giving to the audience and the, the podcast host. How do, how do your subject matter expertise fit within them? And how do you tie that back to a page that you want to link back to? So there’s a topical relevance of your conversation that you’re having with the host and a topical conversation, you want to link back to wherever you’re gonna have that, those links back on to your website. So, Google loves that if they can see topical relevance from a,  a podcast coming back over to a specific page, whether it’s a child page where it’s a product page or a service page, this really helps them understand, uh, that there that’s topically relevant. And at the same time, you’re talking about your experience, right? You’re giving a lot of knowledge and learning over to the host and to his audience and Google when they are looking for this experience, right? They’re really looking for detailed information. So the more detailed information that you can give within that podcast, the absolutely better it is for you and the trust signals that you’re sending back to your website.

One thing you and I talk a lot about this off air over the months is that AI is prevalent as it is and it’s coming out and it’s creating all this great content.  The one thing that AI can’t really do that podcast appearances really are very good at is conveying that experience back to that, I think that when you take the podcast experience factor into play, it’s a great way to kind of differentiate the content that, that you associate with you as an author as an entity over that of just,  chatGPT or Jasper or whatever,  content is created.

Mike, So, so you really actually just hit it right there on the, the head. The entity part of it, right? You as the expert are the entity both on your website as the author of your website and they want to understand how your connections online, these off-page signals that are coming to your expertise all connect, right? Whether it’s third party podcasts that you’ve been on or blog guest posts or whatever, it might be the signals that are coming over. But there are a lot of other signals that are coming too. It’s really about your offsite reputation, right? What does that mean? So it’s much more than reputation management traditionally is seen, which is just like, how do I manage my reviews? These are all about the positive signals that are coming over to you versus if there’s a lot of negative signals. So let me give you an example. So some of the things that Google looks for is they look for and there’s a lot of signals, but they may look for reviews on things like your BBB profile or your Yelp profile, or your Google business profile. And so if you have a lot of negative reviews there that are sending really negative off-site signals back to your website. There’s things that we can do to counteract that such as podcast guest appearances. And one of the main benefits of that right that you can do is if you’re working with a really good host and you’ve provided value during your show, you can then ask the host, hey if I provided value during the, the show, would you leave a, an honest review on one of these three different profiles? Now, for kitchen remodeling, if there are any major associations of that, the carpenters or the plumbers or , whomever it might be, that they have whatever associations they have, if they have a profile there where they can actually get a review on that, that’s huge, right?  As well because that’s gonna be very niche specific for them.  I just mentioned BBB, Google business profile and Yelp because the, three main ones that are kind of mentioned within the guidelines. The quality and when I say guidelines, I’m saying the quality rater guidelines that Google gives for people to actually review websites and that’s just information that they give back to Google. It’s not that your website would get hit with anything like that. It’s to kind of guide the algorithms that makes a lot of sense and,

Matt, As you’re talking about, getting these reviews and getting links back from that podcast post will do one of the things that come to my mind is, people used to be so concerned about the DA   about what is the domain authority, what, what does Google rate the overall site? And now we’re,  looking at it and looking at top authority, I mean, I think it, it’s far more important obviously to, to get relevant links, but with that in mind, are all backlinks equal in terms of SEO value?

How do we, how can a podcast backlink be more valuable compared to like for example, a link just on some citation directory or something like that? There’s always a lot of conversations and depending on what forums you go into, you can hear a lot of chatter on this. But a lot of people are using older methods. When I say older methods maybe 10, 15 years ago, like social bookmarking and, and different methods that can actually hurt your website, right? Google doesn’t provide a lot of value for these links anymore, like things like links for the most part unless it’s very, very niche specific. If  there anything that’s automated. Let me just put this way, any type of link that you can put in an email address, and it will kick back a link to your website is probably discounted by Google and not even included. So you really want most cases to have these editorial links. Links where the editor on a website has purposely put a link there, linking back to your assets on your website. These are very hard to get. It’s either something like a guest post that you could get or there can still be quality guest posts. Google has recently I read in the last few years basically devalued them a little bit. But I think it’s more that they devalued that if that is your only linking program is to just do guest posts, you want to have some type of link diversity to your link profile. And when we’re talking about local SEO, the good news is that you don’t have to have as many links in most cases for the competition of keywords as you would in something that has national competition. The first step to doing anything would be a link gap analysis. So what that really means is taking a look at the top 10 results in Google in your local rankings and then really just saying, well, what are the average amount of links that are coming to each one of these pages that’s ranking and the average amount of referring domains? And what are the amount of the same amount of referring domains and links that are coming to your target URL that you have on your website and the delta in between that average of those top 10 and your page is the analysis of what you need to do to build to rank on the first page of Google for the keyword that you choose. So that’s really where you start before you do anything else with the back with a backlink plan is to get an understanding as to what is it gonna take to move the needle for me to rank on the first page of Google?

It’s interesting, because whenever I do an analysis for a kitchen or modeling clients or a cabinet store, what we’ll do is we’ll look at a term like, cabinet store in Nashville, Tennessee, pick, or pick your area and then we’ll see who are the top 10 rankings. Then you go over to a tool like an Ahrefs or SEMrush, put those competitors in and see how many links they have, and then that kind of gives you an idea. And then in my mind, I’m always thinking, well, it’s gonna take me about,  one month to increase my DA for X amount of time and that,  so it gives me an idea of how long it’s gonna take. But what you’re talking about here is really not looking at quantity, but really the quality too, which is so much more important. With that in mind, what should a business owner consider when and let’s, let’s stick to the podcast world here. when they’re selecting a podcast to be a guest on, or they’re working with someone like interview bookers and, and you are going out and then you’re finding places and booking somebody on there.  what is it that you want to think about in terms of that podcast you’re on?

As it relates to relevance to the niche, and to the authority and all of that, the first thing I didn’t address in your last question, I’ll do that, then I’ll hop to here is on citations. So, citations are still important. And there was a 2023 report on local ranking factors done by White Spark and I believe citations are for local are around 11% of importance. So they’ve decreased a lot, but they’re really to emphasize the name, address, and phone number of your business. And they’re not as much of a ranking factor anymore. They’re a contribution. And when we’re talking about local, we’re talking about a few different things. We’re talking about the local organic results. We’re talking about the three-pack that everybody wants to be in. And then we’re talking about Google Maps, right? So how do we actually have a holistic strategy that’s gonna work with all three? So when it comes to podcasting, to your point with, what do we target? Right, we really need to have a really good understanding of the audience of what the business is trying to target. So if you were doing kitchen remodeling you might have a bunch of different types of  and it’s whether it’s a B2B audience, whether it’s A B2C audience, you have to kind of look at that, right? As to what you’re targeting.  Do you want to target a local audience? So the first criteria that we look at is that we want to look at podcasts that have recently published an episode within the last month because it doesn’t any other podcast that we would be looking at if they haven’t published something recently, that podcast might not be active, we need to have an email address for the host or be able to find the email address for the host. we’re also looking for English language. At least I am looking at the English language. But if it’s something specific, if it was somebody else, if they were looking for Spanish or something else, we could do that. And then we’re looking for what’s the relevance. I’ll give you an example. If I was looking for an SEO agency, I wouldn’t be looking for the most part unless I had new software that I was launching, I wouldn’t be looking for SEO related podcasts. What I’d actually be looking at is business-related podcasts that talk about  the needs of business and business marketing and I’d be very niche specific. So if I was,  looking in kitchen remodeling, I might say OK, let me look at house flipping podcast. Let’s look at real estate podcasts. Let’s look at those type of podcasts that are relevant to my audience, right? And let me get on those. And the goal of that really is to get these links, but also there’s other benefits.

Well, let, let’s actually take a little bit of but very close to it. I mean, when, so you found yourself, in the kitchen modeling space, maybe you get yourself on a, on a flipper or on a real estate podcast or something that,  that speaks to people who need to think about this.  Are there any specific strategies or techniques somebody should employ to maximize the SEO benefit once they’ve been on that podcast?

So, so we kind of mentioned before the questions, right? The questions are really critical. You really have to think about the audience and the host first, right? What’s gonna work with their host? And how does your expertise actually match up to that? And then from there, once you’ve done that, you can take the, the top 10 areas of expertise that you have and you can say, what are the main questions that I get asked all the time? And how can I make them applicable to the hosts podcast and his audience? How do we match that up? And how do we tie that back to a specific page? And then you can say, OK, do I have a local lead magnet? So, uh, when I say a local lead magnet, I’m gonna give you an example that, it might be something and I’ll put it in the kitchen, remodeling space as an example first. So, how about having a guide about, measuring cabinets or something, uh, for homeowners, right? Like what are, what are the, the misconceptions about like standard going to get something from IKEA versus what you really need, how you really need to measure this. And then you have this on a page, you have this on the page that the Google business profile links back to, right? So it’s on your primary local or a location page if you have multiple locations. You have it on there and now you are able to do email marketing as well, right? But now you can have that as an asset that you kind of talk to. You, talk it up to the podcast host. And the podcast host typically talks to the audience and saying, hey, if you stay to the end, you’re gonna get the link here for this wonderful asset here. That’s gonna help you with XYZ, right? That’s going to help you get some referral traffic from that audience as long as the audience is really relevant to our business adjacent to what you do. And now you’re gonna get traffic that’s coming to your website and you have the potential for them to opt into your guide and now you can market to them via email marketing. So it’s a wonderful way to actually add to the value of podcasting.

It reminds me of a couple of weeks ago, we, we had on this podcast, we had Dominic Rubino from the  the profit maker Toolbelt podcast, which, which is one of the premier podcasts on the planet for, cabinet makers actually. And one of the things that Don was, was telling me was whenever he appears on someone else’s podcast.  The thing that he does is rather than put a link is he gives a hashtag says, hey, text me at this number.  And adds a really unique hashtag so be able to track the traffic because a lot of times I think what you’ll find is people don’t want to run to their computer. First of all, they may be in their car when they listen to the podcast, I listen to a time in my car.  They may not be anywhere near a screen, they might not have anything to write on, but they can always, they always have their cell phone in their hand. We may be driving, we probably shouldn’t, but the reality is we do, we have it there and that’s a great way to get someone’s info. But even more than that. And he pointed this out to me is it gives you the legal right to send them SMS responses, which you don’t always have depending on the state that you’re in to that. And that’s kind of a cool thing to be able to do but not like that.  there, there are so many ways to track it, but, at the end of the day, the idea is how do you start the conversation? That’s all that really matters. Right.

I love it and there are tons of SMS tools out there and I’m sure there are some that would allow you to opt-in and then send them something via that. So that sounds like a great strategy to use.

So, let me ask this. I mean, you’ve given us some great ideas in terms of local SEO and how and how somebody like, like a, a cabinet store or like a remodel in Miami, in Lincoln, Nebraska or wherever it might be, they could probably go after, does the strategy change if we’re looking at more of a national or an online company? And what I mean by that is, so let’s take the exact same cabinet store. We got a cabinet store in Baltimore, Maryland, they’re selling cabinets to everybody in Maryland and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, right? But they also have an e-commerce. They have, they have woo commerce set up on their site. They have the shopping cart. How does it, if they’re looking to gain more notoriety for their online store, how does this strategy change or does it?

It would, I would definitely have an internal link hub strategy. So,  Zillow, they don’t drive links to every single page,  they’ll have a city or, or an area, maybe it is a county page, right? And they’re driving links to that and then all their location, and towns within that page are linked off to that and then the link juice from those links flows to those town pages and then helps push those as well. So I would definitely use a strategy like that.

I know one of the things that you do often with your clients at the end of their interview or after their interview, is you reach out and you’ll try and get the host to give that review, you talked about that already today.  Does that change at the enterprise level or, or not even enterprise? But just that,  that the e-commerce level where maybe your store location isn’t super important, is it, do you now maybe focus more on the, do you focus more on the Yelp?

Sure. This affects all websites, whether it is a local website, whether it’s a national, whatever it is. Google is really looking for these signals that are telling them that you are an expert and that you are, you have authority, and you have trust. So incoming links from third-party sites that are relevant will really give you authority. They’re kind of seen as a vote. But if they also are from podcasts where you’re talking about your experience and your expertise on that, that’s just an extra signal that’s being passed along. So it’s really about where you’re sending that there are a lot. And then, when you add that other level of the reviews that are helping with your trustworthiness of your site, there are other things that you can do with, for trustworthy of your site that are on page that go along with this. So, really important are things like how are you gonna have a customer service, kind of where are people gonna find your customer service? Have an about page, have an author page, be able to tell people who is the writer or the author of the content. If you don’t have that on the about page, right? Having a link to your legal disclosures, having things like terms of service and privacy and refund or return type of policies really critical in the E E A T factor.

These are all on-page things that we can control. A lot of people don’t even think about them, right?  But really important. So, they go together all these off-page signals and these on page signals. It’s a very harmonic approach that, that you’re talking about,  and that raises another issue that a lot of people who are not SEO technicians really don’t think about is when you do have that author page, there’s something out there called Schema,  fancy word. It just means programming. But one of the things that schema does, is, it allows you to connect all those different profiles because as people are creating those views for you, you want to make sure that Google picks up,  and so many times, I mean, even like with my name, my first name, Mike is Michael.  that’s something where to the average person. Yeah, same thing, right? There,  a lot of comedians who have always done lots of jokes about it,  hey, I went to TSA and even my name is Tom. My ID is Thomas and they wouldn’t let me on the plane. Right. Well, Google in all seriousness does look at it that way and they, that very easily could change it just like with your N A P.  Do you, do you use the word Avenue at the end of your street or is it Ave? I mean, that could change, you could become two separate entities with that. I know that’s something you tell your clients all the time is how important consistency is and adding that schema, right?

One of the things I would say, whether it’s, on your site, if you had some type and you wanted to be on a podcast is to have something what’s called the one-sheet. The one sheet helps with pitching you towards the podcast hosts, and connects with the same as Schema. What this does is it gives a little bit about your name, which would normally be an H1 tag, a description of what your experience is and then things like the really important things like what type of interviews are you’re available for? What language that you speak? What’s your gender? How can they get in touch with you? Which would be like your calendar link and then you’d wanna, really push up on this author,  if it was somebody who won a lot of awards or, or certifications or schooling, you’d want to put this all there  Any type of associations that they’ve been a part of whether I don’t know what it would be for construction and builders type of association, all that stuff you really want to talk about and, and kind of pound your chest as to the number of years of your experience and you want to talk about this.  And if you don’t have it on an author profile, then you need to have it on your About Us page, right? So either one of those two locations.

Just a quick tip for all the listeners out there. Most of you guys have a WordPress website. If you do check out the, there’s a free plug-in called Star Box. It will create a little mini author profile that will, that you can tag on to, to each post that you do.  There’s, there’s other software like rank math and whatnot. It does cost some money, but if you’re technical enough and you’ll build a program and if not, talk to your agencies, talk to your marketing people, they can really help you with that.

What we’re just talking about with the different things we’re adding to either the About us page or the author profile, help with your E E A T and Google understanding schema. So they understand you as a person, as an entity. Then what we use is something called same as schema. We’re going to add in every single social media profile that you have any type of author bio you’ve had on any third-party website where you’ve had a guest post or anything like that. And then this is what we do at interview bookers is we add in all your third-party podcast guest interviews together because they still see that, that you are a, considered an author or a contributor, so Google would see it the same way, right? We add that together and then what that does is it connects all the dots so that you don’t have profiles that are competing with each other for you as an entity. Then Google understands that and it connects your experience. It’s really important to also add your LinkedIn and all your,  all the, the Yelp the BBB, all that type of stuff together that’s really, really critical. And, yeah, I can’t stress that enough. The other thing is, this page needs to be set to index, right? So what that means is that Google can crawl that page and bing can crawl that page. When that’s set to index any time you add a new guest interview that you’ve been on there, it actually sends a signal to Google to, hey, come crawl that page and re-index this page, something’s changed and then they’re gonna go crawl those new links out to those third party websites. You’re gonna go right to that guest interview site. And so that’s critical because that actually helps in the indexation of that backlink just because somebody’s published something and they have a link on it. The web page could be actually published, but that doesn’t mean the link is actually in Google’s index. So this actually helps the indexation of those links.

That’s really interesting because one of the things I’m wondering, do you do with,  when you get somebody on a podcast? And the the host does this podcast, they put something up on their website. I think a lot of people have podcasts honestly know little to nothing about indexation.They don’t even know if it’s a thing or not. Do you actually take the episode page that someone I guess has appeared on and try and index that yourself by putting it through a tool,  like Omega indexer or something like that.

No. So,  I have no problem helping podcast hosts if they have questions about that, one of the things we’ll look at, when we’re vetting podcasts to make sure that, their pages are indexed and that they link off and that they have guests, but also that they link off to assets because if they have guests, but the don’t link off to assets. That doesn’t help you by being, yes, you’ll have some experience and, and expertise on there and it might help your E E A T but it doesn’t help your ranking for keywords. So we want both things. Right. Right. We want to increase our rankings locally, but we also want to have the E E A T. So we want to have all that and then there are other things that we can do. So do you want to hear about some other things we can do for indexation? I’d love to hear that. So one of the other things that we can do is socially share the get once the, the, episode is live is that we can socially share to, uh, our Facebook or Twitter profile, over to LinkedIn into places like that. We socially share that guest posts that we’ve been on. And then those are platforms that have a lot of authority and trustworthiness. So when they’re on those sites versus our site, which might not be as, of course, it’s not gonna be as big as those profiles. Google is gonna be more likely to crawl that faster and to help index from those sites going over. So it’s just another thing that we can do to make sure that the value of that interview through the link is counted,

That, that makes a lot of sense. You talked about how certain things like social bookmarking isn’t as valuable as it once was and putting something in organically into your social, that’s very different. I want to make sure that we, we make a distinction though too, for the audience.  So now you’ve talked a lot about all the great benefits today of podcasting, how it can help us, how it can help se ranking how it affects your E-E-A-T profile overall with Google and all of that.  The one thing that we haven’t addressed and I’m not sure that there’s a ton but that we, I want to touch on just for a minute. Are there any negative aspects? Is there anything that someone should be careful of when they’re going and seeking a guest spot on a podcast? Is there anything that could actually hurt your, your  E-E-A-T score if you appear on the wrong podcast?

If the podcast is not topically or business adjacent to you, then it’s not gonna have as much emphasis in moving the needle at all.  It would be,  it’s, it’s just not there. So you want to keep it business-related adjacent is what I would say. So, like I would niche related, right? So I would look at anything for, for kitchen remodeling, I would look at like anything that was real estate based mortgage based home inspection, anything from all that aspect would be business adjacent, and would be perfect on that. I would also look at any type of, building association podcasts as well,  within the building community, building, building-wise. And are there any ones that have that but also have a local connection and that’s gonna be few and far between. But if there are one specific that would be like Miami building podcast or something like that, I don’t know,  that the main thing to do is to really do that research up front. You have to understand how many that are. There are another technique that there is, is when we’re actually doing that audience research is if there’s somebody who is the expert in doing podcast guesting already within the niche, we can piggyback over the off of understanding like what podcast have they been on and then we just have to vet them to make sure that they’re still active, you know.  did they, the same thing, did they give a link back? But we can actually go after the name of the person in who’s already blazed the trail.

I love that idea because,  you can go after a podcast and maybe it wasn’t, isn’t so popular quite yet. But, because they had a big name on it all of a sudden, hey, look at that following. It’s right,  and you go, an influencer appears one time and then, that other podcast becomes massively relevant.  So with that said, Matt, you’ve dropped some real knowledge bombs on us today I mean, I think you have shared some information that, that the listeners here are gonna get a ton of value out of. But for those people who would want to find out a little bit more about you, or maybe someone who just wants to talk to you to, uh, to retain you for your podcast consulting and whatnot. How would they get a hold of you? I mean, is it easy to find you? It’s pretty easy to find me. So the first thing is we have a podcast, the EMJ podcast, in which we interview people on S E O. So you can always reach out to me there. If you’re interested in, being a guest on podcasts would be more than happy to talk to you for free for about half an hour to an hour and really about what your goals and your aims are and really understand whether there is an audience out there for you.  So that would be on interview bookers dot com and be more than happy to talk to you about that. And at the same time when we’re doing that, we can kind of take a look at your site and say here, there might be some areas that you might want to work on your E-E-A-T kind of like what we mentioned before, right? The about us page, the author page,  disclosures, and for those types of things, we would make recommendations, but they’re a good way to shore up those foundations. and then the last thing I’ll say,to that, it’s really important if you have any type of service or product where you have prices on your website or if you have affiliate type of links or anything like that, you’re immediately going to need a lot of EEAT because you’re gonna be seen as your money or your life.  So really, really critical that you get that E-E-A-T in order.

Yeah, for sure. And, and guys, if you’re listening today, I mean, Matt has given us so much information about all the things that you need to do. what he hasn’t shared with you is the cost of some of the tools that are necessary to do it. This is not a free thing. It does take a lot of resources, it is a lot of bandwidth you need. So, I mean, your, your business is remodeling kitchens, your business is plumbing, or whatever. It might be always a great idea to reach out to a pro and Matt is, like I said, one of the best in the business right now and helping you expand that reach in the podcast world. So with all that said,  Matt, I want to thank you so much for being here today.  I found this enlightening.  I know my listeners got a ton of value So for Matt, this is Mike Goldstein, this is the crushing it with kitchen remodleing podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Check us out again. Bye bye

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