SEO and Podcasting

[00:00:10] Calan Breckon: Welcome to the Business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host, Calan Breckon and on today’s episode, we are flipping the script. A few months ago, I was on the Making Good podcast hosted by small business marketing coach Lauren Tilden, and the episode was so, so well received that I asked if I could share it with all of you. In this episode, we chatted about what SEO is and why small businesses should pay attention to it. Website must haves, SEO tips for podcasters, why I started this podcast, the business gay ,and so much more. I hope you enjoy this episode where I’m the one being interviewed for once. So with that, let’s jump in with Lauren.

[00:00:56] Lauren Tilden: Welcome back to making good the podcast for small businesses who want to make a big impact. I’m your host, Lauren Tilden, and this is episode 244. I was so excited to have today’s guest on the show. There’s so much to say about him that I honestly wasn’t sure how I would fit it all into an intro. But here are some of the highlights. Callan Brecon helps business owners get clear on their search engine optimization SEO strategy for their websites and businesses. Overall, he he helps develop a content strategy, growth plan, keyword planning, email list building, podcast development and more to boost searchability on Google and search engines, and drive more traffic to websites, products and services. He also does amazing work, uplifting and highlighting the voices of the gay community via his podcast, the Business Gay, a weekly show all about business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I was so excited to discover this podcast because queer voices are drastically underrepresented in business and marketing, and I love to see a platform curated for the community Callan and I are both a part of.

Now, I have to admit, my motivation for having talen on the show is a little bit self serving. SEO is a topic that we’ve covered a little bit on this show, but one of Callen’s realms of expertise is SEO for podcasting specifically. So as you can guess, this is something I was very excited to pick Callum’s brain about. Whether or not podcasting is something you’re interested in, it’ll get so much out of this episode. Callen does a fantastic job of clearly explaining the basics of SEO and how to optimize it for any website. I’ve said it before and I really, really mean it this time. Take notes. I certainly was during this conversation. In this episode, we discussed what SEO is and why you might want to be paying attention to it. The different ways that SEO comes into play website musts for getting found SEO tips for podcasts the role podcasting has had on Callan’s business and more. Are you ready to take notes? Here is my conversation with Callan.

Hello, Kallen. Welcome to making good.

[00:02:58] Calan Breckon: Hey, Lauren. I’m so excited to be here.

[00:03:01] Lauren Tilden: I am so excited to have you here. We have a lot of good stuff to talk about today, actually, but I want to dig into SEO first. However, before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about you and your background. And actually, I don’t know, totally know your story. So I’m curious, too.

[00:03:17] Calan Breckon: Oh, my goodness.

[00:03:18] Lauren Tilden: How did you come to do the work that you do now? Introduce yourself, share about your work. All the good stuff.

[00:03:24] Calan Breckon: First of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. I’m a big time podcaster. So what? History story so I, once upon a time, was a flight attendant in the Middle east for about half a decade. And during that time, I was, had a lot of free time to learn and grow. And I always knew I wanted to start my own business, go into business for myself. I always was drawn to tech and like online. And so when I was nearing the end of my career over there, I was planning ahead to move back. I live in Toronto and Canada. I was planning my life to move back. And I also had been dealing with a lot of, like, physical, invisible medical conditions that really prevented me from continuing on that career, which is why I was like, I need to find an exit strategy. And that medical condition also prevented me from being able to go and work a regular job because it was physical and because it would happen uncontrollably. And I didn’t really have a say in the matter. I couldn’t get a new job and be like, hey, can’t come in. I can’t leave my house. So it made it really difficult for me to be able to go into that world. So I knew I had to focus on creating my own career for myself. And so SEO really stood out to me as something that I enjoyed doing. The more I learned it, the more I enjoyed it. I took a topsy turvy road there. I started a career business with two friends who it was called gay men. Going deeper. The podcast, if there’s anybody out there who likes, it’s all about personal development, sexuality, mental health. And so in that business, I really helped build the structural tech side of everything, like website stuff and infrastructure. And there’s online courses and all these different aspects that went into that business. And I really focused and enjoyed the tech side of it as I built that, because that was my background. And so once we hit the peak, I felt it was time. I gave myself about six months, and I was like, I’m not quite enjoying this as much as I thought. And so I spoke to my co founders and I said, hey, I think my journey here has come to an end. I’d like to go just full on into tech. And then they were very supportive of that and everything was, we navigated that together and then I went full on into tech. And I loved the whole podcasting married with SEO. It was something that I had learned through that business on top of my already existing knowledge of SEO. And it was a magical pairing because I’d never seen anybody talk about it in that way or learn how to utilize it in that way. And then it’s just led me to where I am now.

[00:05:56] Lauren Tilden: Awesome. Okay, so we will get into how podcasting and SEO sort of intersect. But before that, I feel like SEO is one of those topics that feels really intimidating for people. And I guess it doesn’t feel as accessible as like just creating an Instagram account and posting a picture of your thing or your service or whatever. But you and I both know, and you better than anyone, that it’s very, very, very powerful and something worth paying attention to. So I would like everyone to just have an open mind about this. If SEO is not a part of your current strategy and your current marketing, listen to what Callan has to say, because I think you’re going to be pretty persuaded. Let’s start with just like totally back to basics. What is SEO and why is it something that small business owners should be paying attention to?

[00:06:46] Calan Breckon: For sure. So SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s basically optimizing your website so that search engines like Google can find you and rank your content and provide you as the answer to people’s queries. So when you go look something up on Google, it presents you with a bunch of websites. There’s a ranking order that’s not just random, there is so much that actually goes into that that we don’t see that goes into SEO. And so SEO, an SEO person’s job is to help you get to the number one spot. It’s not random. There’s actually a magic and a science that goes into it on how you actually put that all together. And you’re right, it isn’t as accessible as like just starting a social media or starting an Instagram. And it’s not as might not be as sexy, but the long term return you get from investing in your website and investing in the content there, versus investing on social media, I think pays you dividends in the long run. Take, for instance, I think just recently actually, was it. I believe his name is Laithe Ashley. He’s a transgender model, model actor, what have you. He was on pit crew and in drag Race. He went live on tick, I believe is TikTok. And they banned him being like, oh, this is sexual content, because it was. I don’t know what the details are, but there was a lot of talk and conversation around that he’s trans and everything that can go on over there. And so I look at the instances like that, especially in the community, and I go, okay, you’ve built this huge following on rented property that whenever the landowner wants to bulldoze your house down, they can. And so when you invest in social media, that’s the risk you’re taking. You don’t have the rights to your account. If they want to kick you off, you don’t have the right to say, put me back on. This is my audience. This is how I make my money. They can go, I don’t care. And when you invest in SEO and you invest in your own website, nobody can do that to you. You own that land and you own that property. And so one of the best ways that you can start building that, and there’s a lot that goes in here. So I’m not going to go into the weeds, but is putting out regular blog posts. And I know that people are like, oh, blogging is dead, maybe in the sense that it used to be just like, you go and you just write your thoughts and feelings. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about well written articles that are answering questions that your audience has. So, you know, say you’re a crafter and you do a specific type of crafting, maybe it’s crochet. And you can create a blog that on a regular basis you’re talking about crochet, but each article is talking about something slightly different, like this specific stitch or this specific pattern or this specific way. And that’s what we call keywords. You’re targeting those specific keywords so that when somebody goes onto Google and searches up that thing, your website is the thing that pops up. And what that does is that it sends all this free traffic coming to you. That, yes, maybe if you need help in the SEO department, you hire somebody to help you write the articles or optimize those articles. But once you pay for that that lives on your website for the rest of its life and that could be generating a couple hundred, couple thousand, couple hundred thousand viewers a month to your website, which is a more direct line to you because then you can ask them to sign up for your email list, you can send them to another article and you can build this relationship with them in a different way than you can on social media. Social media is a very passive, I’m scrolling through and my brain is turned off. I’m not really here to learn. Depending, I can go on there to learn, but that’s not the main focus. The main focus is to keep your eyeballs there and to keep you entertained. Whereas on your website, when somebody goes to Google, there is intention there, somebody is looking for something and the intention is to get the answer. And it’s Google’s job to provide the best answer. And if you tell and teach Google, hey, my website gives the best answers, it will send traffic your way and then you can build that audience in that way. I hope that gives you enough of an overview to get the picture.

[00:11:11] Lauren Tilden: Yeah, I mean, I’m not an SEO expert, but the way I think about it is just like how do we get found when people are searching for something related to what we have to offer? And I think that was a great explanation of that. You mentioned having a blog and creating consistent, regular content. I know that a big piece of SEO is keywords and like figuring out what is it that people are actually searching for so that we can try to be what shows up for that. Do you have any just like kind of 101 intro level description of what keywords are, how to think about figuring out what the right keywords or key phrases might be for our businesses.

[00:11:52] Calan Breckon: So, yeah, so keywords can be a huge topic when you’re actually doing keyword research. There’s a lot that goes into it, but without getting into the deeper parts of it, some really simple basic things are like general rules of thumb I tell people is post one piece of written content a week and make sure that you’re staying consistent with it. And every time you post, make sure it’s about something aligned to what you do, but slightly different than something else. You don’t ever want two pieces of content talking about the exact same thing. You always want them to talk about something different. So going back to that crocheting again, there’s like the whole umbrella is crocheting, but then as it goes down and all these different sprouts come out of it, there’s different types of stitches in crocheting and so maybe one blog post could be ten or 15 different styles of crocheting or different types of stitch. And then you talk about them a little bit each in that article, and then you take all of those, and now you have ten articles you can write because each one of those stitches could then become its own article that you interlink to and you say, okay, if you want to learn how to do this stitch, I have an article over here. You can go right over there, and I’ll go into way more in depth detail about how exactly to do it. That’s just one example. And when you’re doing keyword research or thinking about what you should talk about, take your topic, take your niche, and the main, I like to say three main key points of your website. And so for me, for my website, that’s business, marketing and entrepreneurship are my kind of three umbrellas that I like to pack everything underneath. And then I pick my articles based on that. And taking it further, I also am an LGBTQ member of the community, and so I like to focus a lot of my articles toward that community because I think we’re underserved in this regard.

And so it gets niche enough that if somebody comes, they’ll know that’s for them. But it’s also broad enough that anybody in a business world can read the article and get the information from it, depending on what I might have talked about. So going and finding what your key words are, your kind of three key umbrella terms, and then ideas underneath those terms that you could talk about. Easy, easy examples, you could go to chat GPT, you know, AI is the talk of the town these days. You can go to chat GPT and type in maybe your umbrella term and go, give me 50 topics or 100 topics to do with this term, or like blog article ideas to do with this term, and it’ll spit out a ton of information. And you can use it like that to generate ideas for yourself so that you’re not stuck there being like, I don’t know what to write about.

[00:14:43] Lauren Tilden: So good. How do we know with keywords? And I won’t go too far into the weeds with keywords because I know it is a huge topic. But how do you know basically, like, how specific to get marketing tips versus marketing tips for creative small business owners in the Seattle area? You know, like, how do you balance that scale of the more specific you get, probably the easier it is to be found if someone’s searching for exactly that, but the less number of people who are searching for exactly that. So how do you decide where to land in that scale of super specific, which is easier to rank for and easier to come up for as a listing for versus super vague, which everyone’s searching for, therefore it’s way harder to show up.

[00:15:27] Calan Breckon: Yeah. So this is one of those things that in general, SEO is going to take longer for you to build. It’s going to be slower, but it’ll pay you back in the long run. And that’s why you don’t ever think about SEO as like a one article or like a month or two. It’s months and years. I would never work with an organization less than six months to twelve months because it takes that long to plot all of this out and to start really developing that know, like, trust factor with Google. Because in essence, you’re also dating. You’re learning how to date Google. If Google doesn’t know who you are, Google’s not going to send traffic to your website. So you can’t think of it in just single article terms. You have to think of it in like my library of content and the more you build that library of content. So part of the attack when you’re coming up with this is, it’s not just this one article I want to rank for this one thing. It is how is this one article going to land on my website? And then what other articles can I write that supports this article or is this article supporting other articles on my website? So they talk to each other and it supports the whole ecosystem so that the more you have, the more Google can look at you and go, wow, this person talks about this specific thing so much, they must be an expert on it. And the more you build that trust with Google, the more websites that link to you, the more traffic you slowly get to your website, the more keywords that slowly appear on your website, the more Google is going to build that trust with you. And the longer you can keep those eyeballs on your website, the more those positive things are going to get sent back to Google saying, hey, this is a really good website to send people to when they’re answering this query. Now, going back to the actual article on figuring out like what you should do, there’s a couple of free things and free tools you can use in order to figure it out. If you have something you want to write about, Google that thing. And then look at those top ten articles and go, okay, who are these articles? Is this like Forbes and some other big websites that like, you’re never going to compete with? Chances are you’re probably not going to outrank those big behemoths in the industry. But if you look up a term and there’s those obscure other blog posts or things you’ve never really seen before, you’re like, okay, this is a collection of a bunch of random websites I might actually be able to rank for this. And you have to go in and then you can see, okay, what have they done on their website? How have they laid things out?

It’s a dance between providing the content but also laying it out in a way people like to see. You don’t want to ever go to a website and just see like a wall of text that puts everybody off. You need to make sure that you have a proper heading. Then you have a thumbnail image, your title image, and then you might have another subheading and then a little explainer or summary saying, hey, this is what you’re going to read in here. I love doing that for my article readers and saying, hey, here’s a quick little synopsis of what you can look forward to reading in this article. So that if they get halfway through and maybe they get a little bit bored or the information is not relevant, they can go, I know later on he promised that he was going to talk about this thing. And so laying things out nicely, adding photos throughout, spacing things out, making sure there’s bullet points, there’s a, there’s a way to paint that picture that Google likes to see now that’s getting into super, like, specific SEO. Like an SEO’s job is to know that rhythm, to know how to paint that picture and to like audit those articles and figure out, okay, we need to add a couple of these words or a couple of those words. There are tools that SEOs like myself will use that actually gives it a rating and a scale rating and tells us, okay, we need a couple more this or we need to take this out, or it needs to be more words or less words. But overall, you could go to Google, look up your thing that you want to write, and then see what else everybody else is doing, and that’ll give you an idea of what you can do. And then it’s your job to then put the spin on or add that little extra je ne sais quoi or what have you to that article. Now, there’s also one other kind of technical thing you can do is you can go to Google Ads. You can use Google Ads for free. It’s not creating ads, but there’s a tool in there called keyword planner, and you can go into that tool and you can put in your keyword and look up how many times it gets searched in Google. And so it’ll tell you how often and how much people are actually searching for that term. So usually it’s good to put like a big list. You can go to chat, GPT, ask for a big list, put that list inside of that Google keyword planner, and then Google will show you, oh, this gets searched a thousand times a month, or this gets searched 100,000, this gets searched none. And through that list you can decide, okay, these keywords get searched a lot. I might want to try and see how I can get those into my blog or into my articles to start building around that. Now that’s one of the topical, very easy things to do, but it’s an idea of where you might be able to start.

[00:20:41] Lauren Tilden: So good.

Okay, if anyone is like, okay, this seems really powerful. I definitely want to be the first results that come up when people are searching for something related to my product. Do you have any tips on, like, how to learn more about SEO and in general, like, if you are a total beginner? Yeah, where would you send someone for that?

[00:21:02] Calan Breckon: I would say YouTube. YouTube is full of so many people who have a lot. There’s a lot of great advice. There’s a lot of not great advice, too. I will fully admit it is full of a lot of tech bros. That’s just who is in the industry. But you can find many diverse people. If you spend the time looking and searching for people that you want to learn from, they are there. They do exist. You can find their YouTube pages and learn as you go. One of the ones that I personally did enjoy learning a lot from, his name is Adam Envoy. He specifically is in a, I don’t want to say affiliate marketing niche, but building out a website where there’s links that are affiliate links and you can build your revenue that way. But a lot of his information is like master classes and quite long YouTube videos. That really explains the deeper concepts and ideas and how you can actually construct a blog article, how you can actually go about doing a lot of this stuff in a deeper manner. So finding stuff on YouTube is definitely a great place to learn and to start.

[00:22:05] Lauren Tilden: Okay, amazing. We will absolutely link to those resources you mentioned as well as Adam Envoy, I believe you said.

[00:22:13] Calan Breckon: Adam Freud. Yeah.

[00:22:15] Lauren Tilden: Okay, we’ll link to him as well on YouTube. That’s awesome. So now I want to talk about how SEO intersects with podcasting, which is something I’m actually personally really interested in as a podcaster. I have not thought a ton about SEO, honestly, like, I just make good content and so far, like, people find it and it’s grown, but I’m sure it could grow more. So I am very curious about how you think about the relationship of SEO and podcasting. Not everyone listening has a podcast or even wants one. But I think podcasting is probably a good fit for more people than think. So definitely I do want to have this conversation, so I’ll just start there and then I’ll dig in with more. But go ahead.

[00:23:00] Calan Breckon: Perfect. Yeah, I love podcasting. It’s one of the.

It’s one of the most perfect mediums to connect, to build an audience, to build that know and trust with an audience. You get time in their ear. That is, whether they’re on a run or doing the dishes, or out doing errands, or getting ready in the morning, having their coffee. That is a very intimate experience with somebody, and it takes a while to get comfortable. And right now, we’re not on video, we’re just doing audio. But my podcast is business. Gay is video and audio. And so there’s so many different ways that you can repurpose that content. And that’s why I get so passionate about it, because so many people just do a podcast and kind of throw it out there, and then they wonder, why isn’t it growing or wasn’t doing that? And it’s because there’s so many different aspects to it that you could implement. One of the main things that I will say is that if you want to build a blog, but you don’t have any interest in writing, you could actually utilize a podcast to do that for you. So one of the first things I’m going to say is that if you were to choose to have a podcast, it’s really important to look at the platforms that are available for you to use, and that your first course of action should be to not use a platform that doesn’t allow you to host the podcast on your website. So one company that does this well is called Castos. It’s who I host with because it was one of the only ones that I could find. But basically what happens is that your podcast is a lot of data, so it needs to be housed somewhere. Castos is the place that is housed, but you want the capability to make it look like it lives on your own website. And this goes back to SEO, because if it’s living on your website, when somebody looks something up and you’ve done a podcast on it, the chances of them being sent to your website for that podcast episode is a lot higher because now that content has a home. And so each episode needs to have, it’s almost like its own blog post on your website. And so when you have your own blog post on your website, that’s where the show notes go. People can come and click and they can play the episode there, or they can choose to listen on Apple or listen on Spotify or listen wherever they want.

But that helps you build multiple things into your website. It helps you build content. It helps Google get to know who you are and the kind of content you’re putting together. And one of the most important factors is that you own this property, you own this real estate, because it goes back to owning your asset, which is your website. If you’re hosting your podcast somewhere else on there’s podbean and there’s a bunch of different ones, all of that traffic is going to their website. And building their website’s what’s called a domain rating. It’s building all that trust with Google. It’s building all those links back to it. You’re putting this content together, you’re building this content. Why aren’t you getting all of that benefit? And so one of the important things that I really stress is when somebody’s choosing to start a podcast, if they want to utilize it for SEO, is that it needs to be built so that it’s hosted on their website and that each episode has its own page. And we’re going to dive deeper into this, but I want to give you a chance to jump in before we go further.

[00:26:27] Lauren Tilden: Okay, so interesting.

I’m wondering, this is a totally self serving question, but like, I use buzzsprout, for example, but I have a squarespace with all the show notes are in squarespace. So there’s a page for each episode. Is that what you’re saying? Or does the audio content even need to be hosted on your own domain?

[00:26:47] Calan Breckon: No. So that’s good. I started out on Squarespace originally and I had my podcast going through it. Yes. So there’s two different ways you need to think about this, and understanding computer language is that there is the outward storefront, which is your website, and then there is the place where all the data is stored for your website, which is the server. These are two different things, and a lot of people don’t necessarily understand this concept. So a server is where the data is stored when it’s not being used. And then your website is the storefront that displays that data. So these two things talk to each other and it displays that data. And so it sounds like your host. Who is your host again?

[00:27:35] Lauren Tilden: Buzzsprout.

[00:27:36] Calan Breckon: Buzzsprout. So buzzsprout is your server. It’s your host. It’s where all that data is stored. You pay for it to live there because it’s a lot of data. But your website should be the place where people can see that data and consume that data. Now, I know that’s also going to go to Apple and Spotify and all those places, and that’s where it should go. But making sure that it is talking through your website is going to be more powerful than not. And so there’s just specific ways to do that. And I don’t, you know, we can’t cover all of that inside of this one episode. But I do have a couple articles on my website that talks about this more in depth. But yeah, that’s how I can best describe that.

[00:28:15] Lauren Tilden: That’s really helpful. And I would love to get those articles. If you want to shoot those over, we will link to those for sure. Okay, so I’m guessing that one of the P’s of podcasting is platform. Is that what we just talked about? But kind of. What are the three P’s of podcasting?

[00:28:33] Calan Breckon: Yeah, so I have a three p’s of podcasting when somebody actually wants to set up their own podcast and do it properly. So, so number one is properly prepare your RSS feed. And that kind of is like platform.

But what your RSS feed is, it’s the language that computers understand and read your episodes. And so each podcast show will have its own RSS feed. Now, buzzsprout will probably have sent you and given you like, this is your RSS feed. The way that I would teach somebody to set it up using the casto system is that your RSS feed would actually be your own website’s domain. It would be like callumbrechen.com podcast forward Slash RSS feed. And that would mean that all the websites, all the Internet is going to my website to read that data that is coming from my host person provider. It’s not going to my host provider to read that data because that is bypassing my website. And I’m not getting the benefit of all that juice coming through my website. So that’s the first p of podcasting is prepare your RSS feed through your own website. Now, not everybody can do this. And that’s okay. You don’t absolutely have to because there are ways to navigate it. Like you said, you have your show notes on your website.

That’s great. I’m going to dive into that a little bit later when we talk about transcripts. The second p of the three piece of podcasting is publishing weekly. Some people hate this, but if you want to build trust with an audience, you need to show them why you’re trustworthy. You need to publish at the same time, on the same day every single week. Because the more you show up and the more you prove to people that you’re trustworthy, that you’re going to show up for them, the more willing they are to give you their time. Because it’s like a relationship. Why would I invest in you when you don’t show up half the time and I can’t see you being consistent? We like consistency. We like habits. And when you build a habit, especially around a podcast, that is so powerful, one of the habits I have is I listen to pivot podcast every Tuesday and every Friday because that’s when they release episodes. And there was one time when they didn’t, and I was beside myself. I was like, why isn’t there an episode? Like, I was so frustrated because it’s part of my morning routine on a Tuesday and a Friday. And so even just missing one episode can be like a distrust. It creates a little seed of distrust in a listener. And you never want to give that opportunity to people. You want to be that trusted person, that trusted friend in their ear that they can lean on week after week. And that means you got to plan ahead. You got to prepare episodes weeks and months in advance so that you never run into a situation, even if you’re sick, even if you go away, everything is programmed in and it’s going to come out week after week. And then the third p of podcasting is promote your own website. So again, when you’re sharing your links, when you’re sharing things with people, you’re sharing the link that goes back to your own website that has, you know, click here to listen to this episode or click here to go to Apple. Here’s the show notes for this episode. And then moving into the next kind of part, we’re gonna talk about the transcripts, which is really important. So those are the three p’s of podcasting. Properly prepare your RSS feed, publish weekly, and promote your own website.

[00:32:11] Lauren Tilden: So good. So good. I’m taking notes here. You mentioned transcripts. Tell me about transcripts. How does that come into play?

[00:32:19] Calan Breckon: Yeah, so this is the part that it gets really exciting if you’ve done the other things and you have your own website. So let’s take yours, for example, you have your website and you have your show notes. I’m going to guess, do you have a little like player that you also put on that page so they can also listen to the. Yeah, so you have all the things. Now one of the things that you need to do is I put it in a drop down because I work on WordPress. So I have a drop down option where I then cas dose provides free transcripts. So I just copy them. I go into word, I do a little doctoring because it’s always like Calan Breckon b, it’s not named, but I go in there, I add the name, switch things up and then I take those transcripts and I paste them into the dropdown so that when somebody comes to the website it doesn’t show. But if they click on that drop down, they could read the transcripts. A, this makes it more accessible because we want to be recognized. Not all people have the privilege to hear, but b, what this also does is it feeds into your SEO because Google will still be able to come and it’s called crawling that information. And so Google will come, it will crawl the information in the transcript. So instead of spending hours and days putting together and writing this article, you spend a half hour talking and then those transcripts get turned into written text. That written text gets put onto your website and then that informs Google about what your website is about. Because naturally if you have a podcast, you’re talking about the things that you’re wanting people to know you for. And so that’s adding to that volume of library of content for Google to go, oh, we know who this person is. Now this isn’t perfect SEO. It’s not like writing a great, perfect article, but it definitely does add to the robustness of your website. And Google can also determine and understand like, oh, this is a podcast, this is audio content, these are the other things that are here. This transcript is what is in this podcast. Because now what can happen is that when somebody searches something, it can recommend that page for your podcast. Not only are they finding out who you are, but you’re possibly getting a new listener to your podcast. Now this could happen if you just put it on like a bean sprout or all the other options that you have, but you tend to get lost in the noise because everybody else is on that website and everybody else has that stuff going on. But not everybody else is doing these other kind of little detailed things of building on their own land, which is what your transcripts is helping you do so good.

[00:34:57] Lauren Tilden: I love the idea of putting it in a dropdown, I think I have fallen off a little bit, honestly, on my transcripts, and it’s on the list. So this is pushing it up the list to put those back on there. But when we were doing it, I think we were linking to a separate page. No, the transcripts were a separate page.

[00:35:14] Calan Breckon: So, yeah, yeah, no, that’s a mistake that I’ve seen other people do that. They’re like, oh, this is just here because people need it. They don’t actually understand the language of how Google works. Like, it definitely has its connector pieces, but it’s not going to be as powerful if it’s not living on that page. And so if you were to go to my mine as an example. Callumbrechen.com podcast, you’ll see all the different. You can click on any link and then you can see how I lay out the episodes, how I lay out the show notes, and then the transcript is right at the very bottom. And if you click that, it opens it up and you can see it all. But this all gives Google so much more data to understand who you are. And it brings your chances of people finding you organically and naturally through Google so much higher. And I always say, why would you invest in advertising on Facebook or Instagram or these other places when Google literally has a bajillion users every single day searching up a bajillion things every single day. If you’re just on Instagram, you’re just on Instagram. If you’re just on Facebook, you’re just on Facebook. You get tied to those places, and it doesn’t really play well with as much of everything else. Like, you can’t find something on TikTok by going onto Instagram and looking it up. If you go to Google, everybody can find anything on Google because it’s all connected in that system.

[00:36:39] Lauren Tilden: Okay, I hope that folks are persuaded, if nothing, if you don’t feel like podcasting is right, for you at least really thinking seriously about SEO and your content on your website to make sure that you are doing what you can to be found that way, instead of just relying on things like social media, which is probably the biggest mistake that people in my audience make, I would say, is thinking that marketing equals social media, when really it’s not even the most effective form of marketing. I’m not saying don’t do social media, but I am saying let’s definitely not put all of our eggs in that basket. And SEO is a really important thing to think about. So thank you so much for all of the gold so far in this episode. Any final thoughts on SEO or podcasting before we start to transition a little bit?

[00:37:27] Calan Breckon: Yeah, I will say that there’s a couple of must haves on your website. One of the things that people don’t understand about SEO is they’re like, oh, I just put up my website and that’s it. People can just find me. That’s not how it works. At least that’s definitely not how it works anymore. You do have to put out content regularly for Google to know and trust you, but must haves that you need to have on your website just for Google to even be like, okay, we’ll send people your way, is you need obviously the homepage, you need to have an about page, you need to have a contact page. You don’t necessarily need to put your like phone number, like your home number. And I also wouldn’t recommend that. But if you have a business number, your business location, like these things need to be included in that contact page. A blog or content page specifically. And then getting into the deeper parts of it using a tool called Google Search console. You just use your email, you go in there, you sign up, you say, hey, this is my website. What that does is that if you want Google to pay attention to your content, you need to submit it to Google on the Google search console and it’ll do it faster because there’s billions of websites. If you want Google to start, you know, crawling your stuff, as soon as you post it, you just go in there, you take that link, that URL, you put it in there and you say, hey, I just posted this, check this out. And it’ll just speed up that process a little bit for you. And then simple things like making sure that you’re putting your headings incorrectly. Like your heading one is your main title. There should only be one heading on one page. That’s it. No more heading ones. Everything else that’s important should be under like either a heading two or a heading three, depending on their importance. And that’s how things should be split up. There should be differences. Again, it shouldn’t be just a wall of text adding in photos that aren’t super large. This is another one that’ll slow down your website. Don’t use a Png, use a jpeg. Why? Because a PNG is going to take a lot longer for it to load because it has to gather that data and then send it to a person, whereas a JPEG will load a lot faster because it’s not as big of a file. These are just little, tiny things that most people have no idea about but can make a big difference, because if you have a slow website as well, Google’s going to mark that against you. And so if you have two equal websites, one’s faster, but they have the exact same information, they’re going to send the traffic to the faster one. Because Google’s job is to provide the best service possible for that user and making sure that your website is going fast. You can go to websites. Google has a free checker. You can just Google website speed tests, put in your website, find out how fast it’s going, and then it’ll tell you where you can work on. So. So those are must haves and the last little bits about SEO that you should check out.

[00:40:15] Lauren Tilden: Take notes. Go rewind and take notes. So many good things so far on this episode. I want to talk a little bit about your podcast, the business gay, which I love, because I think that there’s. I mean, I know that there’s certainly not enough representation for so many communities in the business world, and the queer community being one of them, I can speak to personally. It’s hard to find representations. I am just delighted that you started this podcast and what it’s all about. I would love for you to just tell us a little bit about this podcast. Why did you start it, and what is your goal or your mission with the podcast?

[00:40:53] Calan Breckon: Yeah, so I started the business Gay podcast because I love podcasting. I’ve had multiples. The gay Men going deeper podcast is, if you look at gay podcasts on any of the platforms, you’re going to find the gay men going deeper podcasts. So I know that I knew that there was power behind it, and when I left that business, I decided I wanted to go into business and support LGBTQ businesses specifically because I didn’t see any of that representation. I was like, why don’t we have any? I know Sam Altman runs chat GPT and he’s gay, and Tim Cook is running apple. Like, these are two of the biggest tech companies right now. But there’s no real true, what I would call representation of the whole encompassing LGBTQ business world, all the way from small, solo entrepreneurs up to big tech kind of companies and organizations. And I looked on the charts, and I saw nothing. I saw tons of marketing, tons of business, tons of everything, but nothing that specifically spoke to our community, because our community has different needs. We have a different life that we’ve lived. We have different understandings and things that I think bond us together as a community that need to be spoken about. And so I wanted to give that platform to people to say, hey, we’re here, we’re queer. We’re doing amazing things in business, and somebody needs to shine a light on it and give these people the opportunity to talk about the amazing things they’re doing and building in this world that are making it a better place for all of us to live in.

[00:42:24] Lauren Tilden: So good. Everyone, go check it out. It’ll be linked in the show notes, and you might find yours truly on it sometime soon. So absolutely, go have that episode as well. And then just in general, more broadly, like, what role has podcasting had on your business, on getting clients on community building, like any of those things?

[00:42:43] Calan Breckon: It is one of the best ways to build community.

Honestly, it’s so selfish and self serving, really, because it is such a great way. I’ve met so many amazing people and been able to interview such great people and get access to people. I never would have had the opportunity you need to have access to had I not been like, hey, I think you’re amazing. Would you like to be a guest on my podcast? Because selfishly, we all do talking about ourselves. At least most of us do enjoy talking about ourselves. And so by being able to interview these people, it gives me a relationship builder. It provides value to them. They get to tell their stories. It provides value to me because I then have content that I can share, and it’s a win on all sides.

And so it’s just provided me with so much opportunity in that regard and connected so many people and opened so many doors, and I just. I get so many people reaching out to me on LinkedIn now. And even yourself. Your assistant found me and just sent me an email, and I was like, hey, you’re like the only person doing this. Do you want to have Lauren on the podcast? I was like, oh, my gosh, yeah, of course I’d love to have Lauren on the podcast. And so it creates these connections I never even would have thought about or had access to had I not had the podcast. And it’s putting that goodness just like this podcast. It’s putting that goodness out into the world and sharing it with others. And everybody’s winning in that situation, and it makes me really happy that I get to be a part of doing that.

[00:44:08] Lauren Tilden: Yeah. Yeah. I love everything you just said, and I totally resonate. Obviously, every time I have an interview, I’m creating content for the podcast, and I’m thinking about my audience and wanting to be of service to them. But most of the time, I’m also learning a ton. I’m meeting someone that I didn’t know before. Like, it’s. There’s so many positive outcomes from it. Yeah. Ten out of ten would recommend podcasting.

[00:44:33] Calan Breckon: Yeah, 100%.

[00:44:35] Lauren Tilden: We are getting there with time. I love to keep picking your brain about all things SEO and podcasting, but I want to respect your time. It’s Friday and Callan’s on the east coast, so we’re going to let him go pretty soon. But first, I would love to hear from you. How do you approach doing good for your small business?

[00:44:51] Calan Breckon: I like to focus a lot of my work on supporting the LGBTQ community. So, like I said, I’m all about business. I’m all about growth and all these things. But really, I want my work to reflect in the LGBTQ community. I want to champion our voices. I want to give opportunity. I want to level the playing field. I want to start changing stats. 0.5% of all venture capital that has ever been invested over the last 20 years, 0.5% of. I think it’s over $2 trillion has ever been invested in a LGBTQ business or somebody who identified as LGBTQ as the business founder. Those kinds of things need to change. Those kinds of stats need to change, and I want to be a part of changing that. And so with my podcast, in the work that I do, in everything I do in business, I’m always looking at, well, what are you doing for the community? Like, I have everybody on my podcast. It’s not just, you know, LGBTQ people. I have supporters, I have allies. But part of my due diligence is, what are you actually doing for the community? What can I see that you have done? Where can I recognize that you’re actually a champion and a supporter? Order for us, because we do need the pendulum to swing back. We’re nowhere near an equilibrium. We have to go in the other direction first. And I think we’re seeing a lot of this in the politics of the world today, of what’s going on. The reason we’re being rallied against so hard is because that pendulum is swinging. And that, to me, is a sign of we’re getting there because it’s always going to get harder near the end, before it gets easier. And so that’s as hard as it is. I know that’s always darkest before the sunrise. And so we’re getting there, and that’s a signal to me that we’re doing good, and I want to be a part of that story.

[00:46:40] Lauren Tilden: Snaps, snaps amen. Love it.

Yay. What is one small business that you admire?

[00:46:48] Calan Breckon: So I’m going to be a little self serving here because it’s one that I’m involved with now. But I’d like to say the Bo platform, you can find it at the Boplatform CA, and it is a startup, and it’s gearing up to be basically a queer, all encompassing, lgbtq, welcoming, Netflix esque streaming service with multiple other layers that are going to be involved in it with data driven shows and educational pieces. And we want it to be open to all ages. I find a lot of queer content is, especially in the high quality, like, tv realms, movies, and that it tends to be a little hyper sexualized. I think that’s changing. Like, things like Heartstopper and other shows are coming about where it’s showing a younger audience and it’s providing that education, but I want to see more of that. I think there needs to be more of that. And so the bow is aiming to be, you know, that queer streaming platform that not only is are you able to come and watch that content, but it’s going to be part of producing and actually putting that content out there into the world for the queer community. So I’m very excited about what they’re doing there.

[00:48:02] Lauren Tilden: So exciting. I’m so excited to check it out, too. Obviously, that will be linked in the show notes. What is one book you would recommend?

[00:48:09] Calan Breckon: I have two, I’d say. I know, right? So atomic habits by James clear. I know everybody talks about it, but honestly, that changed my life. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t lazy until I read that book. I always thought that I was the problem, that I was lazy. I just. I couldn’t do it. Even though I knew it was going to be good for me or even though I knew I had to do it for work. I couldn’t get over that. And I just kept negatively talking to myself, being like, I’m the problem. It’s me. And it wasn’t. It was the habits that I had learned, that I had built that were inadvertently dictating my life, that I was unconsciously doing. And until I read that book and I understood it on a deeper level, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and it allowed me to make those slight changes, those 1% shifts and changes, and create better habits, that I am more productive now than I have ever been, and I am more lazy now than I have ever been. And it’s because I’ve learned how to marry the two together. That works for me. And then the second is dare to lead by Brene Brown. I freaking love Brene Brown. She is like, hearts love that woman. And dare to lead is just a really great book for leaders and people who want to, to create this new era of working in the workspace that we’re at a cultural shift. People are recognizing it. It’s always going to be growing pains, and it takes, it takes generational change to truly change things. But I think if you want to be a leader in a workspace, even if it’s just you or it’s just you’re running a small team, dare to lead will give you the tools you need to learn how to navigate that in a more easy flowing manner with less friction.

[00:49:52] Lauren Tilden: I don’t know if anyone’s recommended dare to leave, and I honestly haven’t read it. I’ve read other Brene Brown. I’ve listened, I’ve watched the TED talks, I’ve done all the Brene Brown things, but I have not read dare to leave. Thank you for suggesting that.

[00:50:04] Calan Breckon: Yeah, you’re welcome.

[00:50:05] Lauren Tilden: Atomic habits is such a. It’s like the amount of people’s lives who that book has changed is. I can’t think of another book that high, so.

[00:50:14] Calan Breckon: Right?

[00:50:15] Lauren Tilden: Yes. If you have not read it, definitely add that to your list. Okay. Callum, this has been so much fun. Please tell everyone where they can find you, where they can connect with you online. Follow your work, all the things magic.

[00:50:28] Calan Breckon: So you can find [email protected]. and you can also find me at the business Gay podcast. You can find that on Apple, Spotify, wherever you can find [email protected]. podcast. And then even though I’m not a huge fan of social media and I don’t love it, I do probably most actively post on my instagram, which is catch Cal. So that’s catch and then c a l. Yeah.

[00:50:53] Lauren Tilden: Yay. Okay. Thank you so much for being here. This has been such a blast. I know folks are going to learn so much, and it’s been just, it’s been so great to get to know you and chat with you.

[00:51:04] Calan Breckon: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I love sharing my knowledge with your audience.

[00:51:08] Lauren Tilden: What did I tell you? Such a goldmine of an interview. Links to all of the recommendations shared in this episode and where you can find and connect with Calan can be found makinggoodpodcast.com/244 I would love for you to take a screenshot of your podcast player while you’re listening to the episode and tag me on social media orantilden if you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful to have your support. Here are a couple of ways that you can give back to making good first, I’d be so honored if you’d leave a rating and review in your favorite podcast player. And don’t forget to subscribe and follow. And second, if you have a friend that you think would enjoy the podcast, send them the link. Today’s episode can be found makinggoodpodcast.com/244 this episode was produced and edited by Corinne Monaco. Thank you for being here and for focusing on making a difference with your small business. Talk to you next time.

[00:52:01] Calan Breckon: Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope you enjoyed this episode where it was a little bit of a flip the switch, flip the script, and I was the one being interviewed. Lauren is absolutely fantastic, so I highly recommend you go and check out her making good podcast if you’d like to find out all the amazing, magical stuff, because today’s episode was actually written, produced, and edited by her and her team. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.