Ep 122: How to Audit Your Podcast – 7 Easy-to-Follow Tasks to Grow Your Podcast

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of Podcasting for Indie Podcasters with myself, Verissie.

If you've had a podcast for any amount of time, you've probably wondered to yourself if you're kind of doing things right or if you can reach more people to boost your audience, or you've probably wondered a lot of things about how you can generally grow your show.

So in this case, a podcast audit is probably one of the best activities you can do for your podcast.

And you might be thinking, well, why is that?

And it's because podcast auditing helps you see where your podcast show currently is and helps you to map out where where you can make improvements for your show.

So, first of all, what is a podcast audit?

Well, in short, it's a systematic process of examining and reviewing your show to ensure that it meets expected standards or expectations.

And most commonly, those are going to be the standards and expectations set by yourself.

Auditing your show means looking at a range of areas, particularly from the listener's point of view, to figure out how to make improvements and generally up your podcasting game.

Often, podcast audits can focus on weaknesses and areas for improvement, but that isn't all that auditing is actually about.

Auditing is also recognizing where you're doing things well and the strength of your podcast, as well as areas for improvement.

So during your podcast audit, you're going to choose to review different parts of your podcast, and this could be the structural format of your episodes, the sound quality of your recordings, consistency of your release schedule.

You could be looking at engagement stats of your audience, feedback you receive from your listeners, your podcast SEO, so many different things.

But I am going to give you a direction within this episode, if you've never audited your podcast before, of where you can go.

And then you can gradually, as you get more comfortable with auditing your podcast, you can add things in or out, depending on what's relevant for your show.

But the goal of a podcast audit overall is to gain that clear understanding of what's working well and what needs improvement.

I'd also like to say at this point that I am going to recommend several times probably throughout this episode to go and look at your own content, because you need to be reviewing your content in order to audit it.

Now, I know that this can feel really, really cringey to review your own work, particularly to listen back to your own episodes.

But the more you do it, the more comfortable you'll become with auditing your work.

And also it's a crucial part that self development when it comes to being a podcaster.

So why run a podcast order?

I think this is a great question to get to start off with and I've got five main reasons to run an audit for your show.

First one is to give yourself some kudos for how well you are doing because at the end of the day you have created and run this entire show probably by yourself, most likely with very little input from anybody.

And that's absolutely amazing.

So before you dive into the nitty gritty and you start getting really hard on yourself as to what maybe hasn't gone so well or what you can improve on, what I want you to do is just be really proud of what you have actually achieved.

I fully appreciate that maybe your first episodes weren't as polished as your later ones.

But you know what?

That doesn't matter at all.

Number two, Identify areas for improvement.

I've already mentioned this.

This is at the end of the day the main reason for auditing your podcast.

And it could be that you end up realizing that maybe the quality of your content needs improvement.

Your delivery, your show notes, the value of your episodes.

Whatever it is, you're going to be figuring out some ways of improving your show.

Number three is to improve listener engagement and this could be through feedback that you gathered during the audit.

I'll talk about this a little bit more later on.

Or it could be that you've actually gone out and you have asked for feedback through a feedback survey or what have you.

You need to remember if you are doing tailored feedback forms to an audience by through your mailing list or asking on social media.

A lot of the time people are not very good at filling out feedback forms.

If they do, they either don't do them or they don't do them very well.

Because people filling out feedback forms need to know that there's something in it for them.

You know, every time you buy something online, you ask for some sort of feedback.

Anytime you do anything, people want some sort of feedback.

But I'll talk about getting organic feedback a little bit later in the episode.

Number four is to maintain your own standards.

You have probably got your own standards in terms of how you want your show to be presented, how you want your show to sound, and through auditing you can actually Figure out whether or not you are living up to those standards that you're setting yourself.

Number five is to stay organized and on track, because auditing your podcast can really help you with your production schedule and by reviewing your past episodes and planning for the future.

And I'll give you an example of this.

I've recently audited both my blog and also my podcast episodes.

And what I found when I did this was that I had an absolute ton of blog posts that had no corresponding podcast episode with them.

So I was essentially making the workload more for myself because I was creating content for the blog, content for the podcast, and I was like, well, hang on, this makes no sense.

I had some blog posts that fitted with some episodes and not others.

And I was like, well, hang on a minute, I'm doubling my work.

If I've got a podcast episode, I should have a blog post about it.

I've got a blog post, then I should have a podcast episode about it.

So immediately that has created a whole list of episode ideas.

And that was all came from just a couple of hours worth of auditing.

How often should you audit your podcast?

For me, I think that you should be doing a deep dive on your podcast annually, but at the same time, you might not like doing deep dives and spending a few hours on this or a couple of hours on this.

You might want to review smaller things in smaller segments or more manageable seg more regularly.

So you might want to do more of a mini audit every quarter or every half a year perhaps.

But I do think that a decent podcast audit where you really dive deep, get into the weeds and the nitty gritty of your show, you need to be doing that, I think, at least yearly.

So how are we going to audit your podcast?

I am now going to go through seven things that you could be looking at when you audit your own podcast.

And I would recommend that you don't have to do this in one massive chunk.

I did this over, as I said before, I did my podcast audit.

It took me probably a few hours, but I did it over the course of about a week, just dipping in and out to bits and pieces because it made it more manageable.

One of the tasks that you can do, and you don't have to do any of these tasks in any particular order.

These are just as I was writing and planning the show These are just the list of tasks that I came up with.

So one of the tasks you can do is listen to your part episode.

I've just said this.

I know that it's really cringey to listen to your own voice and to listen to your episodes.

I completely get that.

It's important that you choose maybe three, four episodes.

They could be from way back at the beginning, your recent episode.

Whenever they are, pick three or four episodes and just really listen with a critical ear and think about, you know, is your intro still living up standard?

Is your outro performing as well as you think it could be?

What's the sound quality?

Do you think you could improve that?

I'll have you promise to talk about one thing, but then you actually completely went off on a tangent and you didn't deliver what you actually promised you were going to deliver for that episode.

The second thing you can review are your analytics and not just look at download numbers.

It's really easy to go, oh, they got X amount of downloads for this episode or X amount of downloads in this month.

What does that actually mean?

Particularly when it comes to listener habits and engagement.

So use your analytics to answer these following questions.

Which are your least listened to episodes?

Which are your most listened to episodes?

Which are your least and most downloaded episodes?

Which episodes have the best completion percentage?

Which platforms are your episodes being listened on, and who are your listeners in terms of their gender, age and location?

Is this your target audience?

Because by getting the information for these questions, you're going to be informing yourself as to which kind of content you need to be producing for future episodes.

Third task is gathering feedback.

I previously mentioned this a little bit in the episode, but I would recommend really looking at the feedback that your show has gained organically and what I mean by this are your reviews left on podcast directories, comments about your episodes on social media, and emails or DMs from listeners about your show.

This type of feedback is really, really invaluable because it's unsolicited most of the time.

People have gone out of their way to actually leave that review, even if you've asked for it.

People have still had to take that couple of minutes out their day to leave that review or reply to your email newsletter or send you a dm, whatever it is.

And that kind of information is so invaluable, even if it's just one line of I loved this episode.

This was really, really useful, or I love the how to or I love how you explained this, or I found this really funny I found this really thought provoking.

That's going to give you information as to which episodes and which type of content is resonating most with your audience.

And that's going to help you develop your content plan going forward.

Fourth talk is evaluate your branding.

So take a really critical look at your podcast branding.

Things like your cover art, your website, episode artwork, social media profiles.

Is everything cohesive?

Does it convey the premise of your show and how do you feel when you look at that branding?

For example, does it make you feel happy, serious, inspired?

You know, if you're having a show where you are interviewing people, inspiring journeys into entrepreneurship, for example, does your branding make you feel inspired or does it make you feel really dull and corporate?

Because those two things are then not speaking to each other.

Do you have a show where you're talking about, I don't know, football fixtures with your friend, but it's quite laughing and chatty and it's quite an uplifting, not comedy, but it's quite an uplifting show.

But then does the branding, do the colors that you've picked out, does your show cover up?

For example, does it make you feel really bored?

Need those things that then aren't thinking together.

So think about what your branding conveys and does that match the tone of your show?

The fig task, which I put this at number five, I actually think it's probably one of the most important ones.

So even though this task number five, as I said, these are in no particular order and don't skip this one at all.

But Google yourself, or more than yourself, more specifically, Google your show.

What actually shows up on the first page of Google when you type your show's name in, what kind of results do you get?

Because ideally that whole first page should just be dominated with your show on multiple podcasting directories on YouTube, if it's on YouTube.

Also your blog, if you've got a blog as well or a website to go with your show, if you're not seeing that information on first page of Google, that's a sign that you actually need to work on your SEO strategy.

So think in terms of keywords that people are searching for when they are looking for your show.

Type those keywords not just into Google, but also into podcast directories like Spotify and Apple podcasts and any other smaller directories that your analytics tell you that your audience is listening to your show on as well and see what is coming up.

And if you're coming up high in the search results, brilliant.

And if not, again, maybe that's something that's telling you that you need to work on your podcast SEO strategy.

So I'll give you an example.

And I appreciate that I have recently changed the podcast show to Podcasting for Indie Podcasters.

But just for the sake of an example here when you went on to Apple Podcasts in the last month, typed in podcasting tips, then Lazy Girls Guide to Podcasting showed up in the top three result on Apple Podcasts.

And that is because the podcast is optimized for that SEO search keyword.

I know that's what people are looking for, so I've only just switched the name over to Podcasting for Indie Podcaster, so I'm going to order that again soon to see whether or not that has made an impact and whether or not I am actually still ranking for podcasting tips, for example.

Remember though, when you are optimizing your content for keywords, what your audience is searching for isn't always the same thing that you think they're searching for.

So it's worth keeping an eye on the keywords that you're using in your show notes, in your episode titles, podcast titles, blog posts, et cetera.

And don't be afraid to tweak them accordingly as you get more information about what your audience is searching for.

Task 6 is plan for the future.

You're going to use all of this information that you have been gathering to either create an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet or piece of paper diary, whatever it is that you use to plan your content for the future, to plan your episodes moving forward, and also making little notes to yourself.

If you're noticing that maybe you do go off on a tangent, then do you need to make sure that you actually have a podcast script or bullet points with you when you are recording as well?

The seventh thing you are going to review when doing a podcast order is your podcast title and tagline.

I absolutely know that naming your podcast can feel like an absolute marathon of a task, because to date I have named and renamed two separate podcasts.

But if you're struggling to get listeners, it's really key to look at your title and tagline to see if they can be optimized for search.

Witty and clever podcast titles make us smile, and they're great.

But as indie podcasters, it can be hard to get your show found by your ideal audience if your podcast title and tagline don't include any keywords at all that link to what your audience is searching for.

So it's really important to include at least one keyword in your podcast title and tagline that can really help get your show found by the right listener.

And once they found your show, having a keyword that can help them qualify to listen to your show is also really important.

So if your show is for female entrepreneurs and you have included that in your podcast title or in your tagline, somebody finds your show is automatically qualifying themselves to listen to that show if they are a female entrepreneur.

So Final Thoughts on Running a Podcast Audit Auditing your podcast can take many forms.

You might want to do all seven of the activities that I have suggested in this episode.

You might just want to take one or two.

It really depends on how much of a deep dive you want to take into your show.

If you're near the beginning of your shows, maybe it's only been running a couple of months, or maybe if it's running a couple of years, you're probably going to want to dive deeper if it's been running longer than if it has only had a very short lifespan in the podcast world.

Also, remember that you can do just one of these activities.

You can spread them out.

You can spend five minutes on an audit.

You can also spend hours diving into the weeds of your show.

And however you audit your podcast, a regular review is really worthwhile, especially if you aren't seeing the results that you want to be seeing.

A good podcast audit to recap will make you feel proud of what you've achieved so far, identify areas for improvement and improve listener engagement and help you plan your show for future as well.

I hope as ever you have found this episode useful.

If you have, please subscribe on whichever platform you are currently listening on and otherwise I will see you next episode.