From 500 to 12,000 Monthly Visitors Through SEO

The Challenge

Emily Nakamura launched Design for Founders in late 2022 with a mission: help non-designer founders understand and implement good design principles. Her episodes covered everything from UI/UX basics to brand strategy.

Despite consistent content and a growing subscriber base of 5,800 listeners, Emily's website was getting almost no organic traffic. Her podcast lived in a silo, invisible to the millions of founders searching Google for design help.

The SEO Problem

"I'd spent two years building this library of design knowledge," Emily explains. "But unless someone already knew about my podcast, they'd never find it. Google couldn't index my audio content."

She had tried writing blog posts manually, but the time investment was unsustainable. A single post took 3-4 hours to research and write, on top of the time already spent creating episodes.

The Podhood Difference

Emily started using Podhood specifically for its SEO-optimized blog generation. The AI transformed her episodes into comprehensive articles that captured the key insights while targeting relevant search keywords.

"The first time I saw the AI-generated blog post, I was skeptical. But then I started editing it, and realized—there wasn't much to edit. It had pulled out all the important points and structured them perfectly for SEO."

The Traffic Explosion

Within six months of implementing Podhood's blog strategy, Design for Founders saw remarkable growth:

• Organic traffic: 500 → 12,000 monthly visitors
• Keywords ranked: 0 → 47 first-page rankings
• New listeners from search: 200+ per month

The blog became the primary discovery channel for new listeners, surpassing social media and word-of-mouth.

Unexpected Benefits

The SEO success led to opportunities Emily hadn't anticipated:

• Guest inquiries: Experts started reaching out to be featured on the podcast
• Speaking invitations: Conference organizers found her through search
• Consulting leads: Founders contacted her for design consulting

"I got podcast guests from organic search," Emily laughs. "People who found my blog posts, listened to a few episodes, and reached out to be interviewed. That never happened before."

The Content Flywheel

Emily describes her new workflow as a "content flywheel":

1. Record episode with design insights
2. Podhood generates SEO-optimized blog post
3. Blog ranks on Google for design queries
4. New listeners discover podcast through blog
5. Some listeners become consulting clients
6. Client work informs new episode topics

"Each piece of content feeds the next," she explains. "The podcast builds authority, the blog captures search traffic, and everything works together."

Quality Matters

Emily emphasizes that AI content generation only works when the source material is good:

"Garbage in, garbage out. If your episodes are shallow, the blog posts will be too. But if you're creating genuinely valuable content—which most serious podcasters are—the AI does an amazing job of translating that to written form."

Advice for Podcasters

For podcasters looking to improve their SEO, Emily offers this guidance:

• Think in keywords: Consider what your target audience is searching for when planning episodes
• Be comprehensive: Thorough episodes make for thorough blog posts that rank well
• Be patient: SEO takes 3-6 months to show results. Don't give up too early.
• Interlink content: Connect related blog posts to build topical authority

The Bigger Picture

Looking back, Emily sees her pre-Podhood approach as fundamentally flawed:

"I was creating this incredible content and then making it almost impossible to find. Now, every episode I record becomes a searchable asset that works for me 24/7. That's the power of combining audio with written content."

Design for Founders continues to grow, with Emily projecting 20,000 monthly organic visitors by mid-2026. More importantly, the podcast has become a sustainable business rather than just a passion project.