I’ve been fortunate enough to have some of my content (or my clients’ content) ranked number one for a highly desirable term. It’s great to see traffic come flooding in, For a while. For an all-too-short amount of time. A short amount of time that is continues to shrink.Getting to the top of the list is hard. Staying there is even harder. Search algorithms are influenced by lots of factors. But two of the most important factors are freshness of content and authority. Both of those (and more) help you get to the top. But are you ready to produce the kind of content that keeps ringing both of those bells?You're not probably going to rank on the word “podcast” no matter what you do. In fact, you’re probably not going to rank number one for your category of podcast. You might, however, rank high for more specific terms, Podcasts for private clinicians or something along the lines of scuba diving in the Maldives podcast, by way of example. To sustain a number 1 ranking for your podcast, you have to keep producing content about that thing. Whatever actions you took that paid off with the reward of being number one, you have to keep doing that. A lot. You cannot “get it and forget it” or you’ll quickly find your show no longer in that number one spot.That might have serious ramifications for the type of show you want and the content of the episodes you produce. To maintain your number one ranking, you’ll have to forget about true independence. Sure, you can always produce whatever the heck you feel like. If you feel like producing an episode that’s nowhere near the term you ranked number one for. But that’s going to negatively impact your number one ranking. Are you willing to stay laser-focused on your content so that your show is and always will be about one thing? Are you willing to axe the clever little segments, avoid off-topic diatribes, break out the nine different topics you want to talk about into their own episodes, and possibly switch to a daily or multiple-times-per-day format? Are you willing to cut out anything that doesn’t contribute to your number one standing, changing your show so drastically to maintain that ranking? Getting to the top of the list is hard. Keeping your podcast there is even harder. Here’s your daily challenge: Ask one of your podcasting compadres what they think your show should rank for. Even if they don’t listen to your show (here’s a good way to get them to do that), just ask them what they...