SEO for Podcasts: 5 Ways to Get More Listeners

Podcasts are one of the most popular forms of entertainment today. According to Podcast Insights, 51 percent of the U.S. population has listened to one, and podcast listeners average seven shows per week. From June 2018 to June 2019, the number of shows grew from 550,000 to over 750,000.

Clearly, podcasting is experiencing astronomical growth. The only downside? It can be difficult to cut through the noise. It’s more important than ever to make sure your show stands out so you can gain listeners. Here’s how.

SEO for podcasts

SEO done for blog posts, landing pages, and articles is used to help your website content rank higher in search engines.

SEO for podcasts is essentially the same. The only difference is that instead of showing up at the top of Google, you’re trying to show up at the top of iTunes or other podcast outlets. (Though perhaps that may change: Google announced in 2019 that it would start adding podcast episodes into search results.)

The principles are still the same: you use keyword phrases in your written content to help your podcast rank better.

How to use podcast SEO

To get more listeners discovering your podcast, try these five podcast SEO tips:

1. Choose a focus keyword for your whole podcast

Update your podcast name to have this keyword in it, if possible. Then make sure your keyword and related phrases are prevalent throughout your podcast’s description.

2. Choose one keyword per episode

Choosing different keyword phrases for each episode will cast a wider net in your topic area because you aren’t limited to the keyword phrase you chose for your show as a whole. Use this keyword in the episode title, episode subtitle, throughout your show notes, in the tags/keywords section, and in the Apple title and Apple summary.

3. Ask for ratings and reviews

Social support helps SEO. The more people show love to and interact with a web page, the more a search engine notices and rewards it with higher search results. The same goes for podcasts. If you have a significant number of ratings and decent reviews, it will help with your podcast SEO.

If you want people to write reviews with your keywords in them, you can nudge them with a review prompt.

4. Create a blog post for each podcast episode

If you don’t already have a separate website where you publish your podcast episodes outside of platforms like iTunes and Spotify, you can create one at WordPress.com. It doesn’t have to be a fancy, complicated website, but having another page to optimize for your keywords and through which your content can get found certainly won’t hurt. (Especially while we wait for Google’s update to start showing podcast episodes.)

5. Publish your episodes to YouTube

If you have a video to go along with your podcast interview, why not go ahead and publish it to YouTube? YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine after Google, so publishing your podcast there (with the keyword-optimized title and episode description you’ve already written) could be an easy way to capture more listeners.

Keep your podcast SEO up-to-date

SEO for podcasts isn’t hard when you know which parts of the text to optimize with different keywords. If you use these guidelines to update the SEO of your past episodes, you’ll give new episodes the best shot to show up at the top of search engines.