Top 5 Tips to Increase Your Podcast’s Discoverability

Podcast discoverability – getting your podcast in front of new listeners – is an issue that faces all podcasters. Whether you’re first starting out with your first episode ready to publish, or you’re expanding to your next podcast for your network, growth for your podcast is just as important as audience retention. 

So here are some of our best tips for increasing your podcast’s discoverability:

1. Boost Your Podcast’s SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy of using keywords to boost your standing in search engine results. Any place that has text within your podcast – your description, your episode titles, all the way to your transcripts – can be SEO-optimized to be as efficient as possible.

When utilizing keywords, keep in mind what your potential listeners could be looking for in order for your podcast to come up. Give those keywords and phrases a search yourself, to see what other pages come up and how successful your podcast would be in those searches. But be wary of keyword stuffing, or spamming your titles with nothing by SEO keywords! Not only does this negatively impact your SEO and thusly your discoverability, but it can also get your podcast marked as spam.

Beyond your show notes, there are a few other key places to utilize for your SEO:

• TRANSCRIPTS: If you don’t utilize transcripts for your podcast, now is the time to consider expanding to include them! Not only are they great for accessibility, they’re a great boost to your SEO. Bear in mind that when search engines hunt for keywords, they’re only able to focus on text. Using transcripts will allow the power of your podcasting content itself to boost your podcast’s discoverability.
• CHAPTER MARKERS: Chapter markers allow you to bookmark specific timestamps in your episodes, so listeners can use them to reference different segments or information that you’re sharing. The chapter markers, like transcripts, allow you to use your podcast itself to boost your SEO. With These in place, listeners will be able to find your podcast via the chapter titles.

2. Adjust Your Description/Categories

Remember that your podcast description plays a bit role in discoverability – not only due to its SEO capabilities, but because your podcast description is the key thing to make or break someone’s interest in your podcast.

Which is why it’s important to make changes to your description as necessary, and why it’s a field on your podcast that is always going to be editable. As your podcast grows and shift trajectories, you’ll want to make the same changes to your description to ensure that it always gives potential listeners what they’re looking for: what your podcast is about, and the tone that you’re going to carry throughout your podcast.

It’s a similar situation for your categories that you have set for your podcast. Experiment with changing up the categories that you have set for your podcast. You never know which category is going to suit your podcast best, or it’s helpful to make changes over time. Just be aware that changes aren’t going to show instant results; try changing your categories and keeping an eye on your engagement over the next few months to see if there’s any change.

3. Maximize Your Online Present

I know, “make sure you’re on all social media accounts,” and “don’t stretch yourself too thin by being on all social media accounts,” is conflicting advice, but both things are true! For your best chances of discoverability, you want to make sure that you have some sort of presence in all the places that your potential audience could be.

However, having a presence on a platform does not equal being active on that platform!

Your main thing here is that for the platforms that you’re not the most comfortable on, you at least want to create an account and have links available to redirect to your podcast and your other platforms. This first ensures that no one is going to steal your screen name on any platform, but also acts as a funnel to redirect any potential listeners to your more active platforms.

And for those active platforms? Make sure that you’re crafting content specifically for that platform. While cross-posting can definitely help save some time, sharing images and videos that are properly optimized for each platform will help boost you in their algorithms in the long run!

4. Expand to All Major Podcast Directories

Much like the tip above, you want to ensure that you’ve got a presence on all the major podcast directories and podcatchers – you never know what app your potential listeners are using for their podcast listening, so your best bet is to make sure that you’re available as far and wide as possible.

We’ve got an amazing blogpost that breaks down some of the bigger directories and how to submit your RSS feed. Unlike your social media platforms, these directories are very much a “set it and forget it” type situation. The bulk of the attention they need is the set-up phase, and from there you don’t have to worry about checking in to resubmit or anything like that.

5. Use Newsletters for Outreach

A podcast newsletter is great for SEO and discoverability of your podcast. It’s a direct link to your listeners, bypassing the middlemen of social media platforms. It forges a deeper relationship with your listeners, and allows you to foster an engaged community.

A newsletter for your podcast increases your presence for your current audience, and encourages them to spend more time on your site and your podcast. This, in turn shows search engines that you’re posting content that other users want to spend time on, and will boost you in their algorithms. To make the best of this, your newsletter should point to your website, or to URLs associated with your podcast.

Getting Started

We’ve got a great resource on SEO here, and you can learn more about discoverability on our podcast Podcasting Smarter!