Let’s talk about Google Discovery for Podcasts
Hello, and thanks for listening to SEO tips today.
Google can expose your podcast to listeners through many different Google platforms, including:
- Google Search on all browsers, desktop and mobile. Users can play your episodes in the browser (sample Google Search result shown below).
- Google Search App for Android (requires v6.5 or higher of the Google Search App)
- Google Podcasts app for mobile devices
- Google Home speaker system
- Content Action for the Google Assistant
- Android Auto in your car
For Googlebot to discover and surface “playable” podcast content from your podcast (and therefore increase the discovery and plays of your podcast content), the following requirements need to be met:
The Podcast needs a dedicated “homepage” that describes what the podcast is about and that meets Google requirements and webmaster guidelines. If you have a podcast hosting provider, the instructions are pretty simple – you go to the Google podcast manager, have your podcast RSS feed ready and the rest is pretty straightforward.
If you host the RSS feed yourself, there are extra steps and you need to make sure your RSS feed is configured correctly.
Googlebot needs to get to your podcast homepage and RSS feed. The podcast must have a dedicated homepage with the elements described below. The homepage must have a <link> pointing to your RSS feed that meets Google’s requirements.
- The homepage, the RSS feed, and any non-blocked audio files must be exposed to Googlebot; that is, they must not require a login, and must not be protected by robots.txt or <noindex> tags.
- The RSS feed should be submitted via Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing particularly loves RSS feeds.
- The feed needs to include your email address.
- Each episode should have its own page (URL) with the following:
- Well-structured with HTML markup (H1, H2 and H3s)
- It should have an optimized URL, title, and meta description
- The on-page copy should mention any topics that you want to appear for (this includes your overall topic, the interviewee and any brands mentioned during the episode)
- Episode length
- Date published
- Show notes/ audio transcript with timestamps
- Key takeaways
- Checklists/worksheets
- Resources (here’s where you mention those brands again that where mentioned on the podcast)
- Create a call to action on each podcast page making it easy to subscribe to the podcast
- Structured data markup for podcasts on those pages (Online necessary if you are hosting your own feed)
- Embedded audio player (3rd party).
- Easy social media sharing
Make sure to add and verify your podcast with Google here so that you can get the metrics that Google provides.
Your podcast host will help you distribute to the other platforms, otherwise you need to check the requirement per platform and manually submit your RSS feed.
So that’s your tip for today about how to ensure that your podcast is discoverable via search engines.
Thanks for listening. Come back tomorrow for another SEO tip.
Listen to the previous episode: You might not know everything about meta titles and descriptions
Subscribe and play on your favorite player
Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Spreaker | iHeartRadio | Castbox | Deezer | Podcast Addict | Podchaser
Leave a Reply