Podcast SEO Tutorial
This podcast SEO tutorial from RSS.com, a podcast host, walks through the job in about 22 minutes, and Google's AI Overview cites it on this same question.
SEO in podcasts is multi-platform distribution and repurposing: making a show easy to find on Google, on YouTube and inside podcast apps. Audio alone can't do that, so the work comes down to clear titles, show notes, transcripts and a web page for each episode.
This podcast SEO tutorial from RSS.com, a podcast host, walks through the job in about 22 minutes, and Google's AI Overview cites it on this same question.
Podcast apps actually read text, starting with the RSS feed. Apple says that feed holds all of a show's metadata and decides whether it appears in relevant searches. Each platform then adds its own signals, and each one has said in public what they are.
| Platform | What it reads | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Podcasts | Show name, channel name, episode title, followers, plays and what people do in search results | Ratings, reviews and shares don't count toward search |
| Spotify | Titles, descriptions, categories, plus its own transcripts, chapters and topic tags | The first 250 characters of a description do the heavy lifting |
| YouTube | Title, description, tags and the video itself, then engagement and quality | Tags play a minimal role unless a word is often misspelled |
| Web pages and video watch pages | Its list of indexable media has image and video formats, and no audio |
Apple's line on reviews surprises people, since plenty of guides tell shows to chase ratings for search. The closest real thing to semantic tagging is on Spotify, whose automatic chapters and topic tags tell its algorithm what an episode covers. Your part is to choose the right categories and check what those tags say.
Podcast SEO on Google works through web pages and video, because Google no longer has a podcast app to send people to. Google moved US users of Google Podcasts to YouTube Music by April 2, 2024, and its list of indexable media names image and video formats but no audio. Some guides that still rank tell you to submit to Google Podcasts, which is advice for a product that has closed.
That leaves two doors. A page of show notes can rank on its own, and Spotify recommends one for each episode. A video can reach Google's video features, but only from a dedicated watch page that is indexed and doing well. The episodes on this site follow that setup: one video, one page, the transcript below it. In a Google results check for "seo podcast", the first page held ordinary pages from show websites, Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Reddit, with no special podcast result in the data.
How to do SEO for podcasts comes down to six jobs, listed here in the order the platforms confirm them.
Early listening helps too. Apple says engagement lifts rank, so tell your audience on launch day. Topical authority, the idea that a site earns trust across a subject, is an SEO term David G Quaid uses often, and none of the platforms use it. It still explains why a show's website does better with many episode pages on one subject than with a single page for the whole podcast.
Transcripts help podcast SEO on Spotify, which says its automatic transcripts give its systems the full text to index, so an episode can be found by topic as well as by title. Apple has transcribed more than 100 million episodes, and iOS 27 adds a search that finds words inside one show. Apple doesn't say transcripts feed search across its whole catalog. Google's video pages don't mention transcripts at all, so the case on the web is simpler: a transcript is text on a page, and text can rank.
Spotify also says show pages and transcripts are possible sources for AI answers, though it shows no data. AI tools work from text, so a transcript and a page of notes give a show its best chance of being read.
People find new podcasts through YouTube and social media first, according to the Sounds Profitable and JAR Podcast Solutions discovery report from June 2026. Together those two drive discovery of favorite shows for 61% of people, with YouTube alone at 40%. Personal recommendations drive discovery for 64%, in a separate question. So search is one route among several, and YouTube is the part of podcast SEO with the most reach.
A podcast can help a website rank, which is the other thing people mean by SEO in podcasts. Being a guest on other shows can earn links from their show notes. The Edward Show has covered this for years, from how to get backlinks from podcast appearances to James Dooley's 2,000 appearances in a year. You can search The Edward Show for podcast episodes on this site, or browse SEO podcasts by topic.
Sources for this answer were checked on Nov 1, 2026.
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