Podcasts are a form of video or audio content, which is why they don’t usually get much SEO attention. But when it comes to this content format, the right optimization techniques are necessary to ensure it gets discovered. This is why podcast SEO can not be neglected!
Imagine you’re doing everything to create the best podcasts in your niche. Unless they rank, you are likely to only target a small section of your audience coming solely from your podcast platform. This is a bummer, especially if your content provides context and knowledge.
For better engagement and visibility, you may need to switch gears and start working on optimizing your podcasts for search engines.
Now the real question is. How to optimize audio and video content? Whether your podcast is on Youtube, Spotify, or Pandora, you can use simple techniques to get your work to show up on search engines. Perhaps you’re asking yourself:
How to get my podcast found on Google?
What is the best SEO strategy for podcast episodes?
How to make your podcast rank on Google?
Let’s open the Pandora box to answer these questions and find out which podcast SEO tips and tricks are most effective to get your video and audio shows seen by search engines.
Why Work On Podcast SEO?
Podcasts can be a great way to re-establish your brand authority. If you find that your audience is susceptible to bouncing back from text content, a good explanation is that they are looking for something more interactive and digestible. You can use this opportunity to endorse your brand authority by connecting with subject-matter experts who are willing to talk on niche topics.
Podcasting can work as a pillar to uplift your existing content when done right, but it can also be used as your brand’s core content format. However, the competition in video and audio content is no less than that of text-based content. This is why, SEO is important to ensure that your podcast shows up both on Google and within podcast directories.
The key is to target people looking for information related to your niche. By optimizing the title, description, audio content, and podcast website with relevant keywords, you can boost your podcast SEO.
To put it simply, SEO for podcasts is crucial, as it helps them get discovered, grow, and establish a loyal listener base.
Keyword Research: Laying the Foundation
Keyword research is the foundation of any good SEO strategy. So when you start to work on optimizing your podcasts, it comes as no surprise that you will be required to do extensive keyword research.
Design a podcast schedule that works around the top trending keywords in your business niche. Discover relevant phrases and terms with tools like Google keyword planner, Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, or Answer The Public to find high-converting topics and phrases. For example, if you are talking about local SEO, a good keyword to target would be “local seo for small business.”
You can see in the Ahrefs dashboard that this keyword has a higher traffic potential with a relatively manageable difficulty level of 42.
Use this method to identify relevant keywords for your podcast niche, and incorporate them into the audio and supporting content to push through SERP rankings. For a detailed overview on keyword research, review our article discussing this topic.
Using Keywords In File Name
Before uploading your video or audio file to the podcast platform, rename the file to add your primary keyword in the file name. This is a simple tactic that might provide search engines with context to the content of the video.
While YouTube relies on video titles and descriptions to gather information on relevance and topic, your file name can be an additional clue that drives your SEO optimization plan.
Adding Keywords In Podcast Title & Description
Any podcast’s click potential is highly dependent on its title and description. Creating captivating and clickbait titles is one thing, but using keywords is what really helps boost your content visibility.
For effective optimization of podcast titles, whether video or audio, try following these guidelines. Provide a complete preview of the topic in the title to let users know what they are getting themselves into, and try to introduce your guest at the end. Here are some examples of good podcast titles:
“Dominate Local Search in 2025: Proven SEO Tactics with Chris Kirksey”
“The Secret SEO Hacks Google Doesn’t Want You to Know – With Guest Lily Ray”
“How to Rank #1 on Google in 30 Days – SEO Guru Neil Patel Reveals All”
As for podcast descriptions or episode previews, they should be descriptive, engaging, and should cover the crux of the video. It’s best to provide a basic overview of the discussions that happened, as well as the opinions shared.
If you’re not sure how to use SEO keywords in podcast descriptions, it’s good to remember that relevance and natural integration are the two key techniques to build on. Refer to our latest podcast with Alex Alexakis to review how to write a well-structured podcast description. Add in multiple keywords here in addition to your seed keyword to uplift the video’s ranking potential. By offering relevance and authority, you provide your podcast channel with the two things required to attract search engine crawlers.
Use Transcripts
Adding transcripts to your podcasts has multiple benefits. First, it helps make your podcast more accessible for people with hearing issues, and the bonus point is that it also indirectly propels your content to the top of the search results page. With a text copy of a video and audio, your content becomes more crawlable for search bots. Eventually, you’ll notice that your transcribed podcasts have a lot more visibility and engagement than those that aren’t.
This Reddit user agrees that transcribing each episode and adding it to your website is among the top podcast SEO strategies. 
Use a tool like Notta to transcribe your audio and video files. You may even utilize this transcription when writing blogs or articles.
Add Timestamps or Video Chapters
Adding timestamps to podcasts is a great retention strategy, as they keep listeners engaged. Let’s suppose someone is looking for a specific answer from your podcast, but the answer is right in the middle of the video. In this case, timestamps will help them skip to that part directly, avoiding the possibility of the user bouncing back.
But how does this help SEO? By improving user experience and watch time — both of which are positive signals for search engines. To optimize your podcast for SEO and ensure your content gets indexed, make sure that timestamps are accurately defined within video descriptions and show notes.
To add timestamps to your YouTube videos, click on edit description and add video chapters. Start the first one as 00:00 Start, and the rest will be automatically assumed as a timestamp by YouTube. Here is a reference from our video about November Core Update
00:00 Introduction
00:23 The Outline
00:56 November vs. August Core Update
01:21 Interesting Development on AI Overviews
02:01 The Unexpected Manual Actions
02:56 Google’s Explanation of Site Reputation Update
03:44 Major Websites Hit!
04:34 Impact on Small on Medium Websites
05:08 Stepping Forward
05:34 Bloopers
Create a Podcast Website
Podcast websites provide a central station where viewers can browse and stream all your podcast audio and videos in one place. Organizing episode links, adding show notes, transcripts, and other multimedia content on this site is a power move to boost traffic to your podcast channel. The Quill Team says:
“A podcast website is dedicated to hosting, promoting, and distributing a brand’s podcast content.”
There are several reasons for you to have a dedicated podcast website. It’s listed among the best podcast SEO practices of 2025 in Lowerstreet’s blog. You can use transcripts and show notes to make your content more consumable and improve the chances of indexation.
Additionally, having your entire guest list on the website, in addition to author bios and backgrounds, helps build a connection with the audience. You can also consider adding a reviews and ratings section to build trust and brand authority.
And lastly, keep the site structure simple and easy to navigate to allow better UI compatibility. As a whole, this strategy is going to uplift your podcast’s visibility on YouTube and Google search.
Build Backlinks
Getting backlinks is a risky slope. You want lots of them to strengthen your SEO game, but at the same time, they can’t be of bad quality. The same rule applies when getting links to your podcasts on YouTube or Spotify. You can do this with traditional SEO strategies like guest posting and link outreach.
But what we do is try and snag a backlink on our guest websites. This is a pro tip that not only gets you a quality backlink, but also exposes your content to a whole new audience sphere that’s already interested in the topic.
Another trick is to use Google search operators to find podcast listicles in your niche. Suppose you offer link-building tips through your content. In this case, you can use the following search operators to find a reliable backlink opportunity.
“best link building podcasts”
“top link building podcasts”
“link building podcast” + “write for us”
Approach the site owners to mention your podcast in their content, or swap you for a previously listed podcast that’s outdated. This will give you a link, as well as put your podcast in the spotlight within the search engine rankings.
Aside from that, platforms like HARO and Profnet can be a great asset to reach out to reporters and journalists interested in your niche. Have them consider mentioning your podcast in their writings to get a backlink. Learn more backlinking techniques from our article about backlink strategies.
Ready To Level Up Your SEO Game?
Podcast SEO hasn’t been discussed extensively on any platform, which is why it needs to be spoken about now. While we focus so much on optimizing text content, we often forget the “Video” search section on the SERP.
Google has various podcast platforms where people can access and listen to podcasts. But we are talking particularly about showing up on SERP, whether it’s in the video section or within the top results.
The fact that Google now recognizes audio is a sure-fire sign that podcast SEO must not be undermined. Here is a statement by Google that endorses the idea:
“In some languages, Google can understand the audio content and match listener queries in languages other than the podcast language.”So, if you’re particularly making YouTube podcasts, putting together an SEO plan and adopting SEO tools for podcast creators is one thing we highly recommend. Try the podcast marketing strategies listed above to 10x your podcast SEO game within months.
