Podcast SEO tips with Steven Wilson-Beales

These are key pillars for creating a great podcast. Plus: highlights from the excellent Q&A!

Jul 13, 2026

Hello, and welcome back. Jessie and Shelby here, back from a much-needed extended break. So much softball and soccer was played. Summer nights were enjoyed. We’re back fresher than ever. Here’s to the second half of 2026 Google shenanigans!

This week: Top podcast SEO tips from expert Steven Wilson-Beales! Steven joined our spring community call presented by Trisolute to talk all things podcast SEO (video link here). We summarize his recommendations and best practices, as well as three key pillars for creating a great podcast. Plus: highlights from the excellent Q&A!

The empty podcast booth — a world of possibilities. Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

Let’s get it.

THE 101

People listen to podcasts for a variety of reasons, so understanding the audience — and what they want from your audio or video content — is a foundational first step of optimization, says Steven Wilson-Beales, SEO, AI visibility and content strategy consultant.

Watch the replay!

“Most failures in podcasts happen when clear goals are not set at the beginning of that podcast campaign,” Steve said. He recommends defining the clear intent of the podcast prior to starting.

Without defined ambitions, it becomes impossible to measure success or determine the right strategy for reach, engagement and growth. To counter this, there are three key areas for optimization: product, people and promotion.

Read on for the highlights, including the best questions from the Q&A portion of the community call.

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THE HOW TO

The three Ps: People, product, promotion

Optimizing a podcast is more than just writing compelling title tags and meta descriptions. It also includes understanding your people, creating a great product and giving it the right promotion.

Product: Effective optimization requires, first, a product worth discovering. “You can’t polish a turd,” Steve said (quoting friend of the newsletter Harry Clarkson-Bennett).

Creators need to know what sets their product apart from the competition. “Lead with the need,” Steve said, urging a clear solution for your audience’s problem. No amount of clever titles or keyword-rich descriptions will save a podcast with a flawed foundation.

Consider a format that serves your specific niche, without blindly copying the top-charting podcasts (which may succeed because of their marketing budgets rather than concepts).

“Don’t assume the biggest players have it 100 per cent right,” Steve said.

People: Cater to your audience’s specific need and your topic authority. For instance, a gardening podcast might start with a series on how to grow specific plants. However, the key to success will be digging deeper to address the core challenges your listeners face, like gardening through climate change and erratic weather patterns. Understanding the burning questions — and the emotional weight behind them — puts your podcast in a much stronger position.

To find audience pain points, actively monitor Google Trends, follow Reddit threads related to your niche, monitor social media conversations and conduct real-world interviews.

Promotion: At least 55 per cent of people have heard about podcasts via word of month, Steve shared. Growing a show via social media at first is important, but the real value will come from people recommending your podcast. Make it worth recommending.

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MORE TIPS

Titles and descriptions are ‘powerful and influential’

Titles and descriptions are highly influential for podcasts, but they must be written for humans first and algorithms second.

“There are a lot of podcasts that do not do a great job describing what it is that they are about and what they do and what the offering is to the audience,” Steve said.

Title and description optimization is an opportunity to change that. These include the show title, the show description, the episode title, and the episode description. They should be precise, targeted and descriptive about the topic covered in the podcast, Steve said.

As with any SEO approach, editors should identify primary and secondary keywords to include in these descriptions.

Episode titles are generally best between five and eight words, but you will often see longer titles in the wild. This can be podcast-specific and sometimes simply works because of the nature and style of a particular show. But in general, be concise.
Don’t waste the opening of your episode description repeating the show title or host name. Users already see that. Use the first three lines to outline the specific value of that episode to the listener.

Avoid keyword stuffing. Limit to two or three keywords per title, as too many keywords can hurt CTR and sound robotic. “If you have too much language going on, it’s not going to help with click-through,” Steve said.

The same episode titles and description can be used across all podcast platforms.

What is podcast SEO?

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MAILBAG

The following were pulled from the Q&A portion of the spring community call.

How does SEO strategy differ by platforms (Spotify vs YouTube). What are the platform-specific strategies?

Steve: Apple puts a lot of weight behind the podcast’s name (i.e., the title of the entire podcast), and show description. These areas are priority for the keywords you identified in your research. Spotify takes each episode on its own merits. This means you need to focus more closely on optimizing each episode on Spotify.

How do you leverage authorship in podcasts?

Steve: You definitely want to highlight the expert. If you have a massive celebrity guest and upload that episode to YouTube, you can guarantee a massive amount of traffic. They drive initial engagement — though, whether those listeners stay for future episodes is a different story.

As a matter of principle, if you have an expert guest on, you should include their details in the title and description of the episode. I’m not sure it gives you an algorithmic boost, but it’s best practice.

What are your recommendations for multimodal, or using one piece of content (the episode) for multiple purposes?

Steve: Tools like Riverside make it easy to create clips for YouTube Shorts, TikTok or other vertical video platforms. But, be careful: the auto-clipping can miss the true essence of the conversation.

Different podcasters approach video differently. Some publish the full conversation as a video, some have no video and some publish key segments. Video isn’t essential. Don’t do video for the sake of doing it. Poor-quality video can be damaging your brand; don’t feel obligated to produce it if it does your product a disservice.

Video — particularly on YouTube — presents a massive opportunity. Investing is beneficial for publishers. But, if you’re not careful and true to your goals, the quality could suffer: publishers end up making too many Shorts or vertical videos that don’t connect back to the actual podcast.

If a podcast covers a written breaking news story or investigation, should they publish at the same time?

Steve: If your goal is to push podcast downloads, do it at the same time. Otherwise, bring the reporter on a few days later, giving them time to also capture the story’s reaction. Adjust the schedule depending on your goal.

What about podcast transcripts? Should publishers post and optimize them?

Steve: Post the transcripts. A lot of brands don’t, and they should because it helps Google and the robots understand what the podcast is about. Some publishers optimize transcriptions, by doing a clean up and adding keywords to the text. Transcripts are being crawled and read, why not optimize it?

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