Podcast SEO: How to Get Your Episodes Found in Search

A company podcast earns its keep when the right people listen: the buyers and partners the show was made to reach. Some of them will hear about an episode from a guest or a colleague. Others will find it by searching for a topic or a name, inside Apple Podcasts or Spotify, on Google or on YouTube.

Each of those places reads different information about your show. Apple and Spotify use show names and episode titles in search. Descriptions help listeners choose what to play, categories help the apps recommend shows, and Spotify also uses its transcripts to surface eligible episodes. Google ranks web pages, and an episode page on your own site gives it useful text to index. YouTube treats an episode as a video with its own title, thumbnail and description.

This guide takes each in turn. It covers what the platforms say they use, how to choose your search terms, naming a show and titling episodes, transcripts, episode pages, and how to tell whether it is working.

DisclosureJake Jorgovan founded Content Allies, which is mentioned in this article.

What each platform reads

Apple is the most specific. Its page on search in Apple Podcasts (opens in a new tab) says the main factors in ordering results are metadata (the show name, channel name and episode title), popularity (followers and plays) and user behavior (shows played or followed from search results). Ratings, reviews and shares are not factored into search. The platform guidance cited here gives no numerical weights for any of these.

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Original summary of Apple Podcasts and Spotify guidance. The first 250 description characters are a display consideration, not a hard limit on what can be indexed.podcasters.apple.com (opens in a new tab) · podcasters.apple.com (opens in a new tab) · creators.spotify.com (opens in a new tab) · podcasters.apple.com (opens in a new tab)

Apple's content guidelines (opens in a new tab) also rule out the obvious shortcut: podcasts may not mislead audiences by duplicating other content or search terms, or try to influence search using inaccurate or inappropriate terms. A description stuffed with a competitor's show name is a risk.

In 2021 I described a podcast app as a search engine in its own right, just like Google. That is still the right way to think about it. Someone looking for a show about hospitality operations or executive pay types those words into a search box. Apple puts the most relevant results at the top, and shows that match clearly and that people already play and follow rank higher.

Choose the few terms you want to be found for

Before naming a show or writing titles, decide which words you want it found for. A short list used consistently in the name, tagline, descriptions and titles is easier to keep than a long one. When I wrote about podcast SEO in 2022, my observation was that a show rarely ranks well for more than three to five specific keywords.

1. 1

   List the words your buyers use

   Start with the topics and problems your intended listeners raise on sales calls, the roles and industries they work in, and the subjects your episodes already cover.

2. 2

   Search each candidate in Apple Podcasts and Spotify

   Look at what comes up. Apple advises against names that are too generic or too similar to existing shows, so a term already crowded with near-identical show names is a weak choice for the name.

3. 3

   Check what already brings people to your site

   Once episode pages exist, Google Search Console shows which searches lead to them. Treat that as evidence for your website; it does not measure searches inside podcast apps.

Name the show for the people you want to reach

The show name is the field you set once and live with longest, so it is the first decision that affects search.

In 2021 I described two ways to name a B2B show. The direct approach calls the show what it covers: a hypothetical show about customer discovery would be the Customer Discovery Podcast, with the advantage of strong search visibility in Apple's directory. The creative approach picks a memorable name and carries the keywords in a tagline, as a customer-discovery show we helped produce and launch did with A Faster Horse. My own show, Working Without Pants, was never a keyword name, and I said then that it served me well. Either approach can make the topic clear to listeners. For Apple search, though, make the show name and episode titles specific: Apple lists those fields as its search metadata, so a tagline or description is no substitute for them.

Three Content Allies shows I wrote about in 2022 show the trade-off:

• Hospitality Leaders first came up with clever names such as "Checking In", a phrase anyone in hotels would recognize. As I put it then, nobody was searching podcast directories for "Checking In", while people did search for "hospitality". In October 2026 the show still used the industry name on its site (opens in a new tab), with a line about conversations with leaders in the hotel, casino, attraction, food service and event industries.
• Executive Compensation, for Meridian Compensation Partners, was a deliberately obvious name for a narrow topic. The point I made then still holds: success is the number of right listeners, not the number of listeners. Someone searching for a podcast about executive compensation is the kind of person who might one day need a compensation consultant.
• Pearls On, Gloves Off, Ironclad's show, kept a name built on its host's personal brand. To make the topic clear to newcomers, "legal ops" went into the show's description.

Spotify's own guide to podcast SEO (opens in a new tab), published in August 2026, points the same way. It advises a show name of three to four words that includes a keyword, is unique, and avoids abbreviations and special characters. A generic name such as "The Business Podcast" competes with hundreds of shows using the same words, and the guide says a clever name that means nothing to a newcomer won't help people find you.

Content Allies' Gusto Embedded case study (opens in a new tab) describes the same work for Gusto Embedded's show: the team helped choose the show name, and the page reports top-10 podcast SEO rankings for four keywords, including the brand name.

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Jake’s historical account, summarized from this article. These results describe his experience and are not a performance forecast.

A name can change. Working Without Pants was once the Creative Freelancer Show. If the current name hides what the show is about, adding a descriptive tagline is the cheaper first step.

Write episode titles people would search for

Episode titles are where a show can match many specific searches: a topic, a guest's name, a company.

Apple's guidance on presenting a podcast (opens in a new tab) says to lead with the most important information, such as a big-name guest or the topic. The show name and upload date are already visible in the app, and episode numbers belong in the RSS feed's tags. It also suggests a consistent layout across episodes, and its search page adds: avoid emojis and repeated episode titles. Spotify asks one question: what would someone actually type to find this episode?

For a B2B interview show, a simple pattern works: the topic first, then the guest and company. A Hospitality Leaders episode shows it: "Perspectives From Hospitality's Ground Floor with Madison Martin at Hilton". My 2022 post made the same point with a hypothetical car-repair show. "A casual conversation with Joe Smith of Joe's Auto Repair" tells a searcher nothing. A title that names transmissions, catalytic converters and brake problems matches what people look for.

Avoid titles that could belong to any episode. "Lessons from the journey" gives neither a listener nor a search box anything to place.

Descriptions and categories

Apple's search page does not list descriptions among its main ranking factors. Its presentation guidance still asks for the words your audience searches for there, and Spotify says search engines read the title and description together. Descriptions are also what persuades someone who has found the show to press play.

• Front-load the useful words. Spotify says the first 250 characters are what a listener sees in the app before expanding the description, and are often what appears in search snippets.
• Name people and topics. Spotify recommends naming the guest and the exact topic. Apple's transcript guidance (opens in a new tab) adds a practical reason: putting host and guest names in show and episode descriptions helps its automatic transcripts spell them correctly.
• Write in sentences. Spotify suggests three to four sentences for an episode, and notes that keyword lists don't read naturally and that AI answer engines favor descriptions written the way a person would explain the show.
• Fill both category slots. Apple uses the primary category for category pages, Top Charts and personalized recommendations, and the secondary category for some category pages and recommendations. Its categories page (opens in a new tab) encourages filling both slots where they are relevant. Spotify uses category tags to match shows with listeners' interests and advises choosing tags that reflect what the show actually covers.

Transcripts: review the automatic ones or supply your own

Both major podcast apps make transcripts themselves. Apple Podcasts generates a transcript after each new episode is published, which listeners can read, and search within, on iOS 17.4 or later in eleven supported languages, across more than 170 countries and regions. Spotify's August 2026 guide says it generates transcripts, chapters, and guest and topic tags for every eligible episode, and that transcripts give its systems a full-text version of the episode to index. Its help page (opens in a new tab) notes that transcripts are not available to all creators. A Spotify article from September 2025 tells creators who don't see these features yet to keep building an audience, so a new or niche B2B show may not have them.

So the decision for a B2B show is quality. Automatic transcripts can get wrong what matters most in B2B: names and industry terms. Apple's advice to put host and guest names in descriptions exists to get names spelled correctly, and YouTube says of its automatic captions (opens in a new tab): quality may vary, and creators should review them.

You have two options:

1. Review what the platforms generate. Spotify lets eligible creators download a transcript as a VTT file, correct it and upload it again, and edit automatic chapter labels. Its guide recommends turning transcripts on if they are off.
2. Supply your own. Apple ingests creator transcripts through the RSS transcript tag, as VTT or SRT files; check that your hosting provider supports it, and set the episode in Apple Podcasts Connect to display the transcripts you provide. The same corrected text can then serve your episode page and YouTube captions.

Neither Apple nor Spotify says how much a transcript affects ranking inside its app. Spotify's guide does call transcripts one of the most direct SEO improvements a show can make, because without one, search engines are limited to the title and description.

Give every episode its own page on your site

Google does not rank your RSS feed the way a podcast app does; it ranks pages. Spotify's guide makes the case for a podcast website. A show notes page for each episode, with timestamps, topics, guest names and credentials, and links to resources mentioned, gives Google a page to index on its own. An episode can then rank for its guest or topic.

For Google's video features, its video guidance (opens in a new tab) recommends a dedicated watch page for each video, with a title and description unique to it, where it makes sense for the business. Watching the video should be the page's main purpose; a video embedded in a written article does not make that page a watch page.

For the episodes that answer a question your buyers search on Google, a written article built from the conversation can rank where an interview page will not. The guide to repurposing podcast episodes covers that in detail.

Treat YouTube as a separate search engine

YouTube indexes an episode as a video, so it needs its own care.

There are two ways to get a show there. YouTube can take your RSS feed (opens in a new tab) and create a video for each episode you choose, using your show art as a static image. RSS delivery is available only in some countries and regions, and YouTube does not automatically pick up later changes to the show details in your feed. Or you can upload full video episodes and clips yourself.

Either way, the metadata works differently from a podcast app:

• Title, thumbnail and description. YouTube's own help on tags (opens in a new tab) says these are more important for discovery than tags, which "play a minimal role" except for commonly misspelled words. Adding excessive tags to the video description breaks its spam policies.
• Chapters. To add video chapters (opens in a new tab), put timestamps with chapter titles in the description: the first at 00:00, at least three in ascending order, each chapter at least 10 seconds long. Channels without access to chapters apply for YouTube's advanced features. Automatic chapters are allowed by default for new uploads, but not every video gets them.

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The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

• Captions. Review the automatic captions, or upload the corrected transcript.

Links and launch promotion

Apple gives a practical reason to push each launch. The more listeners engage with new shows and episodes, it says, the higher they rank for relevant search terms, so promote them on Apple Podcasts when they go live.

Guests are a B2B show's natural promoters, and their pages are a natural source of links to your episodes. Giving guests good promotional material is, as I said in 2021, one of the biggest ways to promote a podcast. Make it easy: send each guest the episode link, a short write-up, a few quote graphics or clips, and suggested wording for a post or a page on their own site.

Spotify's guide treats external links to a show's Spotify pages as a signal of relevance and suggests creating a separate link for each channel, so you can see which one turns into plays. The same logic applies to links to your episode pages.

How to tell whether it is working, and how long it takes

Spotify's guide suggests starting in the Spotify for Creators dashboard: if search is a growing source of new listeners, the work is paying off. For your website, Google Search Console shows whether episode pages appear in search and which searches bring clicks.

Be patient. Spotify calls SEO "a long-term play", and my 2022 post warned that dramatic changes in rankings may take six months, or a year or more. Compare searches, clicks and new listeners before and after a change, and give a new name or title format time before changing it again.

Questions B2B podcast teams ask

How do I rank my podcast on Apple Podcasts?

Use a specific, distinctive show name and episode titles that contain the words people search for, then promote each episode at launch. Apple orders search results by those names and titles, by popularity and by how often people play or follow a show from search; ratings and reviews do not count.

Does Spotify have SEO?

Yes, in the sense that its search and recommendations work from your show name, episode titles, descriptions and category tags, and from the transcripts, chapters and topic tags it generates for eligible episodes. Spotify publishes its own guidance for creators on each of these.

Do we still need our own transcripts?

If your episodes are eligible, Apple and Spotify will generate transcripts automatically. Supply or correct your own when names and terminology matter, which in B2B they usually do, and use the same text on your episode pages.

Should a company put its brand in the show name?

It depends on whether people search for the brand. Meta's show, which I wrote about in 2022, started as The Business, Innovation and Technology Podcast, Powered by Facebook, and moved the company name to the front when it rebranded. A brand that strong let it capitalize on searches for Facebook and Meta. For a company most listeners do not yet know, the topic is the better keyword.