How to get your podcast on Google (not just in the podcast apps)

Google used to have its own podcast app and would surface episodes directly in search. That's gone. Today, getting your podcast on Google means getting web pages about your episodes to rank. Here's how.

Step 1: have a page per episode that says something

Your host's default episode page usually has the title, a player and two sentences. That's not enough for Google to rank it for anything except the exact title. Every episode page needs real text: what was covered, who said what, and the questions it answers.

Step 2: write for the question, not the episode

An episode called "Episode 31: Chatting with Mike about roofing" will never rank. A page called "How long does a new roof last?" will, if Mike answered it. One episode can support several of these pages. The question is the headline, the answer is the first paragraph, the episode is the source.

Step 3: quote the audio

Pull the best passages from the transcript and quote them, credited to the speaker. This does two things. It gives Google original text that exists nowhere else, and it gives the reader a reason to hit play.

Step 4: link everything together

Pages on the same subject should link to each other. Your roofing answers link to your gutter answers. Google reads this as expertise on a subject and ranks the whole group higher. This works far better in a dedicated hub than scattered across a general blog.

Step 5: tell Google the page exists

Submit a sitemap in Google Search Console. Add structured data marking the page as an article based on a podcast episode. Both take minutes and both are done for you on PodAnswer.

Step 6: wait, then look

New pages take two to six weeks to settle in. Then check Search Console for which questions are bringing impressions. Those are the subjects to double down on with your next episodes.

The mistake that keeps shows invisible

Doing all of this once, for the launch, and then going back to posting on social. Search is a compounding channel. Ten pages is a start. A hundred pages is a business. The shows that win are the ones that treat every new episode as three or four new pages, forever.

That's the job we do for shows on the network. See how it works or start with a free listing.