Google is Indexing Podcasts in Search Results. Are You Ready?

Earlier this year, Google began automatically transcribing podcasts to make them searchable in the Google Podcasts app. Just a few months later, Google started indexing podcasts right in the Google search results, meaning you don’t have to use an extra app to find and play your favorite podcast.

This addition is huge for digital marketers and their SEO efforts because now your podcast episodes are listed on the first page of search results, similar to when Google started displaying relevant YouTube videos on the front page. When YouTube videos were displayed within Google’s search results, video creators saw huge increases to their viewer counts, and podcasters could begin to see the same success.

You Will Start to See More and More Podcasts in Search Results

Google will be implementing many more changes in order to show podcasts in their search results, and you will only continue to see more in your searches. In our fast-paced world, people are taking less and less time to read articles and are turning to quicker ways to take in information—like videos, podcasts and audiobooks. Google’s changes could help podcasts gain even more popularity because of their accessibility and prevalence on the web.

At first, you were required to include “podcast” within your search in order to make podcast episodes display, but we are already seeing the changes for some searches where the “podcast” term doesn’t even need to be included. Simply searching for the podcast name or an individual or company that was on a podcast will sometimes show podcast results depending on the popularity of the podcast, and we expect this to become more apparent even for smaller podcasts in the coming months.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

Similar to how there was a shift in how people consume their content from reading articles to watching videos, podcasts are on an uptrend in terms of the number of listeners. People can’t always watch a video and many times this results in listening to a podcast, which puts digital marketers and podcasters in a great place right now.

With the coming changes in how podcast episodes are displayed in Google search results, you will soon only have to search for someone’s name in order to find out what recent podcasts they were on. From there, people are just a click away from being able to listen to the podcast from wherever they are.

New Traffic for Podcasters

Get ready for this huge podcasting trend to continue at speeds faster than ever before. The time is now to join this trend as we enter the golden age of podcasts. Could you see your business creating podcasts and building a spot for them on your website?

Be sure to visit our blog regularly for the latest news in digital marketing, or contact us to get started on your own digital marketing plan! Talk to a strategist today!