For years, the prevailing wisdom has been that your podcast name and episode titles are the biggest factors in helping listeners find your podcast. But, a good, detailed but not over-long description can help capture some of those relevant search terms?

Well, maybe, kind-of, not always, but sometimes, but rarely, probably not.

The truth is that’s pretty much never been the case for Apple Podcasts. It only cares about your titles and your author tags.

But what about the increasing number of podcast directories? Where do we need to focus our efforts if we want episodes to surface for relevant search terms? And how can we avoid wasting our time filling out information that is truly optional or has no importance?

I spoke with Mark Steadman, who is a podcast producer, consultant, and coach. He runs Origin, a podcast studio helping thoughtful, creative people of purpose use their voice to make a positive impact.

He recently teamed up with James Cridland, the editor of Podnews, to perform some experiments on a couple of their podcast feeds they knew wouldn’t cause waves of confusion were they to stuff them full of nonsense words in the name of science.

The idea was to pick a different nonsense word for each relevant podcast-related tag in their RSS feeds, and to see which podcast apps picked up which words.

What stirred his interest in doing this podcast app search experiment was after listening to an episode of The Feed, the Libsyn podcast, and he heard them talking about the things that appear in search.

Rob started talking about the various things that Apple Podcasts indexed. I realized I hadn't really thought about it. There were a couple of things that I sort of vaguely think I knew. With anything that's self taught, there's always going to be gaps in your knowledge.

In his experiment, they use the top 14 podcast apps, including Google Podcast. Being a Google product, one might it would be the wild card on the list, quite frankly. From what he saw, it wasn't.

Were those podcast apps really developed as discoverable, findable types of play? They do what they do really well. They play podcasts, but were they really built to do that? Maybe we're asking a bit too much of them?

I had a lovely chat with J.J. at GoodPods, because I think there is, with GoodPods specifically, a real opportunity there. I think it is much more a discovery engine than it is a player. I think I would really like to see search play a better role in that.

What we're addressing is find-ability. Let's just kick that "discoverability" word off of our lexicon.

Overall, here are the key points from this experiment...

• Apple Podcasts only searches your podcast name, episode titles, and author tags (this may not be news to many old-school podcasters, as it’s been the long-prevailing wisdom).
• No-one indexes the copyright tag. Probably not a surprise.
• No-one indexes the podcast:person tag. I found this surprising.
• Apps heavily weight podcast-level data over episode-level data.
• Podcast app SEO is not a viable strategy.
• The in-app podcast search landscape is badly in need of attention.

And lastly, Mark offers 3 bits of advice on how to set yourself up for better find-ability when it comes to SEO and your podcast. (Hint: it's all about your website!)

Let’s talk about what podcasting can do for your business in the next 12-months. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, we can create a content marketing strategy that will work for you.

Connect with me if you would like to talk more about this. My calendar is available on my Circle270Media Podcast Consultants business website at circle270media.com

Subscribe to my free daily Open The Mic Newsletter. It’s chock full of podcast news you may have missed, as well as social media, sales, and audio production tips, and insights on how to grow your business podcast.

Recorded in conjunction with Channel 511, in the Brewery District, downtown Columbus, OH.

Brett Johnson is the owner and lead consultant at Circle270Media Podcast Consultants. With over 35+ years of experience in Marketing, Content Creation, Audio Production/Recording and Broadcasting, the podcast consultants at Circle270Media strategically bring these strengths together for their business Podcast clients.

Email us at podcasts@circle270media.com to set up time to talk more about your new or established business podcast.

Brett Johnson:

This is a Note To Future Me.

Brett Johnson:

Hi, this is Brett Johnson, your host and the owner of Circle270Media Podcast Consultants.

Brett Johnson:

How do people find your podcast and apps?

Brett Johnson:

Should you put your guests name in your episode title?

Brett Johnson:

Do podcast apps, use your podcast description to help people find new shows?

Brett Johnson:

Which apps search what information you provide in your RSS feed.

Brett Johnson:

In a three week experiment, Mark Steadman from podcast STUDIO ORIGIN, cataloged what

Brett Johnson:

every big podcast app indexes, and how to help listeners find your podcast.

Brett Johnson:

This full article is available on podnews.net.

Brett Johnson:

I have a link to that article in the podcast show notes.

Brett Johnson:

I would advise that you read the article prior to this interview, but you can listen to

Brett Johnson:

the article, listen to the interview and then read the article afterwards.

Brett Johnson:

Either way, you're going to get some great information from Mark about his experiment,

Brett Johnson:

his research project, as it were, about how podcasts apps help people find new podcast

Brett Johnson:

episodes.

Brett Johnson:

New podcasts to listen to, or how they don't.

Brett Johnson:

Mark works with best selling authors, entrepreneurs, artists and celebrities.

Brett Johnson:

His work has been highlighted by the BBC and he presented the Comedy Award at the

Brett Johnson:

Inaugural British Podcast Awards in 2017.

Brett Johnson:

He founded the podcast hosting company, Podiant in 2016.

Brett Johnson:

Coding every line, writing every blog post, and in the beginning replying to every support

Brett Johnson:

email himself. He's helped individuals, organizations and commercial radio stations

Brett Johnson:

launch their audio presences online and has been consistently producing podcasts since

Brett Johnson:

2008. He sold his hosting business in the spring of 2021 and now spends his time

Brett Johnson:

exclusively helping podcasters get results on their own terms.

Brett Johnson:

I'm sure him selling his business has helped him open up some time to do interviews about

Brett Johnson:

this article, so I was very happy when I contacted him that he sent an email back saying,

Brett Johnson:

great, let's talk, get on my calendar, and here we got it done.

Brett Johnson:

This interview really solidified what his research and his experiment did prove and

Brett Johnson:

didn't prove in regards to what podcast apps do for podcasters.

Brett Johnson:

I think the one takeaway that you will realize after reading the article and listening to

Brett Johnson:

this episode is, that the findability piece is all on our shoulders.

Brett Johnson:

We cannot rely on podcast apps.

Brett Johnson:

We cannot rely on social media.

Brett Johnson:

We have to do the work ourselves.

Brett Johnson:

It really does come down to understanding how different mediums search and index, and

Brett Johnson:

give those that are searching that information.

Brett Johnson:

This is a really good article to read about that, and this interview highlights a lot of

Brett Johnson:

great stuff from the article.

Brett Johnson:

I hope you enjoy. I hope you learn a little bit.

Brett Johnson:

I know I did.

Brett Johnson:

I think everything from this article and this interview you can take and start producing

Brett Johnson:

even better podcast's for search your next episode.

Brett Johnson:

Mark, first I want to thank you and James Cridland, editor of Podnews and a radio

Brett Johnson:

futurist, for doing some heavy lifting with your research on podcast app search.

Brett Johnson:

The article you wrote for Podnews is concise and full of great information.

Brett Johnson:

So much so I wanted to contact you to see if you might be willing to be a guest on my

Brett Johnson:

podcast to give some highlights of what you and James discovered and what we as

Brett Johnson:

podcasters should do, starting with our next episode.

Brett Johnson:

Mark, thanks for taking some time to be with me today.

Mark Steadman:

It's a real pleasure. Thank you.

Brett Johnson:

What stirred your interest in doing this podcast app search experiment?

Mark Steadman:

It all started when I was listening to an episode of The Feed, the Libsyn podcast, and

Mark Steadman:

they were talking about the things that appear in search for, I can't remember what it

Mark Steadman:

was. It was a user submitted question, I think for Libsyn, and it was about their content

Mark Steadman:

not appearing when people searched and about descriptions and things like that, and Rob

Mark Steadman:

started talking about the various things that Apple Podcasts indexed.

Mark Steadman:

I realized I hadn't really thought about it.

Mark Steadman:

There were a couple of things that I sort of vaguely think I knew.

Mark Steadman:

With anything that's self taught, there's always going to be gaps in your knowledge.

Mark Steadman:

There's always going to be stuff. It doesn't matter if you could tell yourself as being

Mark Steadman:

any kind of podcast, quote unquote, guru, there's always going to be stuff that you don't

Mark Steadman:

know. I'm certainly not touting myself as a guru, but, I work with other podcasters and

Mark Steadman:

try and help them. I started to think actually, I don't know definitively what Apple

Mark Steadman:

Podcast is indexing.

Mark Steadman:

I've got this information from Robert Libsyn but, okay well that's one directory.

Mark Steadman:

I know we've got all of these apps that are powered by the Apple Podcasts directory and

Mark Steadman:

fewer and fewer now as we see more things like the Podcast Index and Spotify, and other

Mark Steadman:

apps maintain their own indexes, but it started me thinking, presumably different apps

Mark Steadman:

have different rules for what's going to be indexed.

Mark Steadman:

So I thought, well, yeah, this would be a really interesting thing to look at and

Mark Steadman:

actually do a bit of a [INAUDIBLE] and do some research and find out, are all apps

Mark Steadman:

indexing information the same?

Mark Steadman:

What data is being pulled in from our feed, and how is it being utilized?

Mark Steadman:

How is it being exposed and such?

Brett Johnson:

There's a ton of talk about what to include and what not include, tons of it.

Brett Johnson:

To me, it always seemed as though it might be more of a this is a best practice you never

Brett Johnson:

know when they might start looking at this piece, just include it.

Brett Johnson:

We'll put the field in there, just do it sort of stuff.

Mark Steadman:

Definitely.

Brett Johnson:

In your experiment, you use the top 14 podcast apps.

Brett Johnson:

When I saw you include Google Podcast, I thought that might be the wild card on the list,

Brett Johnson:

quite frankly. From what you saw it wasn't.

Brett Johnson:

About half, including Google Podcasts, of the podcast app seem to search numerous channel

Brett Johnson:

level tags. That is the podcast RSS feed as the whole.

Brett Johnson:

Did you have some pre experiment thoughts about certain podcast players?

Mark Steadman:

I thought Google would be more.

Mark Steadman:

I thought it would be better at search.

Mark Steadman:

It's that simple.

Mark Steadman:

There's quite a few these apps actually I thought would have a better approach to search.

Mark Steadman:

Now, one of the things that we haven't talked about and when I've spoken to people about

Mark Steadman:

this article is, we haven't really touched much on the way search engines work in these

Mark Steadman:

apps. Now, we used made up words, specifically so that we wouldn't have clashes with

Mark Steadman:

other things, and we wouldn't end up - we could be really definitive about worrying about

Mark Steadman:

things like pluralization and potentially being confused with other languages and stuff

Mark Steadman:

like that. I deliberately just kind of mashed the keys and tried to use often alphabet,

Mark Steadman:

tried to use letters from the alphabet that would kind of look like words.

Mark Steadman:

But, a conversation with a couple of people sort of led me down to thinking about one of

Mark Steadman:

the issues we do have in search is, things like pluralization, things like alternative

Mark Steadman:

spellings. For example, if I think about my, one of the shows that I think I mentioned in

Mark Steadman:

the article, which is a show about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, if you search

Mark Steadman:

hitchhiker, you get one type of result.

Mark Steadman:

If you search hitchhikers without an apostrophe, you get another type of result.

Mark Steadman:

If you search hitchhiker's with the apostrophe, you get a different set of results.

Mark Steadman:

That's a problem.

Mark Steadman:

As a former, in a past life as a former sort of Web engineer, I know what that problem

Mark Steadman:

is. But I think I was surprised at the number of apps that were addressing that problem,

Mark Steadman:

which is almost none.

Brett Johnson:

Yeah, it is interesting, it's almost just get the product out there to do.

Brett Johnson:

As you mentioned too in the article, were those apps really developed as discoverable,

Brett Johnson:

findable types of play?

Brett Johnson:

They do what they do really well.

Brett Johnson:

They play podcasts, but were they really built to do that?

Brett Johnson:

Maybe we're asking a bit too much of them?

Mark Steadman:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Steadman:

That's why I was a little bit surprised.

Mark Steadman:

I had a lovely chat with J.J.at GoodPods, because I think there is, with GoodPods

Mark Steadman:

specifically, a real opportunity there.

Mark Steadman:

I think it is much more a discovery engine than it is a player.

Mark Steadman:

I think I would really like to see search play a better role in that.

Mark Steadman:

Now, for anyone who builds these apps and works in this space, I know what a hard problem

Mark Steadman:

it is, especially given episode level surge, which I'm sure we'll talk about, and sort of

Mark Steadman:

how little provision there is for episode wide search.

Mark Steadman:

I know why that is, because if you think this potentially four million podcasts in the

Mark Steadman:

Podcast Index, now think about the number of episodes each one of those has.

Mark Steadman:

You've got to maintain that database yourself in a searchable way that's mental.

Mark Steadman:

I get the problem.

Mark Steadman:

I think I keep giving very long answers to your questions and I'm not entirely sure if

Mark Steadman:

I'm actually answering them.

Brett Johnson:

You're good. No, you're going in exactly the right direction.

Brett Johnson:

What I'm thinking too is, it seems though, we're addressing that findability.

Brett Johnson:

I just want to kick that discoverability word off of our lexicon.

Brett Johnson:

Findability, it seems that lots of apps are building themselves around the findability,

Brett Johnson:

but they're not great players.

Mark Steadman:

Mm-hmm.

Brett Johnson:

We don't have this middle ground, I just want a really good player that I can at least

Brett Johnson:

find some podcasts that are similar to what I'm playing right now.

Brett Johnson:

That doesn't even really exist, honestly.

Mark Steadman:

No, I think to be honest, what I want to say is, and I'm not in charge of GoodPods and I'm

Mark Steadman:

not about to tell them what to do, but if I take an app like GoodPods, or if we imagine

Mark Steadman:

Discover Pods has a proper mobile app.

Mark Steadman:

I want my podcast player to be one thing, and I want my discovery engine to be another

Mark Steadman:

thing. I want the two to be separate, but be able to communicate so that I can hit the

Mark Steadman:

plus button and maybe I'll get taken out to, sorry the plus button in Overcast where I'm

Mark Steadman:

comfortable listening. I've got things set up the way I want, but then I want to go and

Mark Steadman:

find new podcasts and I think, okay, I'm going to go off to GoodPods, or I'm going to go

Mark Steadman:

off to Podchaser or somewhere else, and use the player that, just a preview.

Mark Steadman:

Just to get a little sense of, here's what people are listen to, I want to hear this give

Mark Steadman:

it a shot. Then I want to just hit that button to say, okay, take me back to Overcast.

Mark Steadman:

I'm ready to subscribe.

Mark Steadman:

Let me subscribe to it in Overcast.

Mark Steadman:

I don't think, I personally think that's the way to do it, is that we keep them

Mark Steadman:

separate, but people wouldn't be able to own as much of the stack as possible, and that's

Mark Steadman:

understandable.

Brett Johnson:

That makes sense too, and you describing that scenario is that would be an easy lift.

Brett Johnson:

You have two companies that do something very well.

Brett Johnson:

Why not? Not necessarily merge, but at least work with each other.

Mark Steadman:

Just talk to each other.

Brett Johnson:

Just talk to each other.

Mark Steadman:

Very, very simply, it's code that's already baked into the operating system.

Mark Steadman:

It's very easy to pass information to, from one place to another to say now bring in this

Mark Steadman:

resource and show it on screen.

Mark Steadman:

That's, very simple.

Brett Johnson:

First you cover in the article the channel level tags, which again telling the audience

Brett Johnson:

are tags in the podcast RSS feed that relate to the podcast as a whole.

Brett Johnson:

That includes the podcast title, the description, podcast, person, iTunes author, iTunes

Brett Johnson:

subtitle and the iTunes owner and keywords.

Brett Johnson:

I'll let you read the article, as I mentioned before the podcast, about how each of those

Brett Johnson:

play into search.

Brett Johnson:

But, what I wanted to ask you, is to talk more about the person tag.

Brett Johnson:

That info about who contributes to a podcast, and that's not being used by any search

Brett Johnson:

engine you surveyed. You made a comment in the article, that this isn't to suggest the

Brett Johnson:

tag has no value.

Brett Johnson:

Far from it. Just because the names are being surfaced in search results doesn't mean

Brett Johnson:

it's not a great way to link podcasts together.

Brett Johnson:

I'd love to see it influence results for guest-based podcasts.

Brett Johnson:

Still, early days. Talk a little bit more about that, linking podcasts together.

Brett Johnson:

What your thought process was there.

Mark Steadman:

Back in, I want to say 2013, I started working on a little project that very naively

Mark Steadman:

I thought would be really fun, is could I create an RSS feed or a playlist of podcast

Mark Steadman:

episodes across any number of podcasts that featured a particular person I like.

Mark Steadman:

Back then I was ten years younger.

Mark Steadman:

I was gullible.

Mark Steadman:

I was whatever age I was, and it was Kevin Smith.

Mark Steadman:

I want to know if Kevin Smith pops up as a guest in a not Kevin Smith podcast, it would be

Mark Steadman:

cool if I could just automatically subscribe to that.

Mark Steadman:

The way I did that, was very naively at the time, was just trying to search through the

Mark Steadman:

Apple back then, as it was called, the iTunes database, and try and find stuff that way

Mark Steadman:

and very quickly hit up against the problem of scale with something like that.

Mark Steadman:

The idea stood, and what I think we're seeing with the likes of Podchaser and to a

Mark Steadman:

degree, the Podcast Taxonomy project is this idea of being able to link information

Mark Steadman:

together now, so we really can go from, you enjoyed this guest on a show, so you've been

Mark Steadman:

subscribed to this particular podcast.

Mark Steadman:

Every week they have a new guest, this guest you really dug on this episode.

Mark Steadman:

You want to know where else can I hear them?

Mark Steadman:

Where else are they cropping up?

Mark Steadman:

To be able to go and follow them because they're listed as a creator in Podchaser is

Mark Steadman:

amazing. A way of being able to do that in the Oodcast Index as well, to uniquely

Mark Steadman:

identify a person, because obviously you can have several John Smiths.

Mark Steadman:

But to be able to know the John Smith you're talking about is this person, and to be able

Mark Steadman:

then to find all the episodes of any podcast that that person has appeared in, to me, as

Mark Steadman:

possibly as a data nerd and an avid podcast listener, that's gold.

Mark Steadman:

There's so much fun you can have with that.

Mark Steadman:

Not just guests of course.

Mark Steadman:

If you loved the music that was on an episode, and you want to know what else that

Mark Steadman:

musician has scored, the sound engineer or whatever, and Podchaser are trying to map out

Mark Steadman:

that information and make it accessible.

Mark Steadman:

One of the things they hit up against a few years ago, was that, we podcasters are a

Mark Steadman:

thirsty bunch. If we find that there is a potential to game the system, to hack the

Mark Steadman:

system, to promote something, we'll do it.

Mark Steadman:

We'll game a system if we can.

Mark Steadman:

They saw that.

Mark Steadman:

The people were just saying, every episode had this X number of guests who were not on the

Mark Steadman:

episode, but were big draws, because there was no vetting.

Mark Steadman:

You could put that information into your RSS feed Podchaser would suck it up and believe

Mark Steadman:

it. It didn't take them very long for them to be like, okay, yeah, maybe not then.

Mark Steadman:

There are ways that we need to police it, and figure out ways that maybe the information

Mark Steadman:

starts at that RSS level, but then we have a way to be able to vet it or to say, if that

Mark Steadman:

information is false, to be able to give it a thumbs down in some kind of system.

Mark Steadman:

Be that Podchaser or the Podcast Index or whatever.

Mark Steadman:

When you've got that sort of taxonomy, when you've got that corpus of data, that you can

Mark Steadman:

then start to navigate around based on people, I think that's phenomenal.

Mark Steadman:

That's what excites me about things like the podcast person tag.

Brett Johnson:

I know exactly where you're going with that.

Brett Johnson:

I love audio drama, and the audio drama world, the actors, the performers, even though

Brett Johnson:

there are a lot of them, there are many that are used over and over, because they're

Brett Johnson:

great at it. And I've always wanted to, when I pick someone, I want to see what other

Brett Johnson:

podcasts they've been a part of.

Brett Johnson:

Have acted in, just to hear their different roles, because the good ones, if you listen

Brett Johnson:

well enough, you can kind of go, oh, I know who that is.

Brett Johnson:

They put on a different accent and you want to go, oh my gosh, she is really expanded in

Brett Johnson:

this versus what I listen to.

Brett Johnson:

I don't know if that exists. I was thinking the IMDB was supposed to try to do something

Brett Johnson:

like that, but I agree.

Brett Johnson:

If something can come up with that and whether it's maybe by genre, by category or

Brett Johnson:

something, that's even better because then it fine tunes the John Smiths of the world.

Brett Johnson:

You know that John Smith is a business entrepreneur, that's the category you want to

Brett Johnson:

follow versus John Smith musician sort of thing.

Brett Johnson:

[CROSSTALK] That would be exciting.

Brett Johnson:

That would be exciting.

Brett Johnson:

You're right.

Mark Steadman:

That's what Podchaser is trying to do.

Mark Steadman:

No one is yet completely disabused me of this notion, but I do have the sense that

Mark Steadman:

Podchaser is used more by podcasters than it is by listeners.

Mark Steadman:

I feel like that's where it is at the moment because it is aiming to essentially be the

Mark Steadman:

IMDB for podcasters.

Brett Johnson:

Right.

Mark Steadman:

Or for podcasting.

Mark Steadman:

And it's great, I've got no shame at all.

Mark Steadman:

The team are great and they're doing a great job and they really care about the space.

Mark Steadman:

They've been doing this for a while now, and yet they are a great team and I've enjoyed

Mark Steadman:

working with them.

Mark Steadman:

I think I still feel like, it's mostly the podcaster's that are using this information.

Mark Steadman:

I want to be able to see, like you were talking about, you listen to that audio drama,

Mark Steadman:

you're into this stuff and you go, oh, wow, who was that?

Mark Steadman:

Or you hear the name in the credits.

Mark Steadman:

And you know instantly, if you want to find out more about that person and other

Mark Steadman:

podcasts that they're in, you know straight away that you go to Podchaser and you put

Mark Steadman:

their name in the system.

Mark Steadman:

Or we standardize linking to people's Podchaser creator profile, and we make that a thing

Mark Steadman:

that we do in show notes.

Mark Steadman:

The more that we can do that, the more we open it up to listeners, I think then we create

Mark Steadman:

something that is immensely valuable.

Brett Johnson:

Right. The findability scale cranks up versus seeing on a Twitter feed of that artist or

Brett Johnson:

that personality, oh, hey, I'm on this podcast now, and you just accidentally saw the

Brett Johnson:

Twitter feed as one resource.

Brett Johnson:

Maybe that's what Podchaser should do and does well.

Brett Johnson:

If it's just for us, it's just for us.

Brett Johnson:

That's great. Build it and make it bigger and bigger and bigger.

Brett Johnson:

You know, it's got to start somewhere.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah, definitely.

Brett Johnson:

Next, you cover the item level tags, which the tags that relate to each episode in a

Brett Johnson:

podcast and those being the title description, the content, the subtitle and the author.

Brett Johnson:

I was surprised by what you found, that the Podcast Index, along with Pocket Casts and

Brett Johnson:

Overcast, not servicing episode level titles in search.

Brett Johnson:

That was interesting.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah, I think the problem here is largely one of scale, because there is just so much data

Mark Steadman:

to index and it takes so much time to index all of that information.

Mark Steadman:

Especially something like the Podcast Index, which is now the, I'd say possibly the second

Mark Steadman:

definitive directory of podcasts and could well be the definitive in time.

Mark Steadman:

They're a ragtag bunch of misfits.

Mark Steadman:

They're a small operation and they're an independent operation and they're funded by

Mark Steadman:

people like us who care about this and want it to continue, but that funding can only

Mark Steadman:

stretch so far and there are massive storage implications when you start to blow up the

Mark Steadman:

size of the database, 100 times plus over, because now you're storing information about

Mark Steadman:

each individual episode.

Mark Steadman:

Again, if we just imagine four million podcasts, each one of those has seven episodes.

Mark Steadman:

We know that many podcasts have many more.

Mark Steadman:

That already just becomes a huge job.

Mark Steadman:

There's all sorts of other number crunching issues with it.

Mark Steadman:

I sort of wrote the article without being sympathetic to that because, you know,

Mark Steadman:

ultimately to the podcaster and to the person searching that doesn't [INAUDIBLE] in the

Mark Steadman:

world that's not our problem.

Mark Steadman:

But it is a problem that is worth addressing.

Mark Steadman:

It's not a simple one to solve.

Mark Steadman:

I think if we can find ways to make that easier then great.

Mark Steadman:

That might just mean more of us throwing more money and helping Dave and the team at the

Mark Steadman:

Podcast Index make this stuff happen.

Brett Johnson:

Right. Well, and I think they want the feedback, too, because-.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah-

Brett Johnson:

I was looking at a few podcasts that I work with, and found it had multiple listings in

Brett Johnson:

the index-.

Mark Steadman:

Mm-hmm-

Brett Johnson:

Whether on purpose, by accident or whatever, and contacted them, they took them out.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah.

Brett Johnson:

They verified that I was the one that should have the only feed of that podcast, and

Brett Johnson:

there were two or three others there. Basically it's a network situation that that feed

Brett Johnson:

is fed into other networks and allowing it and it was there.

Brett Johnson:

I think if we as podcasters take a little time, go to the Podcast Index and take a look

Brett Johnson:

at what you have there in that library, that might help clean it up a little bit too.

Brett Johnson:

Help them do their job, because they were totally responsive.

Brett Johnson:

Within a day I got an email back saying, hey, thank you for the heads up.

Brett Johnson:

We'll clean that up, get it out there.

Brett Johnson:

I think they appreciated that.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah, definitely.

Brett Johnson:

If nothing else for the total numbers.

Brett Johnson:

Yeah.

Mark Steadman:

To be clear, the Podcast Index are one of the companies that are surfacing stuff with the

Mark Steadman:

title, but I think it's very few that are doing anything other than that.

Brett Johnson:

Yeah, and that's not to poke them in the eye at all.

Mark Steadman:

No, no, no.

Brett Johnson:

You're right. It is. I agree.

Brett Johnson:

I think they're going to become the de facto when it comes down to it.

Brett Johnson:

They're setting their selves up to be when Apple decides to, we're done with you guys.

Brett Johnson:

We're now making money and we don't have to do this with you anymore.

Brett Johnson:

Thanks for the ride, but, we're done.

Brett Johnson:

Exactly. You also found that potentially, if the content, the episode show notes is

Brett Johnson:

present, aggregators ingest this information instead of the description.

Brett Johnson:

To me, and I want your thought too, do you think that makes episode show notes a bit more

Brett Johnson:

of a priority when publishing an episode?

Mark Steadman:

First off, I'll acknowledge James really help me out with this one and clarified, because

Mark Steadman:

I get mixed up on this sometimes as well in terms of I always just default to content

Mark Steadman:

encoded.

Mark Steadman:

Which is a tag in your RSS feed for each episode that allows you to have rich show notes.

Mark Steadman:

It has its roots in blogging and it's used a lot in WordPress things as well.

Mark Steadman:

A feed item in a blog post listed in your RSS feed can have as much html as you want, and

Mark Steadman:

it's expected to be in there.

Mark Steadman:

Whereas the description tag, we're all a little bit fuzzy about whether we want html in

Mark Steadman:

there, and so not all of the apps agree about what is allowed in there or not.

Mark Steadman:

I haven't gone back and read the spec to figure out what is the correct answer.

Mark Steadman:

It doesn't really matter because none of us can agree, and none of the apps can agree in

Mark Steadman:

directories. I think, good rich show notes should always be in your episode,

Mark Steadman:

in your RSS feed, regardless of the search ability aspect of it, because it makes your

Mark Steadman:

podcast better. It's that simple.

Mark Steadman:

Even if it's just a chronological list of the things you talked about and links to those

Mark Steadman:

things, which is what a lot of podcasts do.

Mark Steadman:

You maybe have a quick description of what was in the episode of maybe a guest that's in

Mark Steadman:

there. If you're talking about books or articles or TED talks or videos or whatever, just

Mark Steadman:

list them and link them in chronological order.

Mark Steadman:

If you're doing that in your show notes, then you're doing your listener a great

Mark Steadman:

service. I think you should do that regardless of whether it makes the stuff more

Mark Steadman:

searchable or not.

Brett Johnson:

Right. I always look at it, too, if you're going to create something, how many times can

Brett Johnson:

you use it?

Mark Steadman:

Oh, yeah.

Brett Johnson:

If you're creating great episode show notes, why not turn that into the blog that has the

Brett Johnson:

player to it? You've done two things with it.

Brett Johnson:

It doesn't matter if that replicates.

Brett Johnson:

It's two different mediums.

Brett Johnson:

You're letting people read it versus listening people [CROSSTALK] would sometimes rather

Brett Johnson:

read it.

Mark Steadman:

To me, being an old school RSS guy and an old school blog guy, they are the same thing.

Mark Steadman:

They're not different things. All a podcast feed is, it's a blog feed with one extra line

Mark Steadman:

of code in it effectively that says here's an MP3 file.

Mark Steadman:

It's still a blog post that has a date, a title and a URL.

Mark Steadman:

The URL is not your MP3.

Mark Steadman:

The URL is the Web page for that episode, and the Web page for that episode should have

Mark Steadman:

your episode title, and the player and those show notes.

Mark Steadman:

It should always come from the same place.

Mark Steadman:

At the moment I'm in between a couple of different systems for one of my podcasts and I'm

Mark Steadman:

having to copy and paste show notes from one system to another.

Mark Steadman:

You should never have to do that.

Mark Steadman:

You should always be able to just put them in one place, and then they go out to your

Mark Steadman:

feed and on your website as well.

Mark Steadman:

If you're having to copy and paste notes between different platforms, then it's worth

Mark Steadman:

looking about your hosting provider or your CNS and find out whether you can make your

Mark Steadman:

life a little bit simpler.

Mark Steadman:

In reality, it's all the same thing.

Brett Johnson:

Right, exactly. I've always been an advocate of building your castle on your own property

Brett Johnson:

in your podcast website.

Brett Johnson:

Even if it's as simple as activating a, getting a Google My Business page and activating

Brett Johnson:

that page with feeds, it's something.

Brett Johnson:

It's kind of your own.

Brett Johnson:

Most hosts now have the opportunity to create a podcast page, at least through the

Brett Johnson:

hosting platform. So at least do that to control a little bit for the search aspect and

Brett Johnson:

such too. What would you suggest podcast producers consider and do with your experiment

Brett Johnson:

findings?

Mark Steadman:

That's a really interesting question.

Mark Steadman:

I don't know.

Mark Steadman:

I feel like I would like to see more done on the creator, on the podcast app side.

Mark Steadman:

I kind of felt like this with, for a time a few months ago, Apple Podcasts wasn't showing

Mark Steadman:

show notes properly.

Mark Steadman:

It wasn't showing links properly, and it was making them a garbled mess.

Mark Steadman:

People were talking about and advocating, okay, you should format your show notes in this

Mark Steadman:

way. I sort of sat there and kind of bit my lip, or bit my tongue.

Mark Steadman:

I don't think that's the right approach.

Mark Steadman:

We shouldn't, we as the podcaster, shouldn't be changing the way we're doing things when

Mark Steadman:

we're doing them correctly.

Mark Steadman:

It is incumbent on the apps to read our information that we are providing in the correct

Mark Steadman:

format. They need to read that.

Mark Steadman:

If we're providing in the correct format, it is incumbent on them.

Mark Steadman:

If that temporarily means that some people aren't getting the experience that they

Mark Steadman:

should, that is on the app developer, that is not on you as a podcaster.

Mark Steadman:

If the experience is diminished in your show notes in one app, that is the one app's

Mark Steadman:

fault, and you shouldn't be changing your methodology to appease that one app.

Mark Steadman:

Doesn't matter how big it is because it's on the app.

Mark Steadman:

That's my particular viewpoint.

Mark Steadman:

I think this is the case right now.

Mark Steadman:

It's not that we need to do anything different, because we are providing really good

Mark Steadman:

information. Let's say we're doing the really nice episode title with the name of the

Mark Steadman:

guest. We've got a nice short description of the episode.

Mark Steadman:

Then we've got our full show notes and they've got links and rich information, and we've

Mark Steadman:

got a transcript, let's say.

Mark Steadman:

We're filling in all the person tags, we're doing all of these things.

Mark Steadman:

We're donating all of this information to these systems, to these apps.

Mark Steadman:

It's their job to present that to us.

Mark Steadman:

I think the best thing we can do is just try not to game that system.

Mark Steadman:

Is try not to get into the habit of, hacking things or keyword stuffing and all these

Mark Steadman:

different ideas.

Mark Steadman:

Trying to avoid appeasing one app.

Mark Steadman:

I talked about things like the iTunes keyword tag, which is now deprecated and has been

Mark Steadman:

for some time. There's a couple of apps that surfaced this summer.

Mark Steadman:

I spoke to one of the marketing guy for one of the apps last week, and I won't call him

Mark Steadman:

out by name because it wouldn't be fair.

Mark Steadman:

He was, kind of proud that their app was one of the two that was indexing this.

Mark Steadman:

And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not the point.

Mark Steadman:

We shouldn't be providing that information anymore, and saying that podcasters can just

Mark Steadman:

put a bunch of keywords into their feed in order for their show to be found on your app.

Mark Steadman:

That ain't helping anyone.

Mark Steadman:

This is really much more for, let's understand where we are as an industry at the moment

Mark Steadman:

from the podcaster side and from the developer side.

Mark Steadman:

I think if there's ways that we can help developers say, listen, there's a few things you

Mark Steadman:

could do here, make our lives a lot easier.

Mark Steadman:

If we can get episode level search into the Podcast Index.

Mark Steadman:

I did misspeak earlier in that I said they are indexing the title because I read the

Mark Steadman:

article when I was just reading back.

Mark Steadman:

If we can get the Podcast Index and a couple of other places to start indexing some of

Mark Steadman:

that episode level data, I think that would really blow the doors off things.

Mark Steadman:

Again, to very slowly and verbosely answer a very simple question.

Mark Steadman:

I think it's on the app developers to try and lift this space now.

Brett Johnson:

Right. I think you synopsizing what that article is intended to do will help podcast

Brett Johnson:

producers look at it.

Brett Johnson:

I got the same feelings.

Brett Johnson:

Every one of them does something different.

Brett Johnson:

You cannot cater to everyone, the top 14.

Brett Johnson:

You cannot cater to those 14.

Brett Johnson:

Just do the best practices, do what you're supposed to do, do what your podcast host

Brett Johnson:

platform actually is encouraging you to do.

Brett Johnson:

You're probably going to be okay.

Brett Johnson:

That's just one piece of the puzzle anyway.

Brett Johnson:

This is [CROSSTALK] just podcast player app search.

Brett Johnson:

This is small, again, like we talked about earlier, they were not developed to be a

Brett Johnson:

search engine.

Brett Johnson:

They're a player and we're asking a lot of them.

Brett Johnson:

This leads me to my next question.

Brett Johnson:

I think one major disadvantage most podcasters have is the lack of the knowledge about

Brett Johnson:

SEO.

Brett Johnson:

And what search engines are there to do.

Brett Johnson:

We still banter around those terms, as I mentioned earlier, podcast discoverability.

Brett Johnson:

We've got to get rid of that, get rid of it, and probably should really be focused on

Brett Johnson:

the term of podcast findability.

Brett Johnson:

Based on what your podcast was about.

Brett Johnson:

Coupled with podcasters wanting everyone or everything else to do the work.

Brett Johnson:

We put it out there somebody else should take care of that.

Brett Johnson:

What advice would you give podcasters on best practices when it comes to SEO and their

Brett Johnson:

podcast? Knowing your background, what you've done, what would be some good things,

Brett Johnson:

here's three things you got to check off the list.

Brett Johnson:

You've got to do this to help yourself.

Mark Steadman:

Three things. Number one, get a really good website.

Mark Steadman:

Number two, get a really good website.

Mark Steadman:

Number three, say it with me, get a really good website.

Brett Johnson:

Yeah.

Mark Steadman:

I work with, there's a podcast [INAUDIBLE] for someone.

Mark Steadman:

I absolutely love the show.

Mark Steadman:

I've got no interest in the topic whatsoever.

Mark Steadman:

Couldn't be further from my interest.

Mark Steadman:

But I love editing them. They do such a great job.

Mark Steadman:

They are a dream to work with because, they research the episode really well.

Mark Steadman:

They give me lovely show notes.

Mark Steadman:

They have this great banter.

Mark Steadman:

It's pre-prepared. They know what they're going to talk about.

Mark Steadman:

They're really informed on their topic.

Mark Steadman:

They've got great chemistry.

Mark Steadman:

When they make a mistake they're really good at pointing it out.

Mark Steadman:

I can just edit that out and we end up with this lovely, bubbly, bright, informative,

Mark Steadman:

engaging episode. They don't have a podcast website and it drives me insane every time.

Mark Steadman:

It's something we're working on.

Mark Steadman:

I'm not just sitting there going well, it sucks to be you.

Mark Steadman:

It is something we're working on.

Mark Steadman:

The reason is, I'll just break it down a little bit.

Mark Steadman:

It's not just about having a place that you can direct people to.

Mark Steadman:

One of the big things is talking about search, going from search.

Mark Steadman:

If you've got a really interesting topic, if you're solving a listener problem, you want

Mark Steadman:

that to be the kind of question, I actually just put out a video on this yesterday.

Mark Steadman:

You want to be able to answer the kind of question that someone might Google, and to be

Mark Steadman:

able to phrase it in a way that meets a particular need that someone's Googling.

Mark Steadman:

If you have got a website that you own, that allows you to optimize it in the way you

Mark Steadman:

want to, that is linked up with your Google Podcasts account, that sets you up in such a

Mark Steadman:

great way, because then you've made your title really Googleable, really easily findable,

Mark Steadman:

you are helping that person get an answer to that question.

Mark Steadman:

They find your search results, they click on it all.

Mark Steadman:

They might just click the play button and hear the episode straight away in Google

Mark Steadman:

Podcast, or they might click through to your website and they will see the space that you

Mark Steadman:

own. They will see your text, they will see the player.

Mark Steadman:

They will see the subscription links to listen to your podcast.

Mark Steadman:

They will see the link to join your mailing list.

Mark Steadman:

If you need the modal pop up dialog box to say, I've got this mailing list, I've got this

Mark Steadman:

great offer, they can see that.

Mark Steadman:

You're not relying on something like Listen Notes or Player.FM To be indexing your episode

Mark Steadman:

for you and showing it on Google.

Mark Steadman:

This is your opportunity to own the space and it doesn't cost a lot of money.

Mark Steadman:

In order to do this, you can run it on Podpay, you can do a simple WordPress site, but

Mark Steadman:

getting the ability for you to own that space and to be able to optimize.

Mark Steadman:

The last point of this is, tangential to all of this is, each episode that you create is

Mark Steadman:

part of your body of work.

Mark Steadman:

It's not just this is the thing we've put out this week.

Mark Steadman:

We go through the cycle.

Mark Steadman:

We put out out Tweet.

Mark Steadman:

We do our Instagram post.

Mark Steadman:

We put it on Facebook and LinkedIn, and then onto the next one.

Mark Steadman:

That's so often how we think about it because we're stuck in that cycle.

Mark Steadman:

With each episode, you're building a body of work.

Mark Steadman:

If you don't have a website where every episode has its own Web page with the title, the

Mark Steadman:

player and full rich show notes describing the episode and potentially the full

Mark Steadman:

transcript. If you don't have that for each individual episode, then yeah, your stuff is

Mark Steadman:

just going to disappear into the ether.

Mark Steadman:

Having a website, crucially with each episode having its own web page, that preserves

Mark Steadman:

your work in a way that would be so much harder otherwise, because all of that good stuff

Mark Steadman:

that you've written, all of those show notes, that transcript, it's all being gobbled up

Mark Steadman:

by Google and it's loving it and it's eating it up and it's indexing it.

Mark Steadman:

Again, it's going to space you own.

Mark Steadman:

It comes down to having a good website.

Brett Johnson:

Right. I de-mythed it in my own mind about what Google is to us in regards to well, think

Brett Johnson:

about how you use Google.

Brett Johnson:

You're asking it a question.

Mark Steadman:

Yeah.

Brett Johnson:

And you want Google to deliver you the best options it can find.

Brett Johnson:

Therefore, that's the game we play.

Mark Steadman:

Be one of those options.

Brett Johnson:

Be one of those options. Be the best that you can, knowing again, lots of things are

Brett Johnson:

against you to a certain degree.

Brett Johnson:

Algorithm, how long you've been there, how you rank in regards to an authority figure and

Brett Johnson:

such. But, you're there.

Mark Steadman:

Yes.

Brett Johnson:

You may be page five, but you're there.

Mark Steadman:

Yes.

Brett Johnson:

Potentially to grow and then build upon that SEO.

Brett Johnson:

There are a lot of people that are just really good at SEO, find them.

Brett Johnson:

Let them help you out, because there are little tricks to this that you just keep it in

Brett Johnson:

your workflow. It's going to help you in the long run.

Brett Johnson:

I just [CROSSTALK] see that.

Brett Johnson:

It's a little bit of work, but it works.

Brett Johnson:

It works.

Mark Steadman:

I think it's also, it's a habit you build up as well, like a muscle that you build up, I

Mark Steadman:

should say. The title is so important and it's something I fall down on a lot.

Mark Steadman:

There are really simple free tools that will help you make your title better.

Mark Steadman:

They will analyze the words in your title and say, you know, actually if you use this

Mark Steadman:

kind of language, if you put a personalized kind of word in here, it makes us connect

Mark Steadman:

with it more. If you use a brand, if you use certain words, caution or stop words, they

Mark Steadman:

make us have emotional reactions when they read this article.

Mark Steadman:

Doesn't necessarily mean we're talking about clickbait here, but we are making the title

Mark Steadman:

as enticing as possible and as compelling as possible, and to set up a bit of tension and

Mark Steadman:

suspense of, oh, I've got to know what, setting up an expectation.

Mark Steadman:

I've got to know what is in this.

Mark Steadman:

You can do that stuff actually quite easily and for free.

Mark Steadman:

If you speak someone like [INAUDIBLE], I think he's one of these people who's a believer.

Mark Steadman:

It's one of the most important things you can do for each episode.

Mark Steadman:

Is get that title absolutely bang on, because that's the most important thing that crops

Mark Steadman:

up in search.

Brett Johnson:

Yeah, exactly.

Brett Johnson:

Talk about, more projects or experiments coming up as we finish out the episode?

Mark Steadman:

Projects certainly.

Mark Steadman:

I'm having a lot of fun at the moment, trying to make videos and write articles that are

Mark Steadman:

going back to the stuff you and your listeners already know about, but going back from

Mark Steadman:

first principles of podcasting all the way up to a much more advanced stuff.

Mark Steadman:

I'm doing videos every week over at podcode.tv.

Mark Steadman:

There's written articles, podcast episodes as well.

Mark Steadman:

There's the newsletter where I try and disseminate the podcast news through my particular

Mark Steadman:

viewpoint. If you're interested, if I have talked your ear off and you want to hear more

Mark Steadman:

of what I've got to say, podcode.tv is where you can find out some of that.

Brett Johnson:

Super, and I'll remind everyone too listening, that I'll have all the connections and the

Brett Johnson:

links and his websites and such in the podcast show notes so you don't have to hear a

Brett Johnson:

litany of what did he say?

Brett Johnson:

How do you write that now? Which always drives me insane, that's a great way to end an

Brett Johnson:

episode. [CROSSTALK] Links are in the show notes we'll go that way.

Brett Johnson:

Thank you for spending this time with me talking about this.

Brett Johnson:

This has been enlightening for me, even me reading your article numerous times and

Brett Johnson:

spending a lot of time on it.

Brett Johnson:

It still gives me some insight on why you did it, and what you thought from the results

Brett Johnson:

as well, too. You come from a different angle.

Brett Johnson:

Definitely more of the tech piece of this and the back end of how everything is built.

Brett Johnson:

I think that's something we need to know.

Brett Johnson:

We need to understand where things come from and why they exist the way they do.

Brett Johnson:

Then we can do better with them.

Brett Johnson:

And that's great. I really appreciate your insight and your time this morning Mark.

Mark Steadman:

That was absolutely lovely to talk to you.

Mark Steadman:

Thank you, Brett.

Brett Johnson:

My thanks again to Mark for spending a little bit of time with me talking about his

Brett Johnson:

experiment. I hope you got as much out of it as I did.

Brett Johnson:

Again, I encourage you to read the full article if you haven't done so already.

Brett Johnson:

It's worth the 10-15 minutes to read it.

Brett Johnson:

If you're looking for more tailored help on your podcast, then be sure to connect with

Brett Johnson:

our dedicated team of podcast professionals.

Brett Johnson:

We'll help your business create a podcast from planning and launching to editing,

Brett Johnson:

presentation skills, promotion and monetization if it's in the game plan.

Brett Johnson:

Interested in speaking with one of our professionals, we put together a questionnaire to

Brett Johnson:

quickly fill out. This is going to help us help you prior to our first information

Brett Johnson:

meeting, which you can schedule when you complete the questionnaire.