How to use Podigee to get more listeners by improving the quality of your podcast's metadata
How to use Podigee to get more listeners by improving the quality of your podcast's metadata
The distribution of podcasts as a digital medium can be a bit complex and difficult to grasp. There are lots of concepts, like feed, RSS, metadata, audio formats, distribution platforms and a lot more. In this article, we are going to focus on metadata and how it affects the discoverability of your podcast.
Imagine yourself, searching for information on Google or another search engine. Let's say you have a dog and want to read more about teaching it some tricks. You type in your search query, for example "teach dog to fetch". Obviously, you will get tons of websites and blogs as a search result and will be able to read about interesting dog training techniques. It's fairly easy to understand how this works: someone has written about this topic and the search engine has "scanned" the information and added it to its database.
As you already know, podcasts use the audio channel to send a message to the audience. As you might imagine, search engines are no good at scanning the content of an audio file. While there are some experimental voice recognition projects, they are still far from being usable. Therefore the major search engines do not process audio files to add their content to their database.
A podcast is not only a bunch of audio files. It is organized and distributed through "feeds". You may have heard about them as RSS, which is the format, or set of rules, a podcast shall obey in order to be processed by podcast clients. So how does a feed look like? Well, looking directly at the content of a feed can be quite an overwhelming experience to the untrained eye. There is a lot of information inside of cryptic tags (the "language" used is called XML). What's important about the content of these tags is that Google and other search engines are actually capable of scanning them. So this means, that if you provide a detailed description of your podcast, you'll automatically increase the discoverability of it, thus improving the most important asset of your show: Your audience!
The short answer is: provide plenty of information about your podcast. Use the subtitle, description and show notes. Add the most relevant keywords (but no more than 10-15!). Set the category and language of the show. Don't forget to add the authors, especially if you are well-known in your business or have popular guest speakers. And last but not least: use chapter marks! Chapter marks are a topic on its own and we will do a follow-up post on it soon.
When it comes to metadata, Podigee has got you covered. Built into our publishing interface is a tool, called the Publishing Progress Indicator. You will find it on the right side in the podcast editing interface and it looks like this:
You will see, that some of the things are mandatory - you can and should not publish a podcast or episode without them. Others are optional, but highly recommended for the reasons you read above. As you fill in the specific fields in the editing interface, the progress bar will fill up until it reaches 100%. Don't forget the recommended stuff and your podcast is good to go!
Podigee is an all-in-one, software-as-a-service solution for publishing your podcasts. You provide the audio and the metadata, and we take care of everything else, like generating a RSS feed and a blog, improving the audio quality of your show and ensuring that everything runs smoothly and without interruptions. Our interface is built to make the whole process easy by providing you with best practices and recommendations. Also, you will get direct, personal support whenever you need it or feel stuck!
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