Until recently podcasts were not seen as direct SEO assets.

— Manish Dudharejia

For a few years now, I’ve added podcasts as a time filler for commute, housekeeping, car trips – the other being music. The enormous quantity of content that has transited across my ears is, with few exceptions, packed in a sequential format: in order to get to the last word you have to stream (or skip) all those that came before.

Through this endless flow of commentary, information, I’ve learned a lot. However I find it very hard, for the very sequential nature of the medium, to go seek for interesting bits of information that I have discovered previously.

While podcast apps such as Overcast help indexing topics covered during the podcast – by giving podcasters the option to push the index along with the audio file – there’s no easy way to look back for specific bits of content.

As this post explains, Google is giving more and more attention to the podcast indexing puzzle. Speech to text technology available in Google Cloud can be instrumental in the indexing process, however podcast search results reliability is still very lacking.

In order to reach the great insights by John, Marco and Casey about the searched topic, I had to specify the name of the podcast in the search and even then, no text snippets are available in the SERP. When clicking in the “Podcasts” widget I was able to retrieve the abstract of the relevant podcast, but then again, the podcast widget only appeared when I added atp podcast to the topic, in the search.

Also, the guys at ATP.fm do a great job in indexing their podcast, and publishing this index in a site, which in turn affects its visibility in the aforementioned SERP for specific content. Many good podcasts I listen to don’t provide any sort of index nor do they have a detailed episode description, and I suspect this will make them invisible in Google too.

In fact I believe the podcast widget in the SERP and the podcasts inside it, were only there because of their index – and because I added the word podcast and the specific podcast I was looking for in the search box.

So there’s still much to do in content discovery with podcasts

And Google for now isn’t helping much, although things could move very quickly in 2020. The state of in-app content discovery is a topic I would like to explore soon. My podcast app of choice, Overcast, is doing a good job but it’s still mainly focused on sequential fruition. Who knows! Maybe 2020 will bring a content discovery oriented podcast app – one specifically addressed to solve time-filling and finding commentary on specific topics cross-podcasts!

As of today, there’s much to do to improve the state of content discovery in the very fragmented and chaotic podcast market. Mind you, I like this fragmentation, it very much resembles the heyday of the www, when content discovery was very much lacking, and wandering around the web was a joy in its own right. But since more order will inevitably come, I think it’s worth exploring what’s ahead.

So stay tuned for more content on this topic: in the next days I will keep drilling on the content discovery side, and how it can affect (maybe improve?) monetisation.