Excerpt from: Podcasting at Work: 25 Questions to Ask Before Starting

Your podcast content may be incredible, but if your audience doesn’t press the play button, they’ll never know. This is where written elements like your series description, episode titles, and show notes come in: they’re essential marketing and SEO assets that shouldn’t be ignored.

Series Description: This is the paragraph of text that will accompany your show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast directories. Keep it short and punchy - remember - this is an ad for your podcast! Your series description has implications for SEO too - so include words that your target audience might be searching for.

Episode Titles: A “scroll stopping” title grabs attention and makes you want to learn more. Consider what your audience will value most about the episode and put that in the title. Not only that, put those key words near the start of the title. Many podcast apps cut off the ends of long titles, so always put the most important words near the start. There’s no set length limit for podcast titles, but anything over 40-50 characters is likely to be cut off. For this reason leave out any unnecessary words or information. “Tom Hanks Shares Banana Bread Recipe” is a lot more compelling than “Episode 047: Cherished Family Recipes with Special Gue…”

Show Notes: These notes accompany each episode of your show. Think of them as a blog post about the episode. Some listeners look at the show notes during or after listening, while others have a peek before deciding whether or not to listen.

So keep these short and punchy while including information to flesh out the listening experience. Many of our clients include a brief synopsis of the most exciting parts of the episode, a brief guest bio, and web links to things mentioned in the episode. Good show notes can help with SEO too, so be sure to include relevant search terms.