Podcast search: keywords?

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Level 1

8 points

Podcast search: keywords?

Hi all,

My podcast is a storytelling podcast.

It is called 'the airing cupboard's extraordinary stories by ordinary people'.... yes, very long title. At the start the podcast was called 'the airing cupboard' when I figured that Apple organised search by title and name, I changed the title for this longer one. I doubted that anyone would do a search for podcasts about airing cupboards... :)

And it has been effective, giving a good ranking result here in UK for either of the key words included in the title.

I have also just added "Storytelling" to my name, and it now also appears in search results under Storytelling.

However, when looking at the other podcasts appearing under Storytelling or Extraordinary People, ...ect , a lot of them do not include any of the key words in their title.

Can someone explain why? Is there another way to optimise search?

Many thanks in advance.

Posted on May 2, 2020 4:40 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,344 points

May 2, 2020 7:59 AM in response to zopie

I searched on 'storytelling' in the iTunes Store Podcasts section. From the list which came up (which included yours) I looked at three at random which didn't have 'storytelling' in the title: all had an episode, or more than one episodes, which included 'storytelling' in its title: which explains the results you see.

I don't see any way of improving your chances, other than by getting lots of hits to bring you higher up in the results. You title is pretty comprehensive. Remember that you are in competition with a huge number of other podcasts.

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Answer 2

zopie Author

Level 1

8 points

May 2, 2020 9:17 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Thank you so much for your reply Roger. Very kind of you to take the time to answer my ramblings!

Just to clarify two points:

does Apple also allows search by keywords in episode titles?
what do you mean by "hits"? Downloads? Listens? Subscribers?

Although I enjoy this podcasting project a lot, being a one man-band (or should say a one woman-band), I feel completely out of my depth with audience side of things.

So many thanks in advance,

Zoe

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Answer 3

May 2, 2020 9:47 AM in response to zopie

Search by individual words certainly works because I did it during the testing I reported on above. However the more specific the search is the better the results are.

'Hits': slang for access to a web page, a feed or an episode.

'Downloads': people who subscribe in iTunes or Apple Podcasts access the feed and automatically download the top episodes: they can download any earlier ones at will. These episodes are then on their device.

'Listens' would I suppose either the number of times someone has played either and episode or episodes in a podcast. There are statistics about this but they don't show whether someone listened to all of an episode, and are limited to certain groups of listeners (using acceptable operating systems, and having agreed to take part in statistic collection).

A 'subscriber' enters the feed URL manually in iTunes, or clicks the 'Subscribe' button in the iTunes Store. This connects their iTunes app directly to the feed, bypassing the Store (which acts as a sort of introductory agent) and they download episodes to their device. People can subscribe to a feed if they know the URL, even it it isn't actually in the iTunes Store.

You may find my 'geet you started' page on podcasting helpful:

http://wilmut.uk/pc

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Podcast search: keywords?

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