People use Google to find podcasts

People use Google to find podcasts. In this post, why do you need to use Google to target listeners? 

There's lots of advice online about growing your podcast, you'll find tips including:

• Building a following
• Telling your friends
• Make sure your show is on all the podcast apps 
• Using social media 

While it's great to tell your friends or post about your podcast on social media, these tactics are not as effective as you'd hope for building an audience. People who are browsing social media or hanging out with friends may not be actively looking for new podcasts to listen to.

To really build an audience, you need to target people who want to listen right now, with their phones and headphones at the ready. That means finding people who:

A. Want to listen to a show like yours

B. Want to listen to it RIGHT NOW

The best way to target people ready to listen is through Google search results

That's because millions of people are stumbling around online right now, looking for their next podcast listen. How do I know this? The Google keywords planner tells us. This tool is primarily to help people plan Google ads campaigns, but it's also a useful resource for revealing how regularly podcast keywords are searched. (Google Ads tutorial - Discover keywords for your podcast)

On Google, if someone types; "best (type of show) podcast", they're actively searching and ready to listen.

Let's look at the stats for people using Google to look for podcasts. Here's a table of some real example search terms plus monthly volume:

Search term - Monthly Searches (global)

• Funny podcasts - 10k-100k
• Best comedy podcasts on Spotify - 1k-100k
• Gardening podcast - 100-1k
• Yoga podcast - 1k-10k
• Dog training podcast - 100-1k
• Best football podcast - 10k-100k

Interestingly around 100 thousand people per month are using Google to find a comedy podcast on Spotify instead of using Spotify itself! By the way, Google's estimates for search volumes are believed to be quite conservative. 

Millions of people use Google as their primary podcast discovery tool. But why aren't they using podcast apps and players to search? 

• They're new to podcast listening and haven't realised there are dedicated apps for it.
• They've used dedicated apps like Spotify and Apple Podcasts but can't find what they want.
• The search algorithms on podcast apps rarely offer niche results unless you enter the exact name of the podcast
• They trust Google to provide a broader set of ideas or more useful results.

Whatever the reason, I hope I've convinced you about the power of Google to deliver listeners. All we need to do now is figure out how to get our podcast noticed by the search engines. To do that, we need a podcast website and great SEO.