If your podcast is listed in Google Play, have you tried searching for it using the keywords that you’ve included in your main description, episode titles, or episode descriptions? And if so, has your show appeared? If not, read on.
I’ve discovered if you don’t place your most important keywords into the first two paragraphs of your podcast description, your show may never get found organically in Google Play!
In other words, if you have a show on fishing and you want to be found under the keywords: trolling, fish, bass, lake, and lure, you better have those words listed near the beginning of your show’s description (unless you have it in your show’s title). Otherwise when I look for “lure” in the Google Play search field, your show won’t appear.
The two main reasons your show may not be found in a Google Play search seem to be:
- Google Play doesn’t look at anything past the first two lines of your podcast description
- Google Play doesn’t look at your episode titles or episode description in searches
I was able to confirm this by searching for the terms that appeared in the first two sentences Google Play showed people when they opened my show. Here’s what people see when they click on my show:
My description is a lot longer than this, but this is all people see. It’s also all Google Play Search sees too!
If you searched for “affirmations”, my show would appear in the search as number 1. If you searched for “emotional intelligence”, my show would appear high in the results again. But if you searched for “anxiety” (which is under the READ MORE), my show will be nowhere on the list!
I wanted to be found when searching for more important keywords like “anxiety” and “depression”, so I updated the description that people see above the READ MORE link allowing my show to be found for the most common keywords in relation to what I teach on the show.
In iTunes, this doesn’t appear to be a problem. If you search for anxiety or depression, you will see The Overwhelmed Brain as #1 or #2 typically. When I search for those terms in Google Play Podcasts however, my show doesn’t appear at all.
So what can you do if this happens? Update your show’s description with whomever hosts your podcasts. I use Libsyn, so I went into Show Settings and updated my description there. Make sure you include all the important keywords at the very beginning of the show description otherwise you may never get found. (If you decide to go with Libsyn as your podcast host, use the promo code “brain” to get the rest of this month and the entire next month free!).