Short guidance from Tracy Hazzard on optimizing podcast show descriptions for search within podcast apps. Key recommendations: use close to the 4,000-character limit (avoid under ~3,500), write a properly formed description rather than keyword-cramming or hashtag lists, and avoid repetitive use of the exact show title—use synonyms/variations instead.
We get questions all the time about the keyword phrases that you might be using in your description, and we use 4000 characters or as close to that as we can. So the three things that you might do wrong and would hurt your search engine optimization value of the description within a podcast app is to use too little character count. So under 3500 characters would be harmful to you because you're not maximizing and optimizing that description for searchability. The second thing is if you try to keyword cram, use hashtags, or use just a string of phrases, the algorithm's not going to support that. It likes it to be a properly written description. So when you keyword cram like that, it doesn't work. And the third thing that you might do and wouldn't be helpful to you is if you repeated the same words again and again. So if you were constantly using the title of your show repetitively and not using variations on what that might mean. So in the case of a podcast called Hooked, you might want to use terms like addicted or.
Strung out or just other kinds of more vernacular uses of the word in addition to hooked. But if you just repeated Hooked everywhere, you'd actually be harming yourself because you're reducing your searchability when Hooked is already the name of the show, so it's already helping you from there. So those are just the three quick things that could hurt your search engine optimization of your podcast show description.
