Google has announced that podcast episodes will be featured on its search pages, making it possible to listen to them individually on the same search engine .If the potential of podcasts still doesn’t seem promising to you , this may be an interesting time to learn that Google has made its confidence in this type of content quite clear .And if you are part of the growing group of people who consume the format daily, you will be very excited to know that the world’s largest search engine has decided to show podcast episodes on the cover of its results pages.The novelty was revealed last Thursday, August 8, and the functionality is now available for searches in English located in Hong Kong Phone Number List the United States.Do you want to know how streaming audio by Google will work and what will be the effects of this great change? Then keep reading us and stay up-to-date on the topic!How to listen to podcasts on Google pages?Before we explain how the novelty will work, it is important to talk a little about how the podcast search currently works in the search engine .In these situations, it is still necessary to specify the format one wants to find, by typing the keyword + the term “podcast”.So a search like ” Digital Marketing podcast ” was about the only possible way to find an episode or podcast that contains this keyword in the title.

With this change, for any search – in case there is some audio material with good quality and related to the topic – it will be possible to find podcasts positioning in the SERP .Look at the example we took from the story produced by The Verge : podcasts in the serIt is also useful to remember that the technology company confirmed that this alteration will also be available for the Google Assistant . That way, it will be even easier to listen to a podcast and even meet new ones on the topics you like.

How to position podcasts in Google?If we look at it from a more practical perspective, the big question that arises is: how to get a podcast to rank well in Google?To give us the answer, Zack Reneau-Wedeen, product manager of Google Podcasts, said that some factors will be taken into account, such as the following: quality of content;number of listeners;podcast authority.Although they seem half incomplete, these three points can be good parameters if they are combined with other SEO knowledge that we have conquered until today.From that perspective, the quality of the content will be related to the technical issues of its production, but it can also have a lot to do with its coherence with the user’s intention .Another example is the authority of the podcast, which can be linked to the strength of the original domain, whether it is a large producer of digital content or simply an established brand in the market.

This factor can be made explicit with the case of Fini, a company renowned for its chewing gums and which this year launched the FiniCast project in Brazil.In addition, an extremely important element for the positioning of podcasts in Google is the existence of an RSS Feed of the episodes, which will allow the search engine to be indexed automatically .This happens because the Google algorithm can not directly read the audio. For this reason, the contents first go through a transcreation process carried out by the platform. According to Google itself , more than 2 million episodes have already been indexed.What are the possible consequences of podcast rankings?As we have spoken, one of the great concerns of podcast producers will be to achieve good positions in the SERPs and that can generate collateral effects, mainly for the listeners themselves.

Will the optimized podcats keep their naturalness?Will they turn into long audios with keywords inserted every 5 minutes?Would this be a new movement in favor of the mediatization of these contents?Would they get boring, monotonous, or too standard?It is still too early to come up with answers to those questions, but based on the universe of optimizations for texts, we can infer that all this can happen, but not in an epidemic way. Good or bad quality content will continue to be produced, whether over-optimized or not.Apart from that, black hat practices such as keyword stuffing are already well known to Google. Therefore, the search engine has already confirmed that offenders will be penalized according to the severity of the action.

Leaving the SEO issues, this novelty reveals the path that consumer behavior has traveled in recent years and in what way the guidelines of urgency, ease and hypersegmentation have become increasingly present in society.If you are interested in creating your own podcast, be sure to check out our free checklist with everything you need to plan a podcast from scratch: