What is Podcast Metadata and will it improve the success of my podcast?

Small errors in metadata could keep your podcast off the radar of your potential listeners.

4 min readJun 22, 2020

What is podcast metadata?

It is the extra information about your podcast, the signposts (podcast by ‘women’ on ‘music’ this way 👉), which help people find your podcast. Not only find it but be happy when they do, if you signposted correctly, they will find what they were actually looking for.

For this article, I am going to focus on podcasts on Spotify only — one focus, same principle for all sites.

However, these podcast recommendations help my podcast on other providers like iTunes, Soundcloud etc. because the changes I am making are via my host podcast provider (SoundCloud).

Quick starter tips to improve metadata:

Category: choose a category/genre if you will. By categorising = people get what they expect and more likely to love what they find,
Explicit: Is it explicit? Adding the tag is important, just think is it family-friendly? The occasional swear word pops into mine so all mine are marked as ‘explicit’.
Good Cover Art: this is the first impression and best opportunity to reel new listeners in. Tips: look at the top podcasts in your genre/category. They most likely had a team behind them to create a cover that is designed in a way to captivate, inform (clear font), and thus convert people to choose to click on their podcast. I say, why not take inspiration from their work ✨

Now, let’s move on to optimising your podcast’s description:

Start with one line to describe what it is. For example, a podcast by women in music. As you can see in the above image, people may only see the first 10 or so words so make them count!
Next include your mission statement aka What, Why, Who for?
Always end with a call to action. Mine is ‘go visit my website www.bbbpodcast.xyz (FYI, on phone apps the listener can click on this link and it will open in a browser, but on Spotify’s laptop/desktop app it does not show as a link. But I say worth having especially if your listeners mainly listen on mobile).

My podcast description notes as an example below:

Next, let’s look at each episode show notes.

Keep it short, sweet, and summarised. Again, they may only see or simply choose to read the first few words.

Embrace being a chameleon.

Remember, you can always change, re-write, re-design all of the above as your podcast develops. I updated and changed my artwork and show notes after Episode 4 went live. As, by then, I had a better understanding of what and who my podcast was and for.