Discoverability has always been a key concern for podcasts; combine this with the resources required to create, grow and maintain them and podcasts can easily get overlooked as a vital opportunity in finance brands’ marketing campaigns. Google’s native indexing and automatic transcription could be the next step in providing increased discoverability, helping to ensure podcasts become a viable content marketing opportunity for finance brands.
Why podcasts for financial brands?
Around the world, economies have shifted dramatically from only a few decades ago. The average person is facing rising costs of living, complicated investment and savings options, and an uncertain financial future. Audiences are now looking to learn as much as they can about how to approach finance, which gives finance brands a great opportunity to provide that knowledge and education. Podcasting, in particular, is a newer medium that financial brands could hugely benefit from.
Podcasts generate four times better brand recall than other forms of digital advertising.
There are currently over 750,000 podcasts across the world, up from 550,000 in mid-2018. Over half of the US population (51%, 144 million) has listened to a podcast – up from 44% in 2018 and still growing. Podcasts also generate four times better brand recall than other forms of digital advertising; so there has never been a better time for finance brands to jump on the audio bandwagon.
How does Google’s update benefit financial brands?
Google has long returned search results focused on text, images and more recently video. However, it also announced earlier this year that it would now roll out audio as part of its native search results.
Google is also beginning to automatically transcribe podcasts in order to provide additional metadata in its search results. This means your audience can better understand what your podcast content is and whether it’s of relevance to them based on their search keywords, rather than any existing knowledge of your podcast.
These latest updates have an impact on discoverability in two key ways:
- It means your audience could find your podcast simply by searching the subject matter rather than looking directly in a native podcast app – opening up your finance podcast to a whole potential new audience generated from SEO.
- It also means that a user can listen directly to a podcast straight from the search engine results; in a single click.
Optimising for podcast SEO
‘Podcast SEO’ is a growing opportunity, ie. considering the audio content of your podcast and taking into account how this will be transcribed by Google for its search results. It’s still early days to consider how your audio content could generate SEO traffic but it’s never too early to take some basic considerations into account ‘just in case’:
- Ensure your podcast has a clear structure and theme across the entire podcast and within each individual episode.
- Know your audience, perhaps even do some keyword research. What are the kinds of natural questions and topics that your audience would likely be typing into Google?
- Be clear, for both your listeners and for Google. Even the best machine learning will struggle with mumbling or poor sound quality. Ensuring your speech is transcribed correctly will be key to appearing for the right search terms.
SEO is not your main priority for podcast discoverability at this stage, but we know that Google loves great content that is created for the end user so a well structured, clear podcast will likely benefit all with increased audiences and brand recognition. There has never been a better time for finance brands to dip their toe into the podcast pond. We help our clients create podcasts that stand out from the crowd, get in touch to find out how we can help your brand be both seen and heard.
