Writing a Great Podcast Description: At-a-Glance
Podcast listeners have hundreds of thousands of potential shows to listen to. So how can you stack conditions in your favour for helping them choosing yours? One of the most important factors is to have a good podcast description.
Writing your show's description or summary is like writing a blurb for a book. You want to sell the show to your potential listeners and encourage them to give you a shot. In this article, we're going to find out how to do just that. First up though…
What Do I Mean by “Podcast Description”?
Let's clear up any potential confusion surrounding the term.
If you've stumbled upon this post looking for a description of what a podcast actually is, then check out What is a Podcast? An Explanation in Plain English.
Also, some folks refer to single podcast episodes as “podcasts”, but “a podcast” is really the show as a whole.
So a “podcast description” wouldn't be the text that accompanies one single episode – that's what we'd call “shownotes”. Here's our full guide to writing great podcast shownotes.
All pretty straightforward, but good to make sure we're on the same page here!
Now, let's get to the meat of the article.
Where Do I Write My Podcast Description?
Your podcast description is written inside your media host – the place your show essentially “lives”.
This'll be done when a podcaster is creating their show, prior to submitting it to the listening directories, where people will find and subscribe to it.
Unfortunately, many will write their podcast description as an afterthought, and purely because they've stumbled across a big empty text box. They need to stick *something* in there in order to crack on with creating the podcast. But, tasks like uploading their artwork and first episode seem to be the biggest priority. That isn't the case.
The good news, though, is that you can edit your show summary at any time. When you update something inside your media host, the changes will usually show up in all podcast directories within around 24 hours.
Why Is Your Podcast Description so Important?
We recently ran our 2020 Podcast Discovery Survey. This is a sample of the listening habits of 780 podcast consumers.
In the survey, participants were asked “When considering a new show, how important to you is…”, followed by various front-facing aspects of a podcast.
They were they asked to grade each one out of 10, with 10 being really important, 0 being not important at all. As you'll see from the data in the graph, the podcast description came out on top by some distance.
Is It Important for Search?
Not really. And it's likely that stuffing your podcast summary full of keywords will be a waste of time.
This piece of text does its job once the potential listener has already found your show, but prior to them hitting play.
More than 63% of podcast consumption takes place on Apple Podcasts/iTunes. When listeners type a topic into these apps, Apple is only searching podcast names, episode titles, and author/artist names. It isn't going to scan your podcast description, or individual episode shownotes.
Overcast is another very popular listening app. When searching for new content in there, it'll initially only scan through the names of all the shows in there. Once you click on a podcast, you can then search through its episodes.
Spotify looks like it does search through podcast descriptions. It's the second most popular place podcasts are consumed, at around 10%. But that's definitely no reason to go down the keyword-stuffing route.
So to perform well in search, choose a good name for your podcast, and always publish episodes with descriptive titles. That'll help get you in front of more potential listeners, and only then are they going to read your show summary.
What Should Go in Your Podcast Description?
So again, think of it as the text on the back of a book you've picked up, and are thinking about buying.
Or, if you're not much of a reader, the text on the back of a video game box. Or the summary of a show on Netflix you're considering for your next binge.
In fact, it'll be useful to have a look at some of these and pick through the way they're written. Are there common themes, structures, or tones?
Try reading some descriptions from your own podcast listening app too. This could be more hit or miss, because most podcasts don't go through a publishing process in the way books, TV shows, and video games do.
Here are the things you might want to consider putting in your own podcast summary.
Who Is It For?
Who's your target audience? Speak directly to them in your podcast description. Let them know that this is the podcast for them.
To do this, you need to tell them who they are. This sounds strange, but it works.
“You're desperate to learn Spanish, but only have 10 minutes a day to practice”.
For those who can relate to this statement, they already feel like you've created this show just for them. And for those who don't agree, well, they're not your target audience…
What Will They Get From It?
Are you going to teach them something? Help them to solve a problem or struggle? Will you be motivating, encouraging or inspiring them? Or maybe you'll be offering to entertain them and make them laugh? Whatever they're going to get from your podcast, tell them about it up front.
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