Podcasts are booming. There are more than 584 million podcast listeners worldwide, and over 175 million episodes competing for attention. With so much content out there, how do you make sure your podcast gets noticed?

The answer starts with search. While many people browse within apps like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, a large number also turn to Google to search for specific topics, guests, or questions. But without text, your episodes won't show up there.

That's because Google can't "listen" to audio content. It needs text to know what your episode is about. And that's where podcast transcripts come in.

By turning your audio into written words, transcripts give search engines the context they need to understand, index, and rank your podcast. Let's look at the main ways transcripts can boost your podcast SEO - and help you reach more listeners in the process.

Jump to:

• Make episodes discoverable with keyword-rich text
• Expand your reach beyond podcast directories
• Improve accessibility and listener experience
• Fuel your content strategy with repurposing opportunities
• Strengthen internal linking and discoverability across episodes
• Build topical authority over time
• Boost your chances of being featured in snippets
• Help you prepare for AI and LLM-driven search
• How Transcribe makes it easy to create SEO-friendly transcripts
• What to do with your podcast transcript to boost SEO

Podcast titles and show notes certainly play a part in podcast SEO, but they only scratch the surface of your content. A transcript captures every single word, phrase, and theme from each episode. It's packed with the natural keywords your audience is already searching for, so by publishing it alongside the audio file, your episodes become far more discoverable in search results.

Directories like Spotify and Apple Podcasts are great for existing listeners, but they don't give your episodes much visibility elsewhere, on the big wide web. By publishing transcripts, you allow Google to index your content too, so people can find your podcast through everyday search queries, not just inside an app.

Not everyone listens to podcasts in the same way. Some prefer to skim the transcript before committing to an episode, others may want to copy a quote, and for those who are deaf or hard of hearing, transcripts make your show accessible. Better accessibility means a better user experience, which also benefits your SEO.

Find out more about how to make your audio content more accessible.

A transcript gives you a ready-made text resource to adapt into new formats: blog posts, social media snippets, newsletters, or even ebooks. Each new format opens up another way for people to discover your podcast, while strengthening your overall content strategy.

Check out our guide to repurposing podcast content for top tips.

Without text, it's hard to connect your episodes to other relevant content on your site. With transcripts, you can easily spot recurring themes and add links to blog posts, service pages, or product pages using relevant anchor text. This strengthens your internal linking structure - improving SEO while guiding listeners toward the next step in their journey.

Publishing transcripts consistently creates a searchable, keyword-rich library of content around your niche. Over time, this builds topical authority, showing both search engines and listeners that you're a trusted voice in your field.

Search engines often pull concise answers, lists, or definitions into rich snippets and featured results. Without text, your podcast can't compete for these spots. With transcripts, the valuable insights in your episodes become structured and extractable, boosting your chances of appearing at the very top of search results.

While rich snippets still matter, the future of search is shifting toward AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT, Bing Copilot, and Perplexity. These rely on large language models (LLMs), which need structured text to generate answers.

By providing transcripts, you make your podcast content accessible to AI systems, keeping your episodes visible in both traditional search and the new wave of conversational results.

Transcribe makes it simple to create podcast transcripts that boost podcast SEO. Our AI-powered service delivers fast, accurate transcripts, giving your episodes the keyword-rich text they need to rank in search.

We support more than 120 languages and all major audio formats, and you can upload files straight from your device or import them from cloud platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox.

Every transcript can be edited, downloaded, summarized for show notes, or even translated, so you can quickly turn your podcast into content that's optimized for both search engines and your audience.

Learn how to transcribe a podcast with our helpful step-by-step guide.

For SEO, don't just upload your podcast to Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Make sure you embed the player on your own website too. Then publish the transcript on the same page, ideally just below the player. This way, Google can associate both the audio and the text with your site, giving you the SEO benefit. Note: Directories like Spotify and Apple don't index transcripts for Google search, so to capture SEO benefits, you need the podcast and transcript hosted on your own site.

Download the Transcribe app or launch the online editor to get started.