Podcast show notes

Show notes are the searchable half of the podcast

Audio is invisible to most search. A guest can explain something brilliantly for twenty minutes, and nobody searching for that topic will ever find it unless the words exist somewhere in text. Show notes and episode pages are that text.

That changes how we write them. The app description leads with the episode's most useful idea, in words a listener would search for, because most apps show only the first two or three lines. The episode page on your site goes further, setting out the key points so the page can rank on its own and send listeners back to the audio.

Over a year, a weekly show builds a library of fifty indexable pages. Each one is a small, permanent route into your back catalogue, which is where most podcasts lose their value.

Listened to, not generated from a transcript

Notes produced straight from an automatic transcript are easy to spot. Guest names are misspelt, a company becomes a common noun, and the summary lists topics in order without saying which part was worth hearing. Listeners skim them and move on.

We listen to each episode in full. Timestamps mark the moments a listener would want to jump to, not every change of subject. Every book, tool and person mentioned is checked and linked correctly, and anything a guest asked to keep off the record stays off.

• Two or three title options per episode
• A description written for the app's preview length
• Timestamps for the parts worth skipping to
• Correct links to every guest and resource
• Website and newsletter copy on the larger packages