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What actually makes a podcast climb to the very top of the charts? Is it just luck, or is there a specific science to their visibility? And more importantly, should you follow their strategy for your podcast? If you're working on improving your podcast and you enjoy topics like this, you'll love our email newsletter. Each week I answer reader questions, share upcoming podcast events, and highlight tools that make podcasting easier. If you'd like to check it out, head to simplepodstudios.com newsletter or use the link in our show Notes Let's get into it. So today I was reading a report that came out breaking down the anatomy of the most successful podcast in the U.S. a podcast tech company called OSHA teamed up with Edison Research to analyze the top 50 podcast based on total audience reach in Q4. They pulled data from Spotify and Apple Podcast, and they analyzed their last 20 episodes from each show to identify patterns. They looked at data points like episode titles, show titles and descriptions, publishing frequency, episode length, artwork, release days, rating and reviews. And what they did was basically tried to reverse engineer what the biggest podcasts in America are doing. So in this episode we're going to use that report and break down what the biggest podcasts are doing, what lessons are actually useful for smaller creators, and where you should probably ignore the data altogether. All right, getting into the first thing that the report analyzed that was the podcast metadata. This is basically the text that surrounds your show. You can think about this from your show title, your episode titles, your show description, and your episode descriptions. The report was pretty interesting. It definitely Showcased that the Top 50 podcast overwhelmingly favor short, punchy metadata. Their show titles on average were 21 characters long. For reference, our title with our title extension is 81 characters long, so about four times that length. Episode titles were 57 characters on average. For the Top 50 podcast, I typically shoot for about 60 to 70. I do prefer kind of shorter, punchy titles, but I think there's some nuance in that conversation. And finally, the show description. On average, the top 50 podcasts were using 473 characters. I think that's a little bit light as well. So the report does suggest that this reveals a big gap in their SEO strategy. And honestly, I really agree with this, but I think there's some important context that needs to be added. Most of these top 50 shows are already built on massive existing audiences or celebrity brands. If you look through the top 50 shows in this report, you'll see names like Mel Robbins, Cohen o', Brien, Dax Shepard. These are people who were already well known even prior to them starting a podcast. And in all honesty, their actual name itself might be a high volume search word. So their podcast of course is going to show up pretty frequently in the search as people are just looking up Mel Robbins in general. And these big brands, since they have existing audiences, big social media followings, maybe large newsletters, marketing budgets to spend, they don't necessarily have to rely on keyword optimization, search based discovery, and some of these long descriptions that are going to help podcast players actually understand their content. And if you're looking at this report as a smaller creator, you can get into some trouble if you're thinking, oh well, they have shorter titles, that must be the best practice. But the reality is smaller podcasts need to optimize for discoverability. We are not carrying in large audiences already, we don't have large marketing budgets to spend and we don't probably have massive social media followings. Organic discoverability and SEO is one of the primary levers that we need to use in order to grow our shows. So here's my recommendation. Instead, if you're a smaller creator, I would recommend you do the complete opposite of what this report is suggesting. I would use the full character count in your show descriptions. Honestly, I see a lot of podcasters underutilize show descriptions and this is like the About Me section of your podcast. This is prime real estate for telling listening platforms. And honestly, potential listeners that are reading your About Me section what your show is really about, go ahead and fill up the full character count. I think Spotify for podcasters is the only hosting platform that I've ran into that's had a 500 word character count, which is kind of a bummer. Most of the other podcast host platforms, they allow a thousand, two thousand, three thousand characters. And I definitely think it's worth considering adding as much detail into your show description as you can. Both for once again potential listeners to read through and for these listening platforms and the algorithms that power them to better figure out what your show is all about. The second consideration I would suggest is to add a title extension. So for example, instead of us just being podcast playbook, you can read our title and you see that it's Podcast playbook. Helping coaches and advisors convert podcast content into clients. This is that extra context that is immediately improving our searchability and visibility. There are some keywords in our title extension. Coaches, advisors, podcast content, clients. These are all words that are in our SEO strategy and that we're hoping to rank for with inside the podcast players themselves and adding them into your title Field is going to immediately improve your search visibility. And my third suggestion is to treat episode titles as both marketing and metadata. Your episode title should, of course, yes, convince someone or give them a reason to press play. You have to earn the click, but at the same time, it needs to contain keywords that people might actually search for so that when they are searching for them, the podcast players know to surface your episode as a suggestion if you want to go deeper into this topic. These three suggestions, we actually made a whole podcast episode about it. Episode 2 Three overlooked SEO strategies to make your podcast more discoverable. It's probably been the episode in our catalog so far that's gotten the most listener responses. So once again, if you want to dive deeper into this, you really want to make some immediate changes. That's a super actionable and tactical episode. You can go check it out. At the end of the day, as the biggest podcast in the world can afford to ignore SEO as smaller creators, we can't. This is just a growth lever that needs to be utilized as we don't carry in these large audiences, we don't have large marketing budgets. Organic discoverability and searchability is a prime lever that we should be utilizing to grow our podcast. All right, the next section uncovers how often the biggest podcast publishes. So essentially, how often are the top 50 podcasts releasing new episodes? And on average, the report shows that these podcasts are publishing 14 episodes per month. So that's roughly three to four episodes per week, which is of course a much higher publishing cadence than most independent podcasts. And before Utah and Feather me, I would never ask you to publish at this kind of frequency. If you're running a business and producing a podcast to support it, trying to match the top 50 shows by publishing three to four episodes per week is just so unrealistic. Most of these podcasts have full production teams, they have a dedicated content staff, they have large budgets, and they might even have a media company behind them. For smaller creators, I don't think the goal should be to maximize volume. I think it should be to find a consistent and sustainable publishing cadence. So I think the best strategy to go with here is to find some kind of rhythm that fits into the rest of your business schedule. For most creators, that's usually gotta look like weekly episodes, which is typically the most common cadence and great for growth. Bi weekly episodes, which feels much more manageable and still pretty consistent for your listeners. Or monthly episodes if you have to. If monthly is all you can manage, I still think it's better than not publishing at all. But I will put a caveat that I think it is harder to build momentum whenever you're just publishing 12 episodes a year compared to some of the shows that are producing at 52 or 26 episodes per year. Podcast listeners typically find rhythm and routine with their listening habits, and if you're only showing up once a month for them, it's gotta be easy for them to forget that your show exists. The good news is that your publishing cadence doesn't have to stay the same forever. I love advising our clients that the show growth should dictate the publishing cadence here, so whenever they start seeing higher downloads, stronger listener engagement, and any kind of audience demand, that's when it might make sense to actually increase your publishing frequency. But I just want that decision to come from momentum, not necessarily pressured to copy the biggest podcast out there Another interesting part of this section is the actual publishing day patterns, the actual day of the week that new episodes were released. And after reading the report, there is obviously a clear preference for weekday releases. Looking at the percentages, Monday was the most common, with 27% of new episodes being released on Monday, followed by 13 to 17% for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. The two obvious outliers were Saturday and Sunday. Saturday, 5% of new episodes were released on this day and 6% on Sunday. So nearly 90% of new episodes of the Top 50 podcast were released during the work week, with the biggest spikes happening on Monday and Thursday. They also mentioned the timing of the release, the actual time of the day itself, and the report shows that many shows release during the early morning or late morning hours. So think 6am to 10am and I actually think this is a really smart strategy. It aligns well with some of the highest podcast listening windows, which include morning commutes, gym routines, and lunch breaks. That's going to increase your chances of discovery on platforms like Apple and Spotify, where new content is often surfaced to active users. But all of this brings up a really interesting question. Should you follow the norm or should you go against it? Do you release on a Saturday when there's way less supply and people are still looking for podcast? Or do you assume and follow the norm when the most amount of active users are looking for podcasts themselves? If you had to make me choose, honestly, I tend to favor following the norm here. I think those release windows exist for a reason. They align when the most amount of listeners are actively consuming podcast. But I think the bigger question or what this decision should really be based on is actually your listener avatar. For example, if you have a family friendly podcast. Weekends might actually work better when families are traveling and in the car together versus if your show is aimed at busy professionals or executives. Weekday mornings during commuting hours might be the ideal window. So I think instead of asking what's the best publishing time? A better question might be, when is my listener most likely to press play? And then one other final factor that matters probably more than the day or the time itself, is your promotion schedule. When are you going to be posting on social media? Sending your newsletter, sharing the episode to your audience? I think it often makes sense to align your release as closely as possible to your promotional push. That way you maximize the initial downloads, which is going to help signal to the listening platforms that this episode is gaining traction. And when that happens, platforms like Apple and Spotify are more likely to recommend the episode to new listeners. All right, the next question the report addresses is how long are the most successful podcast? So essentially how long on average are episodes among these top 50 podcast? And according to the report, the mean duration is 165 minutes. That's well over two hours, actually closing in on three hours. But they also gave a chart that grouped episodes into a couple of different ranges. The ranges were less than 10 minutes, 10 to 30 minutes, 30 to 60 minutes, 1 hour to 2 hours, and 2 hours plus. The smallest range was less than 10 minutes. But the biggest range, the most common range, was one to two hours. I'm going to assume that the actual average is somewhere in that one to two hours. Or maybe there's a couple of really long episodes that are driving up the mean and inflating the actual average of the average podcast length. But let's think about why these shows tend to be longer, even if it is 65 minutes or 165 minutes. This feels longer than most podcast episodes that are out there. And there's clearly a trend that the top podcast tend to prefer longer format content. And I think there's probably a couple of reasons for that. First, many of these shows are interview based podcast where conversations naturally stretch out. I don't know about you, but if I have a podcast interview, I'm likely going to double how long that episode takes versus if I were just doing a solo episode. Second, a lot of the narrative or storytelling podcasts often need more time to develop the story and keep listeners engaged. Many true crime shows show up in the top 50 charts here. And of course there's just some like crazy outliers shows like Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, they're famous for These like three hour marathon conversations. But the one other big factor that's probably driving a lot of this is advertising. Large podcast often include 10 to 15 minutes of ads per hour. And then of course longer episodes also create more room for monetization. So some of these shows that want to get more ad spots in are going to favor longer episodes. So now the question is, what should smaller creators do? Just because the biggest podcast are long form doesn't necessarily mean it's the right strategy for every creator. I ultimately think that episode length should be driven by your audience and the type of content you're producing. For example, if your audience is busy entrepreneurs or professionals, they often prefer shorter focused episodes that deliver insight quickly. On a side note, I have seen a trend with our clients. I've noticed that many of our clients shows the shorter episodes are often performing better, especially for the education based podcasts that are out there. And I think this makes sense whenever you start thinking about the time to value ratio. If a listener can learn something valuable in 15 to 20 minutes instead of 60 minutes, that's often going to be a win for them once again, especially when the audience is busy. Professionals, entrepreneurs, service providers who are really protecting their time. So in many cases I think it probably makes sense to be more succinct with the same knowledge to actually improve the listener experience here. Another big consideration is your production workflow. Episode length is going to affect what your production process looks like. Shorter episodes are typically easier to record, faster to edit and quicker to publish. While longer episodes may feel more conversational and maybe give you more moments to repurpose for social media and clips. I think there's advantage to both sides and you should consider those advantages and even disadvantages and how they're going to affect your production process. My ultimate recommendation is this though experiment. If you're unsure what length works best for you and your audience, try producing a few different formats. And I would suggest three different kind of formats, including a 10 minute quick insight episode, a solo episode with just you, a 30 minute focused discussion, maybe you and a co host or you and another guest and a long form conversation. It could include multiple segments or a long drawn out conversation with a couple of different guests. After you've recorded each one of those three types of formats, then I want you to evaluate two things. First, how did it feel to create? Does that feel sustainable for you? Did you enjoy that process of that format? And then number two, what did your stats say? Did listeners stick around longer? Did they engage more? Did you get more feedback on certain formats. Once you have those two pieces of information, those can help you decide what your ideal length and format is moving forward. One more plug for an episode. If you are unsure how to interpret those analytics, I'd suggest that you check out episode seven. It's titled three signs your podcast content is Good or bad. That episode actually walks you through metrics that tell you whether your audience is enjoying your content. We dive into retention. Where to find your retention metrics and what are actually good ranges for your retention. All right, the final section that we're going to talk about is show artwork. So the report analyzed the visual patterns across the top 50 podcasts and found a few interesting trends. The first was that black and white appear most frequently in podcast cover art. That's not black and white cover arts, but actually the color black or the color white is the colors that appear most often. There's also some clear genre based color patterns. True crime podcasts tend to favor dark and moody tones, while business podcasts often lean towards blues, reds and whites. The report threw out a recommendation that I thought was kind of interesting and that was to go against the norm. Their argument is that if every show in your niche uses the same colors, choosing something different can help you stand out. They mention quote if every show in your niche uses purple and blue, consider bold orange or yellow to make your artwork pop against the platform's interface. And like I said, I think that's an interesting idea. In practicality, I'm not sure how effective it would work, but it might be worth trying. My personal take is I don't think I have a strong preference for following the trend or intentionally going against it. I think in many cases, especially for smaller brands, our artwork colors are simply going to align with our overall business brand. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Your podcast is an extension of your business, so it should feel visually consistent with the rest of your content. So I'm not convinced there's a single color strategy that's going to work best here, but there was one recommendation that the report made that I completely agree with, and that's prioritizing legibility. Your podcast title should be readable even as a tiny thumbnail on a mobile screen. And I think this is incredibly important because most people discover podcasts while scrolling their phone. I think your podcast title should be large with clear text. You should have high contrasting text and background colors, and there should be minimal clutter or extra design elements on your cover art. The goal of the COVID art, I feel like, is pretty simple. It's to get someone to stop scrolling. So while some color trends can come and go, the real rule for podcast cover art is pretty simple. If your ideal listener can't read your title in two seconds on their phone and it doesn't immediately signal this is a podcast for me, then your design probably needs some work. There is one final section in the report on ratings and reviews, and to no surprise, the numbers are massive. Across the top 50 podcasts, shows average more than a hundred thousand ratings between Spotify and Apple, with an average rating of 4.6 stars. So yeah, the big takeaway is pretty simple. More 5 star reviews equal good. But come on, I really can't leave you with that. But instead of diving into when and how to ask for reviews the right way on this episode, I'm actually dedicating the next episode to it, along with three other listener actions that that you should be asking for throughout the year. Think about this as your four listener request, one for each quarter, designed to help your podcast grow. So if you want to hear that, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss the next episode. But to finish today's episode, I hope one thing became clear in today's breakdown. The top 50 podcasts are playing a very different game than most creators. They have massive audiences, recognizable brands, production teams, and media budgets behind them. Which means if you're building a podcast as part of your business, the goal isn't to copy what the biggest shows are doing. It's to build a strategy that works for your audience, your schedule, and your resources. If you ever want help with building that strategy, you can always reach out to us. You can email me anytime with questions or to start a conversation@justinimplepodstudios.com thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Podcast Playbook.