In this episode, we’ll talk about how to design and create a podcast website that encourages visitors to listen to your episodes, subscribe to your show, and makes it easy to search and find any other valuable content you want to present to your listeners.

We’ll cover common mistakes we see, why your company needs a website or web presence for your podcast, design components you’ll need to think about, and technical considerations.

Think of this as the ultimate guide to building your very own podcast website.

If you’re going to add your podcast episodes to your existing company site, make sure to give them a dedicated home versus mixing the episodes into your blog. This will allow visitors to easily distinguish between written and audio content. It’s also important to link your podcast page prominently on your site (add to the main navigation, not just the footer) to increase visibility.

Make your episode pages robust and intuitive for your visitors. Rather than simply embedding the audio and adding a description, think about how you can incorporate top quotable moments, important resources mentioned, more info about the guest, related episodes, and even the full transcript. Not only will this encourage your visitors to engage further with the episodes on your site, but it will also give you some residual SEO benefits.

By having a podcast landing page or section on your website, you’re making it easier for others to share your episodes on social media and link to your site if they want to refer to any of your episodes in their own content. This helps you build backlink SEO juice, which improves your overall domain authority on Google.

We often see this with clients where the number 2 or 3 most listened to platform for their podcast is their website, oftentimes ahead of Google or Amazon and sometimes even ahead of Spotify or Apple.

Allow listeners to search and filter by category, topic, or keyword to make it easier for them to find exactly what they’re looking for. This search could also surface related articles or guides making your website a stronger and more robust content play.

You can invite visitors to do a number of things on your podcast website, like subscribe to your show on their preferred platform, submit questions or guest requests, or sign up for your newsletter if that content would be relevant to them. You want to make sure you promote a clear call-to-action so listeners know what step to take after they’ve visited the site and listened to your show.

Rather than nesting your podcast within your company website (yoursite.com/podcast) or even tying it to a subdomain (podcast.yourcompany.com), you’ll want to consider giving your podcast its own branded domain name if you’re thinking of building a long-term community from this. The benefit of this is it gives your podcast a completely distinct brand identity, separate from your company’s. You can style how you want, give it a different navigation menu, include forums or Q&As, etc. It also helps you build implicit trust with your audience because they won’t feel like they’re being sold to.

When your podcast lives within your company site, you’re better able to take advantage of the SEO benefits of adding all this content to your site, and it lets you promote your brand more. Your podcast listeners can view your full navigation and explore your product, use cases, or even book a call without having to go somewhere else to find you.

This is where your episodes are hosted and then distributed to all the major podcast players. We recommend a platform like Transistor or Simplecast. This is where you’ll upload your episode audio file, artwork, show notes, and transcript for it to be shared with Spotify, Apple, Google Podcasts, etc.

Apps like Zapier allow you to build automation funnels where when an episode is published, it can automatically create an episode page on your website and put it into draft mode. It could pull in the title based on the title of your episode and maybe even automatically pull the episode description. This will help save your marketing team from having to rebuild episode pages on your site after inputting all information into your podcast hosting platform.