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Podcast SEO for a parenting wellbeing brand: episode planning from keyword research

How keyword research shaped a new podcast's schedule and episode titles for a UK working-parent wellbeing brand, with results from the first 14 episodes.

Hannah Reed
Published ·Last updated
SEOContent strategyBranding
Client: a UK wellbeing and education brand for working parents (anonymised)
Sector: parenting wellbeing and education, where UK health advertising rules apply
Scope: SEO-led podcast planning, covering the schedule, themes, episode titles and descriptions
Collaboration: the client's founder
Engagement: 2026 and ongoing

Results at a glance

  • 300+ plays and 70+ hours of listening on Spotify across the first 14 episodes, from a show that started with 1 follower.
  • The 2 episodes whose titles were planned around a head term, the short high-volume phrase for a topic, each drew about 4 times the median episode's plays. Together they hold over 40% of the 300+ plays.
  • Of about 140 Spotify listeners, over 80% are aged 35 to 59, the age range of the brand's working-parent audience.

Source for all 3: Spotify for Creators, launch to early November 2026. These are small numbers from a new show, and 2 episodes is a small sample.

The starting point

The founder had a library of recorded interviews with academics and practitioners, and no existing audience. The brief was to turn the recordings into a schedule, with a title and description for each episode and a launch post to go with it.

Some of the brand's own vocabulary matches how parents search and some doesn't. Each title had to work for search and still sound like the show.

How the engagement ran

Keyword research came before any scheduling. Spotify has no keyword tool. Google search volumes stood in as a record of the topics and wording parents use. I read them as a guide to interest and language, and the client playbook states that they don't forecast plays.

The research became a keyword sheet of 250+ UK terms across 20 topics. Each term was tagged by search intent, meaning what the searcher is trying to do, and mapped to the guests whose interviews covered it. Mapping to guests instead of episode numbers kept the sheet usable every time the running order changed.

From there the work ran episode by episode. The rules sit in a written playbook that every episode is checked against. Each guest's credentials are verified against their own site, and every claim in the copy traces to the transcript.

What the research changed

The schedule

Episodes follow a loose arc through the brand's themes. Episodes that answer the same question are spaced apart so they don't compete with each other.

The keyword data showed demand for a subject with no recorded episode. When a guest on that subject was recorded, the episode went into the schedule. 4 recordings on subjects with negligible demand and no fit with the brand moved to the end of the run.

Before building the schedule, I checked the claim that audio and social platforms penalise a show for covering more than 1 topic and found no platform source for it. Spotify and LinkedIn have both published work on retrieval that matches the meaning of content to what a person is looking for. For a show with no listening history, that puts more weight on the wording.

Themes and wording

A subject first appeared to have no search demand. 19 variations of the obvious phrase returned almost no UK search volume. A second pass in plainer wording found the largest term in the dataset, with 5,000+ searches a month and no advertisers bidding on it.

Several high-volume terms came from a different audience, such as people shopping for a product or a gift, and those stayed out.

A group of therapy-labelled terms with 4,000+ searches a month was excluded for compliance. UK advertising rules (CAP Code rule 12.2) restrict marketing that offers advice on, diagnosis of or treatment for conditions needing medical supervision. The brand's service is educational. Every title and description is written in wellbeing and education language, with a plain disclaimer where a guest discusses clinical frameworks.

Some subjects had no search demand. The likely reason is that parents have no name for the problem to type. Those subjects were planned for the podcast and social, where the content reaches parents who aren't searching for it.

Titles and descriptions

Searchers shorten their queries. Long natural questions returned close to nothing, while the short head term carried the volume. Each title leads with the topic in the searched wording and puts the guest's name last. The description holds the client's expertise and the fuller way a parent would describe the problem.

Where the head term was jargon, the title translated it. A term with about 1,000 searches a month was a phrase few parents think in. The title used everyday words and the exact term went into the description.

The same episodes go to YouTube under the same titles. The description opens with the hook and adds chapters.

Balancing search with the brand

The obvious category label for this kind of content is saturated in UK search, and most of the demand is attached to another author's name. The brand's own phrase for its approach has no competition. Every description closes on that phrase, and the saturated label stays out of titles.

A guest's central metaphor was first noted as having no search volume. A later check found about 200 searches a month with no competition, and the episode's title was built around the metaphor.

For 4 later episodes, 3 more rounds of keyword research found almost nothing with enough searches for Google to report a volume. No titles changed. Some large terms sat close to the subject, but the guests hadn't discussed them, and they stayed out of the copy.

Results

Across 14 episodes, Spotify recorded 300+ plays and 70+ hours of listening. Followers grew from 1 to 20+. Monthly plays in October were over 6 times June's.

The 2 episodes whose titles were planned around a head term drew 60+ plays each, about 4 times the median. Both guests are well known in their fields, and a guest's own network moves the numbers on a show this size. A third episode, titled on a smaller uncontested term, sits at the median.

The show had almost no plays in the first 2 weeks of September, then 15+ in a day. An episode added to fill the catalogue gap had a single play 12 days after release. That pattern points to episodes being shared with an audience, and it suggests promotion still decides when listeners arrive.

On YouTube the show had 170+ views and 2,300+ thumbnail impressions. Most early episodes were shown to few people, and about 9 to 11% of them clicked. Most later episodes were shown more widely, and click-through fell to between 1 and 2.5%. Thumbnails are the next piece of work.

The largest term in the dataset isn't yet in an episode title. A title test on it is planned next.

Scope and involvement

I own the keyword research and the schedule, and I write each episode's title and description, plus its launch post. The founder hosts and records the interviews, and the brand language is the founder's.

Sources

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