Goodpods.

Challenges & Objectives

• Newly launched web app (Sep 2022) with limited existing organic traction.
• Massive enterprise SEO challenge: 45M+ crawlable pages across multiple languages.
• Compete for market share against Podtail, Stitcher, Player.fm, and other established directories.
• Increase non-branded organic traffic by 1,000%.
• Grow domain authority from 25 → 50.
• Lift account sign-ups (no benchmark or KPI provided).

Approach & Strategy

Owning intent-based podcast discovery

Search behaviour showed listeners often look for topics rather than specific shows (e.g., best mystery podcasts). We built dynamic “Best [Topic] Podcasts” Top-100 pages powered by real user data (listens + reviews), ensuring rankings stayed fresh and matched audience interest.

Turning recognition into backlinks

We designed Top-10 and Top-50 badges for podcasters to showcase their rankings. These badges linked back to category and show pages, generating high-relevance backlinks from niche podcast and creator websites.

Capturing long-tail episode searches — without URL bloat

Introducing a “Best 10 Episodes” module on show pages allowed us to target lower-volume searches like best shawn ryan podcast episodes. By nesting this inside existing templates, we avoided creating thousands of new URLs and maintained index health.

User-generated content as a strategic differentiator

We enabled listeners and podcasters to publish curated Top-5 lists within the platform, strengthening topical hubs and adding authentic human-first content ahead of Google’s UGC-ranking surge (Reddit/Quora).

Smarter indexing for a 45M-URL ecosystem

Dynamic, behaviour-driven sitemaps prioritised URLs with engagement and rapidly surfaced new episodes. Sitemaps were split by language to improve crawl efficiency and discovery.

Global expansion through language segmentation

We translated the platform into 12 languages, added clean locale structures (e.g. /es/, /de/), mapped podcasts to language-specific categories, added hreflang, and shipped dedicated regional sitemaps. Within 10 days, over 1M previously unindexed URLs were indexed.

Key Results

Within the first 12 months, Spicy Web delivered a dramatic uplift in Goodpods’ global organic presence.

Organic Growth

Daily organic clicks in the US increased by over 3,900%.

Market Share

Goodpods captured +18% additional market share for high-intent, non-branded category searches.

Authority Growth

Domain Rating/Domain Authority jumped from 20 → 81, establishing Goodpods as a major player in podcast discovery.

Global Reach

International traffic grew +430% YoY, driven by multi-language optimisation.

Long-term Partnership

Our results extended the partnership for an additional two years.