Audio Content Has No SEO Benefits, Says Mueller

The notion that including audio versions of existing content somehow improves search engine rankings is yet another SEO content creation myth that many creators these days buy into. But according to Google’s John Mueller, SEOs and webmasters do not stand to gain any rankings benefits if they include audio versions of their text-based SEO content on a webpage.

In a Google Search Central SEO episode on 12 February, an SEO asked if adding an audio version of a webpage content could boost their search rankings, aside from improving accessibility.  Mueller replied that Google does not do anything special with audio versions of a written piece of content. With that being said, he added that content creators and publishers do not need to avoid making audio recordings since Google will not treat them as duplicate content.

Moreover, audio recordings are different from videos and photos. Google does not process audio content separately. There are times when an audio recording may get shown as a piece of video content with a video snippet on the search engine page results, but overall, it neither helps nor harms a website’s rankings.

The SEO had a follow-up question, asking if audio recordings affect SEO in any way at all. They wondered if a webpage would be seen as higher quality if it contained both text and audio recordings compared to pages that only have text. Mueller stayed firm on his original answer, insisting that the quality of a webpage is not affected just because it contains multiple types of SEO content.

Although there are no direct benefits, having audio recordings could get a webpage shared around more. For instance, users may deem a webpage more useful if it has audio recordings in addition to text, so they are more likely to share it with the people they know. Still, SEOs should know that although this is the case, Google does not factor in how many different types of content is on a page when determining rankings.

Lastly, Mueller said that there are indeed SEO benefits from publishing webpage content with high-quality pictures and videos. This is because these types of content can rank independently, unlike with audio content. For instance, searchers can look for photos and videos through Google’s Image Search and Video Search. However, there is no Google Search for audio content where they can rank independently.

For now, the closest thing that Google has for audio searches is their podcast search. However, this type of content is tied specifically to the podcast content category. Podcasters can share a feed of podcast information, and Google will index it just like that.

But if a piece of an audio recording gets independently published on a single webpage, Mueller said that it will not automatically change anything in Google’s algorithm systems.

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