Are podcasts more popular than blogs? The short answer is – yes – if Google trends data is anything to go by.

Judging by the number of searches being performed for ‘podcast’ versus ‘blog’ the data shows that blogging and blogs are trending downwards and podcasts are on the up and up.

Have a look at the Google trends graph from Search Engine Journal below:

It seems that more people – and perhaps you’re one of them – are turning to podcasts to learn more about topics of interest, rather than blogs.

Why should you care?

If you successfully use blogging as part of your marketing and brand strategy, it’s time to start looking at creating podcasts as well.

When it comes to content marketing, podcasts are able to do many of the same duties as blogs: they educate, entertain, answer user questions, build trust & thought leadership and provide content for customers at all stages of the funnel.  

Where they fall short – at least for now – is in terms of the SEO benefits.

However, there’s more to a content marketing strategy than SEO so it would be silly to discount them solely based on that.

It also may not be the case for long. We reported earlier in the year that Google announced plans to make audio content searchable. If this becomes the case and Google’s voice recognition software gets to the point where it is able to crawl them in the same way it does a page of content… but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

For now, podcasts are worth considering because people clearly enjoy consuming them and, the search trend data hints at the fact that podcast listening could overtake traditional blog reading in future.

So while you may not want to ‘write’ off blogging entirely just yet, getting good at creating podcasts is definitely worth considering.

Tags: blogging, blogs, content, google search, Google voice, marketing strategies, podcasts, SEO