Sermon podcast transcription — show notes, chapters, and Apple Podcasts SEO

Three reasons. (1) Apple Podcasts and Spotify now index transcripts to surface episodes in topic searches — making your show discoverable for queries like 'sermon on Romans 8'. (2) Show notes drive episode page SEO on your podcast website. (3) Accessibility — Deaf and hard-of-hearing listeners can read the message. Increasingly, sermon podcasters publish transcripts as standard practice.

Apple Podcasts began auto-generating transcripts in 2024 and prefers publisher-supplied transcripts when available. Provide a transcript URL in your RSS feed (using the <podcast:transcript> tag from Podcasting 2.0) and Apple will use yours rather than auto-generating. Spotify supports the same tag. Your transcript also feeds into search indexing on both platforms.

Most sermon podcast show notes follow a 5-section pattern: (1) one-paragraph episode summary, (2) main scripture passage, (3) 3-5 key points with timestamps (chapter markers), (4) discussion questions for small groups, (5) links to mentioned books or resources. The transcript is the raw material — you extract these elements in 15-20 minutes per episode.

Yes — our word-level timestamp JSON export gives you the precise second for any phrase. To create chapter markers: identify the 3-5 main topic transitions in your sermon (introduction, main point 1, main point 2, application, conclusion), look up the timestamp for each transition in the JSON, and add them as PSC (Podlove Simple Chapters) tags in your RSS feed or via your hosting platform (Buzzsprout, Captivate, Transistor all support chapters).

A standard 35-minute sermon episode costs $0.21 to transcribe at our Whisper standard rate ($0.006/min). A weekly podcast runs about $0.91/month. Adding a midweek bonus episode + a Q&A episode brings it to roughly $2-3/month. Compared to Castmagic ($23-65/mo subscription) or Riverside transcribe-only ($15-29/mo) this is dramatically cheaper at typical podcast volumes.

Yes. We export SRT (works with the <podcast:transcript> tag using type='application/x-subrip'), VTT (the preferred type='text/vtt' for Apple Podcasts and Spotify), plain TXT for show notes, and JSON with word-level timing for chapter generation. You drop the VTT file on your podcast hosting platform or church website and reference it in your RSS feed.

Yes — and you should. Transcripts retroactively boost SEO on existing episodes. Most podcasters batch their last 26-52 episodes in one session. At Whisper $0.006/min, a year of weekly 35-minute episodes costs about $11. Many sermon podcasters see a measurable rise in organic discoverability within 30-60 days of back-fill.

Yes if your podcast format is a conversation or roundtable. Premium tier ($0.02/min) adds ElevenLabs speaker diarization, labeling 'Speaker 1', 'Speaker 2'. A 45-minute interview episode is $0.90 on Premium vs $0.27 on Standard — and you save the 15-20 minutes of manual speaker tagging that would otherwise eat into your post-production.