Choosing the right category for your podcast has the potential to help your podcast get discovered and featured. But what should you do with so many categories to choose from, and sometimes seemingly not enough?

Sidenote: “genre” and “category” are often used interchangeably in podcasting, but I'll stick with the “category” term for this episode.

Categories in Apple Podcasts

Apple was the first company to popularize RSS features to standardize podcasting back in 2005. For more than a decade, Apple offered 68 categories. Apple offers 110 categories you can use for your podcast (19 of which are parent categories). And since nearly all podcast feeds use the “iTunes” RSS namespace to make podcasting possible, most other podcast apps also use Apple's categories, at least the top levels.

While Podcasting 2.0 is also seeking to build an expanded category list that apps can use, Apple has laid a nice foundation that will probably be built on for many other innovations and improvements.

Podcasts can be in more than one category

Publishing tools have a variety of limits, but Apple's official statement is “You can choose up to two categories or subcategories that best reflect the content of your show” [source]. So even if your publishing tool lets you pick 5 categories, assume only the first 2 or maybe 3 will actually matter.

If you pick a subcategory, you are also automatically included in the parent category. Here's how that looks in the RSS feed:

<itunes:category text="Religion & Spirituality"> <itunes:category text="Christianity" /></itunes:category>

So don't worry about trying to put yourself in both the subcategory and its parent. Focus on a subcategory if you can.

The primary category matters most

No matter how many categories you put in your feed, the first one is what matters most.

Your secondary and other additional categories will help you show up in those category collections, editorial features, searches, and browsing. But Apple says that in addition to what your secondary category/categories do for your podcast, it's your first category that is used for top charts, displaying on your podcast, and even for recommendations on other podcasts in the catalog and “Listen Now.”

4 steps to pick the right categories for your podcast

With this in mind and so many podcast categories to choose from, here are some steps to help you pick the right one!

1. Ignore the charts and saturation

Look at the number of podcasts in each category from Podcast Industry Insights and you'll see that “Education” and “Society & Culture” have the most total podcasts by large margins. But filter out the inactive podcasts and you'll now see four categories fighting for having the highest numbers of 90-day active podcasts: Education, Religion & Spirituality, Business, and Society & Culture.

And as for what category the 90-day active podcasts mark as their primary, “Society & Culture” still leads by more than double the runners-up, and then it's a close battle for second place between Comedy, Education, Business, and Sports.

These stats are based on the top-level, parent categories. If we drilled down to the subcategory level, these stats would start drastically splitting apart and you would find categories that have hardly any