What are the best practices for podcast SEO and discoverability?

The trick is to make sure you're optimising for the keyword. So your advice here is partly true with caveats. If you want to be found for a podcast about vegan cooking, then you probably want to include that search term in there, rather than the suggestion you made. In other words, "Vegan Bites:..." would be ditched for "Vegan Cooking:..." or if you want to call it Vegan Bites, fine, but then have the qualifier be "delicious vegan cooking recipes" or something like that.

The number 1 podcast app is Apple Podcasts, and it does NOT index descriptions for 'everyday' shows. There is a point at which your podcast does start getting indexed in the description but this is human controlled much like being featured etc. The places you need to focus on optimising are: Show level title. Show level 'author' Episode level title. Episode level author. And that's pretty much it. Or, so Apple Podcasts claims. That said, I've had some podcasts rank on terms found in the description and I think I know why but it's not the wider consensus.

As part of the content summary, leverage any guests you have by including their name, bio (which will often have a lot of those keywords you are looking for) and credentials. When possible, include linkbacks to your podcast website and other social media channels as well as your guests' media spaces as this linking process will help with indexing as well as Google ranking.

You can't even hope to rank in Google for your keywords if you don't have a podcast website so this is actually a MUST. But ensure you're being careful with the link structures and canonicals. For example, you ideally want your podcast website and your main website (if you're a brand) both linking to each other to ensure the domain authority carries in both directions. And whatever you do, don't just have your podcast website as a static page with one player updating with new episodes. EVERY episode needs it's own page. And try to throw in some support content that bolsters the topics on other pages.

This also gives you another opportunity to leverage keyword targeting, SEO, and gives you a window to leverage search engine marketing (SEM) and being able to easily measure the results through your web tools. WordPress offers a ton of plug-ins (some free, and others paid) to assist with managing SEO, SEM, and you can also link it to your google Insights for a deeper look into what is driving traffic.

If you are driving the traffic to your webpage link, you can analyze the social media platforms that are driving the most traffic and run lookalike ad campaigns to target others who match your audiences on that platform, thereby continuing to grow your audience.

Social media traffic accounts for 0.6% of your podcast's traffic, so decide whether it's time well spent investing in promoting on social. Certainly give it some serious reconsideration if you're ONLY promoting using organic social media. Even with a highly systemised automated social campaign, you're not going to see much audience growth just relying on social media. Think about using some paid Google Ads and some paid Facebook traffic campaigns.

The ONLY measurement tools you need to be checking are Google Analytics, Apple Podcasts 'Connect' dashboard, Spotify for Podcasters dashboard, Google Podcasts Manager, Amazon Music's podcaster dashboard and whatever stats your hosting company provide (but ensure they're IAB compliant) Forget Chartable as they're wholly unreliable and they're not even measuring Apple Podcasts as of next month anyway.