Podcast metadata is read by more machines than people. Apple, Spotify, Google and a dozen directories all parse the same RSS feed, and most shows fill in about a third of it.
The show title is the field everybody optimises and the one with the least room left. If your show is called a name, that name is competing with every other use of it. Adding two or three words of subject after the name is the single highest-value edit available to most shows, and it is one line in your host's settings.
The author field is not your name. It is a search field in Apple, and it is indexed. A show whose author field says a personal name only is invisible to somebody searching the subject. Putting the subject there as well is unglamorous and it works.
Episode titles are where most of the loss is. A title that reads "Episode 47" tells a directory nothing and tells a browsing listener less. The number belongs at the end if it belongs anywhere, and the subject belongs at the front, because the front is what survives truncation on a phone.
The show description gets skimmed by people and read in full by machines. The first two sentences do the human work. The rest can carry the subject vocabulary somebody would actually search for, provided it reads like prose. Keyword lists are visible as keyword lists and have been discounted for years.
Episode descriptions are almost universally wasted. Most shows put a link tree and a sponsor read there. A paragraph of what the episode actually covers, with names and terms spelled out, is indexed and is what makes an episode findable a year later when somebody searches the guest's name.
Categories are a ranking decision disguised as a form field. Your primary category decides which chart you compete in. The two secondary ones cost nothing and are frequently left blank.
Transcripts are now read by Apple and by search engines. Most hosts generate them automatically, and most shows leave them switched off. An hour of speech is several thousand words of indexed text per episode, which is more text than the rest of your metadata put together.
None of this replaces the show being good. It decides whether a good show is found by the people who would like it, which for most podcasts is the actual bottleneck.