Episode Summary
One of the ways listeners find your podcast is through the search function within Google, Spotify or Apple. And if your show ranks higher in the results, it leads to more listeners.
But how do the search engines work within the most popular podcast platforms?
In this episode of Recorded Content, Justin Brown chats with Alexis Hue, the Managing Director and Co-Founder at Voxalyze. Voxalyze is a company that offers search engine optimization (SEO) services, data, and insights for audio content, including podcasts. The technology powered by Voxalyze helps podcast episodes rank higher in search results and helps to draw more listeners.
“The good thing for podcasts is that it’s extremely easy to rank high on certain keywords,” adds Alexis. He believes that entertainment-based podcasts are more likely to be discovered on the web than those associated with B2B because “no one is going to type your name unless you’re a celebrity.”
Guest Profile
Name: Alexis Hue
What he does: Alexis is the Managing Director and Co-Founder at Voxalyze
Company: Voxalyze
Noteworthy: Before he became a co-founder at Voxalyze, Alexis had a background as an engineer
Key Insights
- You have to be smart with the podcast name and description. It is essential to compose your podcast’s title and description with SEO guidelines in mind to ensure people can find your content on the web. Don’t go to the extreme. Remember it’s going to be read by a human. So you need to be smart there. You have to have a description that fits and people understand all the keywords, all the expressions they could be looking for, for the content you’re providing. So the description is important. The name is also super important.
- For most of the 80% of podcast producers, the main challenge is to increase the audience. Almost every podcaster dreams about having their show recognized and easily discoverable, but it may be pretty tough to boost the audience. Podcast producers spent time and money to publish and produce a great piece of content, and it’s not getting the visibility to serve for a lot of them. The challenge here would be to increase the visibility of your content, increase the visibility of your podcast, boost your SEO traffic, boost your SEO downloads.
- One of the biggest differences between entertainment and B2B-based podcasts is the artist’s name. Building SEO for entertainment-based podcasts is often much easier than making B2B shows more discoverable. According to Alexis, that’s because of the names mentioned in the podcasts. One of the big differences is the artist’s names. In the entertainment podcasts, you mention a star, a celebrity. You do all those types of things. In the B2B podcast, you quite often mention brands like your clients, case studies, or you mention the topics, but it’s less about the people. It’s more about the environment, the value, the product.
- SEO for podcasting is a lot like SEO was 15 years ago with Google.
Episode Highlights
50% of people discover a podcast by typing a keyword into a search bar
50% of people discover content by typing a keyword or question into a search bar, mainly on Google or Bing, and it’s the same on podcast listening apps. And a lot of the podcasts people do not think about that way of increasing the visibility. So when people type certain keywords, let’s say fly fishing, you may have a great podcast exactly on that topic, but they will not find you because that keyword doesn’t surface in the search algorithm of the podcast listening platform.
The good thing about the podcasts is that they are extremely easy to rank high on certain keywords. But another side of the coin is to get the data because you have a multitude of platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Deezer. That gets complicated pretty quickly. So the advantage is that it’s easy to optimize, but the challenge is to get the data.
Your show is your homepage and it needs to have a proper name and description
Your show is your homepage. It’s your main domain. And every episode is like a blog article or page below, and the first thing you need to do is be clear on the name and show description. Let’s take a hypothetical example. Let’s say you have a podcast about meditation. Then you would have the name of the podcast, so you need to have that meditation in a title. In the artist’s name, you could have Emotional IO Meditation or the Meditation Experts. And then the description: meditation, well-being, mindfulness, and all those associated keywords at work suite.
Use long-tail keywords to reinforce your episodes
When you go to the episode, we would recommend people to go long-tail. Don’t do just Episode 51: Meditation. No. Go for Guided Meditation for Senior Citizens, Meditation for Pregnant Women, Guided Meditation on Guided Meditation, Meditation at Home, Meditation in the Morning. When you don’t have a lot of time, try to go long-tail but always around the same quote, which is in this case your meditation quote. And that’s going to reinforce every episode. It will reinforce the visibility of your show exactly on that, in that example, on meditation.
If we have two podcasts with the same description and views, the one with more reviews wins
Do a search query on Google and you’re probably going to click on the three or four of the results on the first page to find the content you’re looking for. So why should it be different for podcasts? There’s one thing: look for reviews.
If people took the pain, especially on the Apple Podcasts, to leave a review, it means they care about the show. If there are two podcasts with the same description, the same episodes, but one has twenty reviews and one has one review, guess which one is going to come on top? The one with twenty reviews. So collect reviews from your friends, families, relatives to boost the quality of your podcast.
The evolution of podcast SEO over the next 12 to 18 months
When we tell people that you can do SEO for your podcast within the platform, they are like, I didn’t know. So the first thing we’re seeing is awareness, and I’m sure we’re going to see a new technology solution. You can see the people going very deep into it. There’s going to be some over-optimization, the platform will probably react and change a little bit the algorithm.
But there will be more and more podcasts. Last year, I think there were 800,000 new shows launched. It’s probably going to be even more this year. It’s going to be more and more complicated to be on the top three, four, five results for a given search query on the listening apps. But that’s an opportunity for people that go in early because they’re going to learn the platform.
