Increase Traffic to Your B2B Podcast with Alexis Hue at Voxalyze

Since the early days of Google and Yahoo, search engine rankings have been critical to driving traffic to websites in order to grow business. Then people started to figure out they could use various techniques to move their website up in the search results for their chosen keywords.

Those techniques have come a long way and now we have a new twist — boosting your rankings in the search results of various podcast directories like Apple and Spotify. After all, you can produce the most compelling B2B podcast in your industry, but if nobody can find it, your show will never grow.

The Power of Voxalyze

At Content Allies, we are a big fan of using the tool Voxalyze. Right from the beginning, when we are launching a new podcast, we can check the search difficulty of the keywords we hope to rank for and use that information for things as basic as choosing the podcast title.

Alexis Hue joined me to talk about this terrific tool and how it can provide data and analytics to help boost podcast visibility. 

Content is King

There’s an old saying in SEO that ‘Content is king’, but Alexis includes the distribution ‘is queen’ to that adage. You can create the best content in your niche, but if you don’t have the distribution, and if you’re not getting in front of the eyes and in the ears of your target audience, that content will do you no good.

A significant amount of search traffic for podcast topics happens in the directories, not in traditional search engines. When you type a topic into the Apple or Spotify search bar, the algorithm will not find you unless you have taken metadata into account, which is how you describe your show. That information is what the directories start with to move your show up in the rankings.

That metadata includes your show title (choose wisely), your publisher and the short description. Thought in this area can send you up in the rankings and move you ahead of other podcasts in your niche. Don’t fall into the trap of simply naming an episode, “Season 2, Episode 3.” Many people make this mistake. You have to tell the directories what the show is about.

Star Wars and Other Factors

As you promote your show and you start getting traffic, there are several other factors that will help with your search rankings. The first is what Alexis calls ‘Star Wars’. The shows with the most five-star reviews will move up the rankings faster than shows with a low number of positive reviews. Don’t be shy, ask your listeners to leave a five-star review.

Another factor that impacts search rankings is completion time. In other words, do people listen all the way to the end of your podcast, or do they click away in the middle? Make sure each episode is interesting and concise. A boring show will not be a popular show.

The number of subscribers affects your search rankings, too. Just like with the five-star reviews, go ahead and ask listeners to subscribe. Adding subscribers provides a snowball effect, the more you have, the more you’ll get.

The Evolution of SEO

At Voxalyze, they use a metric called Podcast Visibility Optimization (PVO) to help you drive traffic. Some people say that PVO is like the way SEO was in the early 2000s. That’s not entirely true. Search as a whole has evolved, and you can’t trick your way into ranking high like you could back then.

By using the Voxalyze keyword database, you can find out ahead of time which keywords will be difficult to rank for and which keywords you can use to climb to the top. It’s better to have niche keywords rank in the top five than to have broad keywords show up on page seven of the results.

Keep these tips in mind when you are looking to increase traffic to your B2B podcast. The attention to detail will pay off in the end.

Have a topic you want to see us cover on the podcast? Write to our host at jake@contentallies.com.

This episode is brought to you by Content Allies. 

Content Allies helps B2B companies launch revenue-generating podcasts. From startups to Fortune 500s, we have helped some of the world's leading companies build and run profitable podcasts. Contact us for your free podcast consultation at ContentAllies.com.

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