65. The Definitive Guide to Podcast Player Visibility with Alexis Hue

00:00:00 The goals of Hue is really to increase the visibility. Meaning, how can I be more visible for a given search query within Apple Lens Fortify? I remember when I first discovered PVO, which stands for Podcast Visibility Optimization, just in case you didn't know, because I sure didn't. In fact, I call it in app SEO and Color me slow, but for some reason, I was really struggling to get my head around it. And the reason I was struggling to get my head around it is because the rules are quite a bit different to traditional SEO.

00:00:32
And to be honest, I was a little bit angry because, come on now. I had just been learning about traditional SEO, and if you've been following following along with this podcast, you know how overwhelming I used to find it. And now I had to learn about another type of SEO egg ads. Now, in my podcasting journey, I have been trying to find someone who can tell me exactly what those rules are. What are the rules to optimize for SEO and get discovered in Spotify and itunes?

00:01:03
And the good news? I have found just the person. Someone who lives and breathes this day in and day out. My name is Alexis. I'm one of the cofounder of Voxalyze.

00:01:14
What we do is podcast analytics and with a focus on Podcast Visibility Optimization, or SEO for podcast. Yep, Alexis joined my Capsho Collective and Pro members in front of our guest expert Masterminds, talking about exactly how we optimize for in app SEO, or what he calls PVO. So if you want to know exactly how you can get your podcast discovered in Spotify and itunes, then hang with us. You are in for an amazing treat. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder, Cap show.

00:01:47
And this is the Grow my podcast show. I'm sure you're wondering something similar to me. How in the world does someone get in so deep into Podcast Visibility optimization that they create a whole business just. Around that it all came. We all studied a few years back when two young children, not that young anymore, and when they started to interact with Alexa and asking Alexa things when they could not read and write.

00:02:11
And I started to think about how do Alexa decide which skills or which app for Alexa to bring up? When a child would ask Alexa, bring me a game. And we built a solution for that. So, like, how to increase your visibility within Alexa? And we got a few clients as radio stations as clients, and they came back to us, love the product.

00:02:32
And they came back to say, Alexa is a very small business. What we see growing and growing in a way we make a significant amount of money is actually Podcast. Do you know anything about a tool like Cubet for podcast? And we looked around, didn't find anything. We build it.

00:02:46
And literally the day we push a button. We had radio station starting using a tool, said we startup based in Berlin, ten people and we work with the likes of some American clients, glassbox, which you probably know, APM Studios, Pod people and a lot of smaller creators as well. And we do one thing and only one thing. It's podcast analytics with a focus on podcast visibility optimization. So SEO for podcast within Apple and Spotify and always audience analytics.

00:03:18
Who is listening to my show, where is the base? How can I use that data to provide it to advertisers and get better CPM or better sponsorship? That's what we do. Isn't it so interesting seeing the types of things each and everyone quote unquote falls into it is so cool. Now, why is in app SEO even important?

00:03:38
I'll start with explaining a little bit why PVO is important. So. As I mentioned, I'm French based in Berlin. If I ask you to look for information about Berlin, Germany today, what would be your first reflects you're going to bring up Google, maybe eventually B, you're going to type Berlin facts about Berlin and get information that way it's up consuming content that started with a search and that's about Google publishing data. 51% of content consumptions start with a Google search.

00:04:09
No. If I ask you to find an app to learn French or German, what are you going to do? You're going to grab your phone, you're going to go to the App Store of the Play Store and you're going to type learn French, learn German, and Apple or Android will show you a bunch of app. You're going to see a list and you're going to click on one download and start consuming the content. And fast forward.

00:04:29
If I ask you to find a podcast that talks about meditation, marketing, learning French, what are you going to do? You're going to grab your phone, you're going to open Spotify, Apple podcast, you're going to type I don't know, marketing and then we'll come a list of podcasts. You will like some, you will be interested by some, you're going to start downloading and you start consuming the content. And what this means is that just for like for the web and mobile, being visible within the platform is extremely important. You may have heard about SEO, search engine optimization, maybe about puzzle App Store optimization on what we're going to talk about today is PVO, podcast visibility optimization.

00:05:07
And in fact, a lot of surveys converges and data .3 users out of form have already used a search bar on Apple podcast on Spotify to find a show. And they could have been looking for podcast topic, which is the number one sort of search query they do podcast name wizard. Wizard Typo. It's a show they know, but they want to go to it. Same as you would go to Google and you would type Walmart.

00:05:32
You know what Walmart is, but you go to google to search, it could be the podcast host or the podcast, yes, and a lot of data merging to the same way. And what's important to keep in mind is you need to be visible within the platform. I like to say content is king, true, but distribution is king. You need to be visible within the platform. If you're not visible, people are not going to find you, you're not going to get the downloads, you're not going to make the revenue, you will be able to reinvest into your podcast.

00:05:58
And that's really the basis of PVO. What are the sort of goals of Pivot? The goals is really to get higher rankings on relevant keywords. What I mean by higher ranking is you may have seen those, it's called technical thing that CTR curve, optics rate curve. If you are on the first position, such as it on Google, depending on its web, mobile branded keyword, non branded keyword, you're going to get about 25 to 25% to 30% of the clicks.

00:06:28
If for that same search query on third position, you're going to get 10% of the clicks. If you at the bottom of that first page on Google, you're going to get about percent of the clicks. Meaning that optimizing your visibility on those search query or keywords, moving from position three, 5% clicks to position 125, you're going to look five times more traffolution or downloads for your show. And that's really what PVO is all about. Now I didn't know this, but there are actually two different levels of data that these platforms consider when ranking your show against other shows.

00:07:02
The first is what Alexis calls metadata and the second is podcast authority. The first one is the metadata. Metadata is data that describe data. What I mean there is they're not going to listen to your show and decide, oh, that content is interesting. They talk about XYZ, therefore I'm going to rank them on XYZ.

00:07:20
No, they're going to look at how do you describe your show and there's a lot of things that come into show title, artist name or publisher name, short description, episode title, pizza description. All the text that you write there is going to be indexed by the bots, by the search algorithm of the platforms, and they are going to take those and decide to rank you on all the words. But then if two shows have the same description, they need to find a way to decide who goes on top of the other. And for that there's a concept which we call podcast authority. And podcast authority takes into account a few different factors like numbers of downloads.

00:07:59
Is that shows having 100,000 a day or 100 a day and how many subscribers, how many rating, what is their average ratings, how many reviews, what is their conversion rate? Do people do binge listening or do they just listen to one whenever it comes? If two shows have thousand donors a day is one really on the web and one on the way down. And so they take a lot of those elements to assess the authority of the podcast and based on the metadata or the text you write to describe content and the authority, they will work the magic in their do it and rank you on some keywords. And the art and science of PVO is to constantly test and optimize your metadata to start ranking on the right keywords.

00:08:41
Decide what are your money keywords, what are the most important keywords, play with it, trick the algorithm, optimize against it and be number one. And the impact works for shows of pretty much any size and shapes. One of the biggest show we have done recently from a broadcaster in France, they had 300,000 downloads a week and they managed to increase that by on average 12% over three months and really be ranked in the top three position for all the keywords that we're targeting. We also worked with way smaller shows that were just starting and managed to double or triple the audience within a matter of weeks just by identifying keywords opportunity and going for it. Pretty cool, right?

00:09:24
Is this starting to get your mind thinking about some of the things you're going to have to start doing already to get ranked inside the podcast player apps? Yep, mine sure did. So we're going to help you with that and break down the exact four steps you need to implement in order to start seeing results, to start to rank inside Spotify and itunes. Oh, I cannot wait to get into this juiciness and let's get straight into it, shall we? Let's get into step number one.

00:09:51
Step number one of how it is that you can get visible, get discovered inside Spotify and itunes, step number one, which is to understand what actually drives PVO. So what are they? So show name, artist name, show description, those are the most important. Keep in mind that Apple and Spotify are coming from a music background and therefore show name and artist name are the most important. So maybe for your show name you can explain what it is.

00:10:20
If you call it School X-Y-Z maybe X-Y-Z iPhone, the podcast visibility optimization show or the mobile phone show. Explain what it is. But the keywords you show is all about wherever you can in your artist name. If I put Alexis as artist name, great, but no one knows where I am. Alexis, founder of Voxelais, the podcast analytics company.

00:10:42
Then I start to rank for podcast analytics company and Voxeli and it's all that. It's the Albuquerque metadata and text. Whenever you can short description the same. I like to say the bigger the publisher, the worse the description. You would not imagine how many of household names are description like new episode published every Thursday.

00:11:01
What is the show about? So Apple and Spotify will decide you episode released or published every Thursday. Great. But what are you talking about? Are they talking about news?

00:11:10
About business? News about sport? About entertainment, about fashion, about they don't know? Is it talking about fashion not being ranked? Not having the word fashion in the description?

00:11:18
It means you're not going to rank for it on episode title, season five. Episode three, what is it about? And the police grabbed the murderer and they went to the court, explained detail, and put two words at every single opportunity. That's really what is important. Okay, so we're only on step one and already my mind is blown.

00:11:38
I'm already learning so much that I did not know. Things like the importance of the artist name and how we can use that field in a really smart way to optimize to be found. And it's not just the artist name, but also the show title and the show description. So have you started thinking about updates you're going to make? Think about that as we head into step number two, keyword research, specifically long tail keyword research.

00:12:02
And here's why. If you're not the New York Times or any of those very big shoes, start with what we call long tail. What we mean there is look at the example of shoes and on the web. So imagine Google search on the web for the word shoes. There is a not high search with lot of people are tapping shoes into Google.

00:12:19
But it's getting very complicated to be on top of Amazon, Walmart, Capsho and Masses and all of those brands for your shoes. No, if you go for the long term, running shoes for men with splat feet is probably low surgery. It's starting to get very niche. But there is also lower competition, meaning your show that has a lower authority than the show of Amazon has a chance to rank them. And as you start ranking, you're going to get new listeners, new subscribers, new ratings, new reviews, you're going to start gaining authority.

00:12:51
And as you're going to gain authority, you'll be able to move up that curve and again gain more authority, be able to go up and up and up and up. And that's really the goal of review. Yes, long tail keyword research is what we learn about regardless of whether it's in app or search engine SEO. In fact, if you're a Capshovian, longtail keywords are what we recommend you use as your topic when you're processing your episode inside Capsho. Because as we know now, nailing the right long tail keyword is so important for all types of SEO.

00:13:22
And now comes this episode's bonus clip, which is Alexis's process for actually doing that keyword research and how that can be done really easily using boxwise. So if you want to get the deep dive including specific examples, then you can get them for free on this episode's website page. You can get there from the description, click on the link, scroll down a bit and you'll see the link to get it. And when you see how easily you can use boxlier to do this research, then you want to think about whether your show title and description might need a little updating. Which actually leads us straight into step number three which is to do exactly that, optimize our show title, author and show description.

00:14:04
Because I would hazard a guess that at a very minimum you would want to include the long tail keywords you've just found into your show description for sure, perhaps maybe even your title and author fields. Let's talk through some examples. So it's business news, so it's very broad as a topic and they were pretty much saying hey, all show talks about business news. That was the description before and they said, well, and we're going to go deep into the stock market, finance, Bank, European Central Bank, economic crisis, all what does the news of our society such as Gaffer, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google if someone looks for information on Amazon, they want to be number one or at the top and get things. Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, USA, China, Brexit, interest Rate and they went on and on and on and on and on.

00:14:57
Price of electricity, price of gas ukraine war, vladimir Selensky, Vladimir Putin and they went on and on and guess what? Apple in Spotify said well it's a show that has a certain authority that talks about Vladimir Putin. I'm going to rank them for Vladimir Putin. And if someone is looking for information, Vladimir Putin because he dies tomorrow, I decide to walk out of Ukraine or whatever or there's a coupon, Russia, anyone that's going to type Vladimir Putin will actually jerk on the top, they will get Donald's. Fun fact one thing Vladimir Putin is when we kicked it off with them in Bristol back in September, it was the day where from Russian president or USSR president died.

00:15:33
And on that day there were a lot of search career for Gobachev because people, Gobachov is dead. What is history? Can I get a podcast to just inform myself staying loop on Gobachov and if that show was ranked that day number one for Gobachoff, they would have taken about a sort of older search and volume that day. So that's what they do. I'm going to show you another show.

00:15:52
Those guys were never more article than friends and they talk about history. You can guess where they studied optimization and then where they stopped doing things. So whatever. Look how deep they went. Look at the length of the description.

00:16:05
And they said so we talk about historical figures such as Collette Credecallo, Charles Darwin, Albertinstein CC, Spartacus, Andy Waul, and so on, so on and so on. And they went on. And we talk about French Revolution. First World War. Second World War.

00:16:25
EU. They went deep. And you can as well look at the title. The title used to be at the heart of history. No, they said stories to discover and learn history because they really wanted to be number one on the keyword history.

00:16:40
But they did the keyword research, they got the shortlist and they started implementing it and then they extended it. Did you manage to grab all of that? Okay, so have you noticed that everything we've been speaking about so far seems to be at the show level? Optimizing the show title and the show description. What about at the episode level?

00:16:59
I wanted to get Alexis's views on how we think about episode titles and description. Put your keywords into there and put your keywords into the Apjot title. Try to make it as attractive as you can. Not think, clickbait necessarily, but there's a lot of good things to learn from those. Make it attractive and put keywords in there.

00:17:16
Not season five, episode one. Just put the keywords at the beginning and then in your description on don't put an extract of the transcript, please. Please not an extract of the transcript. Put five, six sentence explain what is the shorter. But it's all about an insert keywords and I don't capture those.

00:17:33
A lot of those things explain, describe the content. Keep in mind that every word you type in there will be crawled by Apple and Spotify and show will be indexed on those. We have the funny example of a user and he was cutting a transcript of a show into the episode description. The problem is you get cut after a certain time and all the description that was there was hi everyone, I'm glad to be here, thanks again to sponsor A that does a blah, blah, blah. Thanks as well to sponsor B that does Narana and then that's it.

00:18:04
Well, it got scared. Don't do that. Then the time to describe and you. Know a really easy way to do that capture. Just in case you need a reminding.

00:18:14
We have proven that we have the best ranking, title and descriptions to get your podcast episode discovered. Come on now. But enough about Capsho because this fourth and last step to PVO is actually one I really appreciate. And I appreciate it because it's not strictly about ranking. If you've done the three steps and you continue to iterate and improve it, you'll start to rank inside the podcast player apps.

00:18:36
But once you are ranking, then what? Because ranking doesn't guarantee listens, it doesn't guarantee that someone is going to click on your podcast, but what does? Cover art and reviews. So that is step number four, which is more about converting through having more reviews on your podcast and having attractive cover art. Let's get into how important reviews actually are.

00:18:58
Apple doesn't share the data Spotify news and they will keep that close to the heart. But to get an idea of if you move from three stars average rating for your show to five to four star, you get 89% more downloads. If you move from three to five star, you pretty much download them, double the number of downloads. It's a social proof. If you see three shows coming up and one has three stars and one has five stars, when you're going to see those three shows, the chance that you pick on the one having five stars is higher than you click on the one having three stars.

00:19:29
Don't focus only on meta. Net. I like it. Star wars fight for those stars. Ask people to leave ratings, reviews, organize raffle contest date with people leaving you reviews.

00:19:40
It doesn't matter. Get those ratings. It is extremely important. Another thing because remember, we're talking visibility, that's mostly the metadata that will get you up at the top. But once people see your show, they need to understand and you want them to click because you have the right title.

00:20:01
It sounds interesting. The COVID is good. There's a lot of ratings and good ratings. Yep. I think we all know by now how much we humans are creatures of social proof.

00:20:11
So getting reviews is actually a really important conversion tool. And what about the COVID art? What should we be thinking about there? Do you know what the show is all about? I don't know who that person is.

00:20:20
I'm probably not going to click on it. That if you don't know that it's somewhere related to HTML Five, you're probably not going to click on it. You can't read it today on a computer screen. So imagine on your phone on a go, not a chance that you're going to understand what it's about in Lulu See gig. It's very complicated.

00:20:37
And cover art is also something you can optimize just to give you an idea of the impact. That game developer getting millions of downloads a month on that cover art about icon. They've set it to test three variations. White on blue, yellow on blue. That one triggered 7% more click, meaning if 100 people were clicking before when they would see the icon, now they got 107 people clicking on it.

00:21:01
Not too bad. 7% increase just by one test. But they did not submit. They keep moving that one. They see the bit lighter, blue looking up 3% compared to this one.

00:21:10
That one didn't work. That one didn't work. So they kept on that one. They did another iteration, nothing could beat that. But in two iterations, moving from this one to this one, they got 7.2 times 3.2.

00:21:22
So close to 11% more downloads for the app, just the COVID out. It's something to optimize again. And what we like to say is the way to do a quick test is go to Bar, go to Sabbath, show your cover art to someone for alpha seconds. That what is the show about. And see what they're going to tell you.

00:21:38
Because you want people when they go to Spotify and Apple to immediately understand what the show is about you want people oh yeah that's on the interesting I'm going to download it and you see a lot of blocked but in the media space a lot of the famous hosts radio stations here newspaper personalities they are fighting for the size in terms of pixel of ang and we work for the same TV station. Why is the face of the other host that has another show bigger than my face on my podcast? But if you don't know who the person is, that doesn't bring anything. So think about your cover out, not only from a branding point of view, but from a conversion point of view. It's a conversion element.

00:22:17
When people have on their mobile phone three, four search results, they will decide to start downloading a piece of content. Big part is cover art, the title and the rating. So you need to optimize those three parts. Okay? So yes, I hope you got from that exactly how important your cover art is in converting searches into listeners.

00:22:36
So with that, let's recap on the four steps to optimizing your podcast. Optimizing Your podcast for in app search, step number one is understand what drives PVO podcast visibility optimization or what I call inapp search. It is the metadata in your title, the author field and your show description all at the show level. Right now, episode title and episode description is important, but those are almost ranked fourth and fifth. So if you do nothing else, just make sure that you've optimized your show title, your author field and your show description.

00:23:08
So that's step number one. Step number two is to do your long tail keyword research and hint, use Foxalize for this. And step number three is focus on optimizing then your show title, author and show description. Step number four, which is almost like a bonus step, is to think about your conversion. Because it's one thing to get discovered to be ranked inside the app, but it's another to actually get people to click on it and to start listening.

00:23:35
And for that, Alexis's advice is get ratings and reviews to increase your podcast authority and really look at your cover art to convert. Make it attractive for people, have them understand exactly what it is that you speak about on your podcast. So a couple of things, please go and check Voxalyze out, you can do that at voxelize voxalyze.com. We'll also leave a link to that in our podcast website page. And if you wanted that bonus clip on Alexis's process for actually doing long tail keyword research and how that can be done really easy, easily using boxwise with specific examples, then grab that for free on this episode's website page as well.

00:24:16
You can get there from this podcast episode description. So just go to the description, click on the link, scroll down a little bit, a bit on that page and you'll see the link to get your bonus clip. Go and do that right now. Right now. Okay.

00:24:28
My name is Deirdre Tshien. Stay awesome.