The B2B Sales Podcast is one of the leading sources of information on B2B sales and helps Sales Development Reps (SDR), Account Executives (AE), or anyone in sales management discover new tactics and implement them within their sales organizations.
The Podcast is run and managed by SalesLabs and co-hosted by Thibaut, the founder and CEO who has trained sales teams at companies such as Hubspot, Shopify, Hootsuite, or Chargebee. The company is known for its T-shaped sales development framework and is also experimenting around communities for sales teams and peer learning.
The drive behind the weekly release of podcast episodes is to remain top of mind with potential clients and generate new leads for his business. Thibaut let the Voxalyze team take over the visibility optimization process and gave them the credentials to directly modify the metadata for the show within their hosting platform.
I didn’t know we could actually do SEO for podcasts. Working with Voxalyze was a no-brainer for me: not only do they provide the data you need, but Alexis and the Voxalyze team also took the time to dive deeper when recommending what to do, and it paid off.
Thibaut Souyris (CEO of SalesLabs)
1. First thing first: audit the visibility of the podcast
The first step was to understand where the Podcast was standing in its two core markets: Germany and France all while keeping an eye on the more competitive US market.
Surprisingly, the podcast wasn’t ranking within the top 10 for its core keyword “b2b sales” in neither country. This means it wasn’t visible as users hardly scroll down further than position #10 to find the content they are looking for. The same applied to other keywords with the show ranking on average at position #41 in France (#39 in Germany) with the keywords ranking between positions #7 and #54 in France (#29 and #45 in Germany).
Keywords ranking overview – Voxalyze dashboard
Using Voxalyze’s dashboard and reports, we had a view of the lay of the land and it was easy to spot the missing important keywords and therefore what to do next.
2. Define the most relevant and important keywords for the podcast
It was clear from the sub-optimal rankings that the description and other assets of the podcast had to be optimized.
Increasing the keyword density for “B2B sales” wherever possible and while remaining reasonable (ie no keyword stuffing), wouldn’t be enough. We had to include and push other keywords forward. But which ones?
This led to the SalesLabs defining a prioritized list of the 9 keywords that were meaningful for their business and positioning while keeping in mind what their target audience would be searching for.
Some of those keywords were terms such as Sales Development Reps (SDR) or Account Executives (AE).
3. Updating the podcast metadata & checking all the other elements
Next was to write an updated description for the show including all the desired keywords, all while remaining within the lengths limits imposed by the platforms and without sounding like a bot. After all, the description is read by Apple Podcasts and Spotify search algorithms but also by humans and it should remain appealing to users considering starting off with the podcast.
We also did a quick check using Voxalyze’s Podcast Visibility Optimization stack and while the different elements of the podcast were generally in good shape, we spotted a few areas of improvement.
Podcast Visibility Optimization Framework © Voxalyze
One of them was a weakness in ratings and reviews. A quick email campaign asking friends and listeners helped to leave reviews was set up to tackle this.
4. Analyze the results and plan the next steps
We could notice the improvement within the next 2 weeks with the audience up by 24% and 7 keywords ranking in the top 10 for Germany (5 for France).
The podcast always had peaks in terms of downloads/listens on the days where new episodes are published. That is due to 1. the subscription system and auto-downloads and 2. The communication done by SalesLabs via email and social media on the release day.
Podcast Keyword Distribution
The really interesting thing is that the peaks remain more or less the same, but the baseline has more than doubled and reached new heights.
Thibaut Souyris (CEO of SalesLabs)
The fact that the baseline (ie the volume of downloads outside of the peaks) has increased proves that the show is now more visible and that the audience converts by downloading/starting to listen to the podcast.
What’s next?
Podcast visibility optimization is not a one-time thing. Search algorithm changes so do one’s business and audience interest. And the competition doesn’t sit still. SalesLabs keeps on monitoring the B2B Sales Podcast and main competitors’ ranking with Voxalyze and is currently working on a long tail strategy for its keywords and the next show assets update.