Is Spotify Stealing Your B2B Podcast's Search Traffic?

That's Spotify's page for my podcast. That's my company's website. Google put Spotify higher, and it isn't even Spotify's page for the show. It's one episode, a single episode of mine sitting on somebody else's platform above the website I actually pay for.

Now, I run a podcast agency, and this is my own show. I'm also gonna be honest with you here about which bits of this I actually understand. that'll matter more than it sounds like it does initially. So here we are, more than 45 episodes, of telling founders to go and look at their own numbers, and I had never once typed my own show name into a search bar Took me 45 seconds.

Here's why it's worth your 45 seconds. Your episodes are not for strangers. I think I've argued that for a year now through this show, and I'm not walking it back. Episodes convert people who already half know you But conversion needs supply.

Somebody has to arrive before they can circle and fall in the funnel. And the thing doing that job today while you're watching this isn't your episodes. It's this page which you have never actually opened Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights. I'm Neal Veglio, the founder of Podknows Podcasting, a full-service podcast marketing agency based in the UK, helping founders, CMOs, and people like you to get the best possible results from their B2B podcast So let's go do that.

Five things top to bottom. One, Google has already answered the question before a single link that you could click on shows up, and it's answered it using two of my own episodes which can seem flattering for about four and a half seconds. It means the show is being read as a source by Google, and being a source in Google is a nice problem to have But look at what's actually happened here. Somebody asked a question and my work was used as an answer for it, and I got credited in roughly the same way that a photographer gets credited on a stock image.

A small gray line, but no guaranteed click. Two, the paid results. Not a lot to do here directly, but you wanna know who's buying into 'em If someone's buying ads against your show's name, that's information you probably want And probably today, not in 18 months. So go and look.

Four seconds it'll take you. Right, moving on. Three, the first thing a human can actually click. Now in my case, that's b2binsights.

podnos.co.uk. That is a page that exists for this show and nothing else.

It's on a subdomain that I own with copy that I control completely. It has a very sole purpose. Now it's top of the organic results. It's beat everything else on the page, including my own company's page.

There's one difference between this particular page and my main site that I can actually point to. I'll show you in about 90 seconds, shall I? And then I'm gonna be quite careful about what I claim that means. Four, Spotify, one episode.

Five, podknows.co.uk, my actual company website behind the episode Now everyone's instinct here is usually to get a little bit cross with Spotify. Don't.

Spotify hasn't done anything wrong in particular Spotify built your show a dedicated page to it and pointed at it because you gave your show a menu item. That's not a search problem. That's an ownership problem And it existed before Google ever saw that you existed And then there's the dates. My main site's result is stamped the 4th of June Three months of it being sat there not moving, while the subdomain published something new every single Friday.

So I have a theory about this. Hold that thought. Right. Here's where I stop and consider because I can feel it happening.

I've run one search. I've looked at one screenshot and I can feel myself about to become a man with opinions about Google. And I've spent 45 episodes telling you the reason most podcast advice is cack, and it's because nobody will say the words, "I don't know that." They'd rather sound like they're an authority about something adjacent to their thing, to their actual job, than admit where the edge of their knowledge is.

So I don't fully know why Google ordered those results the way that it did. I've got a theory, and it's an informed theory. I run a podcast for an SEO expert, and that podcast, in case you're interested, is called SEO Fucking What. Hopefully the bleep worked there.

Nikki Pelkington, an absolute genius in the world of SEO, and because I publish her episodes every week, I've learned quite a bit about SEO. I already knew a little bit about SEO, but now I know a lot more So here's my theory. The main site's page was stamped June and was not updated. The subdomain publishes every Friday.

So it looks to me like freshness is doing something, but it looks to me like it's not a strategy, is it? It's not expertise. And if I dress a hunch up as a mechanism, I become precisely the person I complain about on this show and on my other show. So that part is Nikki Pelkington's department.

She does the SEO for my business, and she's the reason I know the difference between a thing that worked and a thing that merely happened at the same time as a thing that worked, which it turns out is what most people mean when they say SEO What I can talk to you about is the podcast bit, the podcast SEO. So let's do that. One, go and search your own show name right now, today. Screenshot it.

Now, that's not SEO, that's just looking. That's observation, and it'll tell you more than any dashboard that you've even looked at this year. Two, ask whether your show has a home that you actually own. Not a menu item, not a tab on the company site, a page that exists to do one job.

Whether that helps you in search is Nikki's department. Again, link in the description. But whether you own the thing representing your show to strangers is very much mine, and for most of you, the answer is no. Three, read your show description as somebody who's never heard of you Most of them are written for people on episode 40.

In this episode, we continue our conversation about… Continue? Mate, they've only just arrived. They didn't know there was a conversation already happening. Four, look at your episode titles as first sentences, not as keywords.

Whether a title ranks isn't something I can tell you. Whether it names a problem that your buyer actually has at the moment they're having it, that I can. Five, fix your split signal. Three old brand names all pointing at each other is a positioning problem before it's ever a search problem.

Pick one, point everything at it. One last thing about these results. They haven't changed since I recorded this. They won't change on their own.

They're not the weather. Somebody has to go and change them, and that somebody is a person with a login to a website, which is almost certainly you. And in my case, on podknows.co.

uk, it's me. So here we are, 40 seconds, search your show, screenshot it, look at what a stranger meets first. And if what you find sends you into actual search territory, that's for Nikki, not me. Again, she's linked below in the episode description, and she's worth a click and a discovery call If it's the show itself that's the mess, then that's my diagnostic, also linked below.

All right. It's that part of the episode where I answer a question that's come in from a founder. This one's from Struan in Glasgow. Struan's had a guest ask to hear the edit before it goes out, and he wants to know whether that's actually reasonable, and if it isn't, how to say no without it being awkward.

So no, and the awkwardness is completely solvable, just not at the point that you're currently trying to solve it. The reason this feels awkward is that you're being asked after the recording. Once it's recorded, saying no sounds like you've got something to hide. Before the recording, it's just how it works.

So it goes on the one sheet, same sheet where you tell them what kit you'd like them to use, the same sheet where you tell them that recording something doesn't guarantee you're actually gonna publish it. And one more line, edit to final, and we don't circulate them before release. It's simple. You put it in plain English.

Now, where do you give ground? Well, there are two places for this. Number one, factual corrections, obviously. If they've said 2019 to you and they meant 2021, fix it and thank them for catching it.

And then if they insist on hearing the evidence that you've fixed it, by all means, honor that. If they said something about a client that's gonna cost them that client, take it out. That's not editorial weakness. That's not being an ass Where you don't give ground is on how they sound, and that's what this request nearly always is underneath it all.

Nobody has ever in the entire history of recorded audio liked how they sound. Open that door and you're not getting an edit note, you're getting a person listening to themselves at 11:00 at night slowly deciding that they hate the sound of their own voice, and they're now gonna make that your problem As a result, you've got no episode, they feel worse than when they started, and everybody's a loser in this situation. Hope that helps, Drew. Here's this week's quick tip.

Stop editing out every breath mindlessly using a one-button click from something like Descript or Riverside. I know, somebody showed you that button. You think it's magical, and it is quite satisfying, isn't it, to hover over it, click it, and see about half of your content disappear, reducing your editing time. But here's the problem.

If you take out every single breath, every little gap, oof, the gaps are how a listener knows there's a human there. Remove those gaps completely with no allowance given for time and pacing, then what you've basically done is you've admitted to the listener that you have removed that person's humanness and turned them into a robot. Now, am I saying that you should never, ever sort out breaths? No, you absolutely should sort out breaths.

You should at least reduce them, and where you can, get rid of them. But don't get rid of them without replacing them with something. They need a little bit of gap just to give that human pacing And don't remove every breath. Some breaths serve a purpose.

So for example, if someone's contemplating a fairly deep answer, the last thing you want is for them to just immediately come off the back of the question straight in with their answer. That's not what they did in the recording, so why are you making them do it in the final edit? Use the breaths like colors on a painting. Sometimes you gotta know where to make the brush strokes and where to leave space.

Breaths are no different, and this goes double for all filler words like ums and uhs. Yeah, we definitely want them gone, but what we don't want is something that sounds like it's been edited in Riverside. In other words, " Yep, and that's when I went to this place in wherever." You've heard those podcasts where people have just literally hit the button and all the ums and uhs have disappeared.

We certainly don't want ums and uhs in there, but what we don't wanna do is replace them with something that sounds like a robot So that's the end of this episode. If you've got a question that you'd like answering on the show like Struan did, then there's the voicemail address, which is podknows.co.uk/voicemail.

That's P-O-D-K-N-O-W-S.co.uk/voicemail. You can talk into your phone and it comes to me, and I'll answer it here.

If you prefer to send a video clip, well, you can do that via email. That's N-E-A-L@P-O-D-K-N-O-W-S.co.uk, and I will then get your video in my email.