A Neglected Topic
I looked it up and I haven't penned a blog entry about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for over ten years. Ten years! Since it's been so long, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about SEO again. What has changed in SEO over the past ten years?
"To be an effective voiceover artist inside the booth, you must be an effective voiceover business outside the booth." - Tom, VOS Hack #1
Everything And Nothing
Yes social media has made a huge impact on how search engines value content like Tweets & stuff and yes there are new strategies for keyword use blah blah blah, but for us individual voice actors with one teeny tiny website in an ocean of voiceover websites, do the changes really matter? Meh.
The fact is that unless you're a super-mega-highly-specialized voice actor with a truly unique sound narrating lesser-known genres, nobody is going to find your website via a search engine. There are thousands of voiceover websites out there and anytime a voice seeker types in some voiceover-related keywords, all of the Pay-to-Play sites will come up first.
Tip Of the Week
If you are early in your voiceover journey or even if you've been around for a while, I don't recommend putting much effort into improving your website's SEO. There are many, many other things you can do to improve your chances of connecting with voice seekers by driving them to your website instead of you praying they discover it. We're talking about Inbound and Outbound marketing techniques and other strategies.
If you insist on trying to improve your SEO, here are a few tips:
Make sure the pages and guts of your website has all the SEO-crunchy things like tags, keywords, inbound and outbound links, etc. There are many articles & videos out there that can help you, just make sure they're current as the SEO rules change all the time.
Blogging. Every time you post a blog about voiceovers, your website publishes an additional page of content that is (hopefully) dripping with voiceover-related keywords. Looking at it that way, www.tomdheere.com is 20 years old with over 600 pages. That's why I occasionally book voiceover purely on the power of my website's SEO, but I can't depend on that and neither should you.
Get on as many free online casting sites as possible. Yes, there are TONS of free online casting sites out there. You don't know about them because every time you use Google or Bing or Yahoo or whatever, the Pay-to-Play sites who spend thousands and thousands of dollars on SEO always pop up first. Do some digging and you'll see what I mean...
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Today's recommendation: shock mounts! A while back, I bought the Eggsnow universal shock mount & mic clip. The problem is that a few of the rubber bands broke and apparently Eggsnow has no website, contact info, or any way of buying replacement rubber bands (I bought it on Amazon, BTW). Since I'm not interested in playing the guessing game of what size the rubber bands are and ordering from someone else, I decided to get a new shock mount.
I purchased the Rycote InVision INV-7 HG mkIII Microphone Shock Mount. While the Eggsnow shock mount was under $10 and the Rycote shock mount is $75, if nothing else this shock mount doesn't require rubber bands to secure my Sennheiser 416. And it looks really cool!
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Tom Dheere is the VO Strategist, a voice over business & marketing coach and demo producer since 2011. He is also a voice actor with over 25 years of experience who has narrated just about every type of voiceover you can think of. When not voicing or talking about voicing, he produces the sci-fi comic book Agent 1.22.