SEO Company Blog

How to Increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a VO Talent: Part 1

This article is the first in a series of articles on increasing your SEO as a Voice Talent.   If you are a working voiceover talent, you already know that there is so much more to the business than just having fun in the studio.  A considerable amount of time needs to be spent in developing, nurturing, and maintaining the business aspect of this creative and fun career. Naturally, one of the main goals of your business should be acquiring new business, as well as effectively maintaining existing customer and client relationships.  To grow your business successfully in today’s economy, a primary goal should be for you to establish an effective online presence.  This should include some,  or all forms of, the following:

Website(s)
Your Social Media presence(s)
Blogging!

Pingdom.com released numbers about the Internet in 2010. Take a look at the HUGE Social Media stats below. If you think Social Media is a fad, you’d better think again! Here are some highlights:

The Internet

1.97 billion internet users worldwide 
107 TRILLION emails were sent in 2010 
There are 255 million websites 

In Social Media

25 billion – Number of sent tweets on Twitter in 2010 
100 million – New accounts added on Twitter in 2010 
175 million – People on Twitter as of September 2010 
600 million – People on Facebook at the end of 2010 
250 million – New people on Facebook in 2010 

Videos

2 billion – The number of videos watched per day on YouTube. 
35 – Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
186 – number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month.
2+ billion – The number of videos watched per month on Facebook.
20 million – Videos uploaded to Facebook per month.

I just read this recently that Lady Gaga is the first personality to have over 10 million Twitter followers!  Keep in mind with this type of audience, there is huge potential for you to grow your business!

So, What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is the ability to have your website, and not just your website really – it could be your name, your brand, any affiliation or interaction that you have had on the web, show up at the top or within the first page of an Internet search.  In order to better understand SEO and implement it effectively as a voice talent, it is prudent to first understand some basic key principles of search engines and search concepts in general.  
To start, let’s take a look at the current Search Engine market share.  As you can see on the diagram on the left, Google has the largest market share of all of the search engines.  Not really surprising huh? J I know that I use Google pretty much exclusively when it comes to searching for things, unless of course some application has installed the Yahoo toolbar (Internet Explorer) or Bing (my mobile phone) – these applications tend to install their search engine as a default.  For the purposes of this blog, I will be showing you examples with Google search, but just know that the process of SEO affects all search engines, each of them having their own unique way of mining all of that available data on the Internet. 

Let’s Google Search for “Voice talent”  

If you were to go to Google and enter the fairly broad search term of “Voice Talent”, you’ll probably get close to a mere 12 million matches, or search results.   Now at first that might seem alarming, and you might think that that means that there are 12 million voice talents out there.  Well, not to worry, what that really means is that in terms of Google’s database, there are that many matches for those particular words.   When searching, you need to think about how the page you are looking for will be written. A search engine is not a human, it is a program that matches the words you give to pages on the web. Use the words that are most likely to appear on the page.

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Location – If you have a Google account and have filled out a profile that indicates your location,  Google will show relevant local matches for your search terms.  You would really notice this if you use a generic search term such as “restaurant”.  Google will display matches for restaurants in your local area first, as well as display a map with locations on the right hand side of the results page. If you do not have a  Google profile, Google uses their self proclaimed  “location detection” technology, which automatically sets a location for you based on your IP address.When you look at the results page in Google, you can see that at the top of the page, highlighted in yellow, are the sponsored ads – If you have used Google for a long time, you’ll notice that this is different than how it used to be.  They used to look a lot more like actual ads – now Google’s strategy is to have them look similar to the “organic” , or “un-paid” results, which are the ones that you see directly below the box in yellow.  Now of course this strategy is to get more of those sponsored ads to be clicked on because there is revenue in that. However, only about 20% of those ads are ever clicked on, so everyone’s dream is to be at the top of the list of the organic search since there is no fee involved.  A couple of things about the results page that you should note: 

You may have noticed that lately Google has been including results from Social Media – such a Twitter and Facebook posts.  This is a recent test deployed by Google to improve their search engine.  Presumably, you will see more integration with Social Media in the future that will enhance user searches even more based on your social circle. 

In the world of SEO, Searches are defined and classified into three categories:

Organic Search – This is a natural, or “unpaid ” search, and results can be Local,  Regional, or National
Local Search – This is a search which is based on a local city or town.  This is becoming increasingly popular with SEO companies who help you to optimize your pages.  It has been shown that business owners who include local search engine optimization advertising as portion of their over-all marketing and advertising program will see a great improvement in their levels of success. There are some wonderful benefits that you can gain from concentrating on local advertising, and it is rapidly becoming a well-known strategy of generating cash online
Sponsored or Pay-Per-Click – This can be a local, regional, or national search.  Statistically only 20% of people click on the paid advertisements – the other 80% use the “Organic” search.

Let’s get Local 

Here you will see that we have less results than our previous search – only about 887,000 results !  Notice that my VO website appears on the first search page for this type of search.  My underlying strategy is that by localizing my SEO, I will increase my business by capturing the attention of local clients who might want to work with me in their studio!  One of the main reasons I was attracted to Orange County was the fact that there are over 400 production companies based in the area. When I moved here, I decided that a good strategy would be to become friends with each and every of them!   J One of the ways to employ this strategy, outside of face to face networking was to build local marketing into my online presence.  Even if you live in an area that doesn’t have 400 production studios, you can still benefit from a connection with the one production studio, or advertising agency, large company, etc. that wants to have local access to you!Let’s add a more localized perspective to our Google search and add “OrangeCounty” to our original search term of “Voice Talent”.

Let’s get even more local…

Let’s narrow our search even more and include my local town of Irvine. Again, you will notice that my website shows up at the top of the first page.  I recently received a request for a quote off of my website just the other day from a local insurance company wanting me to be the voice for their phone system.  When I called them, they explained that they wanted someone to actually come on site to do their recording.   They hired me for the gig based on the fact that I was local talent – they also saved on travel costs!  A great example of how advertising locally can be important for you.  

Google also is now incorporating more and more specific categories for you to search on the left hand side of the page:  Let’s try a video search for videos that contain the key words “narrative voice talent” – notice that this is a more general search term, and not localized.  I am a big believer that a standard procedure for all voice talent when they complete a job is to request a copy of the final product as well as a testimonial. These are great additions to your portfolios, as well as valuable marketing items for your business that you can use to advertise on your web site.  I find that many clients are more than happy to supply you with the finished product if they can, as long as they have access to it, or are not under any non disclosure agreements.  A lot of times, if a video is produced for a company website, and it becomes public, you can certainly ask them for permission to link to it.  You can then take all of your demo videos and set up your own You Tube channel, where you can specify tags and a description for each upload.

In my next article, we’ll will talk about the essential elements that are critical for your website SEO optimization, including keywords, site structure, Web Page Strategies, and more!  Many thanks to my good friend and colleague Dennis Backer for his amazing knowledge and generosity in helping me to improve my own SEO.  Thanks so much for looking and please feel free to add your comments and suggestions below!  You’ll notice that one of my videos shows up at the top of the search page for “narrative voice talent”  These are key words that are placed in the video description and tag fields for each upload in my youtube account.  Since Google owns youtube,  doesn’t it just make sense it to take advantage of this and optimize your descriptions and tags?  Best Wishes and Much Success, Anne

How to Increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as a VO Talent: Part 2

This article is the second in a series of articles on increasing your SEO as a Voice Talent.

Hey Peeps!

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the basics of search engines and searching techniques as they relate to SEO.  In this article, we will focus on some key elements for Website Optimization, specifically Keywords and Site Structure.  

Keywords

Keywords are one of the most important things to consider in SEO, and Keyword research is an extremely important part of marketing your online business.  You should carefully consider what key words you will use to represent you and your business.  These will be the words that people use to search for your product in the search engines.  Start by learning and researching the top ranked web page titles and search result snippets – what were the search terms you used to generate the results? Some important keyword terms you should know:    

•         Keyword Density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization keyword density can be used as a factor in determining whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.

•         Keyword Frequency Keyword frequency refers to the number of times a keyword or keyword phrase appears within a web page.

•         Keyword Prominence Keyword prominence refers to how prominent keywords are within a web page. The general recommendation is to place important keywords at, or near, the start of a web page, sentence, TITLE or META tag  

Essentially, Keyword Research = Knowing Your Customer.  Start by learning everything you can  about your customer.  Define your target market. Who is going to use your product?  In the voiceover industry, this can be any business directly that needs to advertise their product, as well as production companies, marketing and advertising agencies, and even talent agencies.  Think like your customers. What terms or phrases would your customers use to describe your product or service?   Adding your VO “niche” to your keyword list will help you to target your market.  Keywords that are too broad or general will not reach users as effectively as keywords that are highly targeted.  Be specific and relevant with your keywords. The more specific your keywords are, the better chance you have at building value with search engines. For example, the term “Voice over” is very general and it will take a lot more effort to stand out than if you were to use a more specific term such as “corporate narration voice over” or “audio book narrator”.  It is also a good idea to include both singular and plural versions of your best keywords.

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Once you know which keywords are important, your web pages should reflect and target the users who use those keywords. Your goal is to get listed on the first page (and preferably at the top!)  for all popular  keywords in your site category.  You will need to convince the search engine algorithms that your pages are the best results for those keyword searches.  In other words, you will tweak and adjust the web page contents in ways that will cause it to be ranked high.  We will talk about the specifics on how to tweak your pages in subsequent articles in this series.  There is also an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization Services that caters to this; and for a fee most claim that they will get you first page ranking for your key terms.

Today there are lots of online tools that can help you to determine good keywords to increase your SEO.  One of the best, and one that I use almost exclusively – mostly because it is easy (and free!) is the Google Keyword tool: http://www.adwords.google.com/keywordtool. Simply start typing in search terms and Google will generate a list of keyword ideas and related search terms.  It will also let you know the approximate amount of Global and Monthly searches for those terms, as well as a competition factor.  Words that have low competition and a large amount of searches would be good choices for key words.  Play around with different combinations of words to help determine the ones best for you.  

Site Structure

Your Site Structure will also affect your SEO ranking and how search engines process your web site.  Search engines send programs known as ‘robots, ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ to research the internet and find out what’s on sites. They also use complex algorithms to process the data returned to them by these “robots” to determine the popularity and relevance of sites to be listed on their results pages. Site structure is important because it will affect the ways in which crawlers perceive its content. In terms of website design for optimization, use the KISS theory!  Your site should have a straightforward and logical structure, very similar to an outline. This not only allows for user-friendly navigation, but it will also help to facilitate search engine discovery of your pages.  For example, if your site has multiple pages, it should be broken down into logical categories, such as 

Home 
About 
Demos
Contact, etc. 

The URLs to these pages should be short, meaningful and not stuffed with keywords, i.e. http://www.annespeak.com/about.html,http://www.annespeak.com/demos.html, etc. Using search-engine friendly URLs allows users and crawlers to find the pages they want with ease.

A side note for those of you with Flash-based web sites:  Most search engines don’t like and don’t index these sites – not all search engines are able to crawl and index the content of Flash, and if they do, there could be errors, and therefore may not be able to direct visitors to the proper page.  If you have a Flash designed web site, make sure to find out if  it’s been optimized for SEO.   Personally, I am not a big fan of  Flash sites in general.  They may be pretty, but they are not always designed to be cross-platform friendly.  Check to see if your site is viewable on your mobile device, or on an iPad!  Also, unless you know Flash and have developed the site yourself, you are at the mercy of your web designer for any small design modifications, including SEO, and that can cost you a pretty penny!    

It can also be helpful to generate and submit a site map for your web site to various search engines.  This is basically a list of pages that represent your web site that you have allowed the search engines to index.  You can see an HTML example of a site map on the voices.com website by going to http://www.voices.com/site_map.   Using a site map generator can be a quick and easy way for you to see how search engines interpret your site, as well as to help troubleshoot any issues that search engines may encounter when indexing your site. Most search engines require you to submit your site maps in XML format. You can easily generate an XML sitemap for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.  They will give you instructions on how to submit your sitemap to Google, Bing, and Yahoo, etc.  They also give you an option to create a text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages, or an HTML site map (similar to the one at voices.com) to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

In my next article, we will discuss specifics about your Web Page Strategy and how to effectively optimize your pages using the Title, Meta, and Header tags.  Thanks so much for  looking and until next time,

Best Wishes and Much Success,

Anne