There’s that term again: Keywords. Everybody throws it around like it’s OBVIOUS what they are, or should be. Delve into online websites, marketing your VO services, and you’ll see that keywords pop up in many of the SEO and SEM strategies that used to be so important. I dunno. Are they still? I choose keywords (tags) for every blog I write. Some keywords are visible, others are written into the site’s code. Keywords show up in backlinks, inbound links, and inlinks.
Keywords are at the heart of most analyses of web traffic. If you want metrics, chances are the person you’re hiring, or the program you’re using is going to ask for keywords.
Google “keywords” and you’ll invariably get a lot of links to a site called Moz.com. They hope to sign you up for their service, but the site is chock-full of some basic keywords philosophy. Check out their page: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research, where you’ll find this wisdom: “….through the detective work of puzzling our market’s keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated – with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are already actively seeking…”
Great. Got it. The concept of keywords is not hard…just choosing the keywords…THAT’s hard. Why?
My friend Brett Bumeter — web developer and WordPress expert explained it to me this way:
Customers typically need solutions to problems. A voice over actor might be the solution to that problem, but they might approach it like ‘How do I make my own commercial?’ or ‘Where do I hire a firm to narrate a commerical?’ or something like that which never mentions the actual keywords voice over, or voice over artist or voice over actor. They have questions to ask, but they do not have the answer to the question and therefore can’t seek out the person that embodies that answer.
So that means that as you are trying to drive more business and sales, you need to make certain pages or posts on your site visible in search ranking much further upstream int the clients ‘self-education process.
With that being the case, generic keywords like the ones above could be the absolute lastkeywords to chase and maybe also the most competitive and more expensive keywords to spend money and time on!
BTW, Brett is a genius at this stuff, and although he says he doesn’t do much SEO anymore, he’s plenty savvy about it. He’s also great at ANYTHING WordPress. I give him my unabashed recommendation: http://www.softduit.com.
So where does that leave us, as voice-actors? Where you’ve always been: finding your own marketing path to success. Surely it may make sense to choose the standard keywords: voiceover, voice-over, voice over, voice actor, etc. But then again, maybe you need to choose more creative VO-related keywords that could reel in a different kind of fish.
The more you read about this stuff, the more complicated (and fascinating) it can be. Of course, Google is big in this realm, so you may want to start there: GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER.
There’s that term again: Keywords. Everybody throws it around like it’s OBVIOUS what they are, or should be. Delve into online websites, marketing your VO services, and you’ll see that keywords pop up in many of the SEO and SEM strategies that used to be so important. I dunno. Are they still? I choose keywords (tags) for every blog I write. Some keywords are visible, others are written into the site’s code. Keywords show up in backlinks, inbound links, and inlinks.