Voiceover Work and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can it be done?
Trying to get voiceover talent jobs on-line is tough. Each day, more and more people enter the field looking for a job in voice overs. With practically each and every one comes another website with the same focus as yours. All these personal pages are clambering for the same piece of a very small voiceover pie.
In recent years and the foreseeable future search engines are and will be the most widely used internet tool to find sites for products, services or information. Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page and it’s just usually just the top three or four listings of that. Sounds kind of fruitless doesn’t it? The more traffic, the more business, but just how hard is it to make the top ten with voiceover talent?
Let’s give it a try, I’ll type in “voice over” in everyone’s favorite search engine, “Google”, and let’s see what we get. As of this writing it returned 49,700,000 results. Sure, some of the results are for other things, but even narrowing the search parameters I still came up with 942,000 results. One popular keyword research tool predicted that there will only be about 160 searches a day for “voice over”. One number seems incredibly high and the other incredibly low, even if they are both off by 50,000, your commercial voice over service website has a lot of competition.
Ok, “voice over” seems like a tough search engine term to crack, let’s pick another. Let’s try “voice talent” and we get a whopping 2,310,000 sites as challengers. Put in “Voice actor” and we get over two million. If you got these kind of odds in Vegas would you go? When your odds of being struck by lightning is a measly 576,000 to one, or your odds of dating a supermodel is a sure bet at 88,000 to 1, are you still going to make that voiceover website and hope for the best? Yep.
We are the people that love to buy lottery tickets—why, because they are fun and there’s always that chance…. Buying a lottery ticket is fine and building a “voice over” website is great, as you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. One website developer who specializes in voice over websites says right their homepage; “I have never heard of anyone getting a VO gig because of someone stumbling onto their website via a generic web search.” Wow, what’s a voice imaging talent to do?
“The Voice”, Frank Frederick, had great advice in his lecture “How to Define Your Niche Voice Acting Market”. The days of being all things to all people are numbered. Take an honest assessment of who and what you are and become the best at doing it. Once you find your niche, then make sure as many people as possible know about it. Even if you have a voice over agent or are a member of a voice over directory, self marketing is essential.
Education and hard work are also a better bet for furthering your career than a generic “voice over cheap” website. Voiceover talent jobs are tough to come by and the good ones are even harder, that’s why it’s so important to stay top of mind and totally prepared.
So when it comes to your personal voiceover talent website, you need to think of it more as your electronic business card. Instead of focusing on the generic term “voice over” or “voice talent” make it “voice overs by your name” or “your name voice talent”. Better yet, make sure your site is your name and your niche. Oh yeah, and remember, market yourself every chance you get, because as we have seen, if they don’t know you they probably won’t find you.
Tags: Voice actor, Voice over, voice over seo, voiceover talent, voiceover talent jobs, voiceover talent website, Voiceover Work
September 16th, 2008 at 6:13 am
That’s one good point. The voice over industry is now radically changing the worldwide web. It is a market fever in web development, seo/sem. It is creating a phenomenon and a massive traffic is plain to see. One must excel the other to compete. But one must be skillful, resourceful, creative and proficient enough to pass through the eye of the needle. Every VA must go through the process to be one. Both education and experiences are necessary tools to succeed. But a character must be established. Patience is a must virtue for VA to consider.