You’re a professional magician. You want more clients, more bookings and more revenue. To do this, you decide to improve your SEO rankings. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Many people pay a lot of money to get those top google search spots. But before you spend thousands of pounds getting yourself to the top spot, try these five easy SEO wins for magicians. They might make all the difference, and they’re a great introduction to search engine optimization.

Before we get started, let me say again that the goal of One Ahead is to help inspire you to produce, perform, promote and profit from great magic. This post was requested by several of our members. Let’s get going.

SEO Basics

The critical thing to wrap your head around is that the purpose of Google is to give people what they are searching for as quickly as possible. Google is constantly trying to work out the value and purpose of your website and who needs to visit it.

When someone searches a keyword, scrolls through the results list, then clicks on your website. Google figures out that people who search that keyword in the future probably need to see your website in the results.

Make things easy for Google. Give google as much information as possible, so it doesn’t need to do the slow, cumbersome detective work its algorithms do over time.

Not all of these easy wins will apply to your brand and your business.

1. Ask clients what they searched to find you.

You’re not going to know what to tell Google about your business if you do not know what clients search for to find you. Ask what they searched before they found you too. Perhaps they searched for a magician in a specific area, googled the cost of booking a magician or searched for an affordable magician in Bristol.

People will search for things you will not be able to predict. By asking future clients what they searched for before they found you, you will also discover whether the following five steps boost your business.

Oh, make an actual spreadsheet. Write the client name, their value to your business, and the individual keywords they searched. It’s as simple as asking them, how did you find me? And if they say a web search, ask if they remember what they searched for.

2. Use custom site titles with keywords.

The title of your website is not just for visitors. Google announced they won’t always show your main site title to users in the search results. A site title is a place for your most important keywords. You should add good keywords to your page title, and you should use a different custom title for every page of your site.

Google uses these keywords to help deliver the right results to its users. So make sure you think long and hard about what your clients might be searching for to find you.

Even the big brands rely on keywords to attract new customers. Some even value keywords more than their brand name — placing them first in their site titles.

Theory11 captures so many SEO keywords in their site title. Playing Cards, Playing Cards Store, Playing Cards Shop, Online Playing Cards Store, Online Playing Cards Shop, Magic Tricks, Magic, Tricks, Magic Shop, Magic Tricks Shop, Magic Tricks Store, Online Magic Store, Online Magic Tricks Shop, Online Magic Tricks Store.

3. Add keywords to each page prefix.

You can change the words you see in the full URL after your website name. When you build a website, these tend to match your page title automatically — but sometimes they’ll cut off the complete sentence.

An example of a magicians booking page URL without keywords might be:

.com/booking-page

An example of a magicians booking page URL with keywords might be:

.com/book-magician

With most site builders, it will only take a few minutes to update these prefixes but be careful if you have already shared the links elsewhere on the internet. You do not want a broken link if someone taps to book you elsewhere and the link has changed.

You might want to make multiple booking pages for corporate, close-up, event, etc. Including different keywords for each.

4. Add alt text to every image on your website.

It would be best to do this anyway because it’s the law in most countries — you need to make your websites accessible to all, even those with visual impairments. You might think you’re a small fish, but I know people in America have got in big financial trouble for not making their sites accessible. Someone who is blind relies on image alt text to be able to understand what an image is displaying.

Google also uses Alt-text to deliver image search results. You would be surprised how much searching takes place in google images. I often will search for a product on google images and then click through to the website of the product I like.

For legal reasons, your Alt text must describe the contents of your image. You can also include relevant keywords for your business and that web page. When I google image search “hire a magician,” I get this image of Jamie Docherty. Any guessing which keywords were in his alt text?

The good news is that if you include an image with alt text on your page, Google will factor that data into regular web searches too.

5. Optimize your images.

If your website takes a long time to load, people will get frustrated. They’ll also get frustrated at google for recommending them a slow website. Because of this, Google factors in the load time of your website into your domain search rankings. Remember, just because you have that fancy fast broadband, it doesn’t mean others will too.

You can use tools like this to test the speed of your website.

You can use tools like this to reduce the size of your images.

There you go then. Five easy SEO wins for magicians. You have no excuse not to spend the short amount of time necessary to implement all of these into your website.

Feel free to link to your website in the comments for everyone to help each other with feedback. If you’d like five more easy SEO wins, I can share more in the future.