Boost Your Fiverr Gig with Keyword SEO Tactics

Want more details? Scroll down. Or try these tips direct from Fiverr.

Just want a few quick tips in a video? Here you go:

Also see Mastering the Marketing Funnel

Did you know Fiverr suggests changing your gig title immediately after creating it?

A Gig’s first title generates its permanent URL. And a good URL is often not as user friendly as a good title. Your URL should include some Root Keywords (e.g. “voice over”). Once you create your first title, immediately change it, even when just saving a draft of your gig. Or at least before you go live.

Example first title: I will record voiceover professional studio fast service

The first one is optimized to become the URL, while the second one you create—which should be similar—needs to be optimized for buyers seeing and reading your title. The first one just needs punchy root keywords, and doesn’t have to be overly readable. You simply don’t want the URL to conflict with your title as you change it over the years.

While your Gig must have a good description, your keywords have a bigger effect on buyers finding you—on getting more impressions. If you’re changing a gig, don’t forget the keywords! Fiverr uses keywords to match you to buyers in search results, which is why they are crucial to your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) marketing efforts. You can try adding/changing keywords in low- or medium-value keyword locations before over-committing to making a major change in a high-value area.

Creating Multiple Gigs

Fiverr points out that your success will generally not be limited or increased by how many gigs you have—many sellers have been wildly successful with just one gig, and some with many gigs have failed (mostly by adding too many too soon). You need time for Fiverr to generate a reputation profile of you, and your reputation is generally better if you put all your efforts into making your first gig succeed before adding more.

Argument Against Adding a Second Gig

Fiverr limits how many times it will show your all your gigs (“impressions”) in search results in several ways. To determine how many impressions you should get, one factor is the popularity of all your gigs. If one is doing poorly, it can lower the number of impressions allotted to you, and thus a bad second gig can drag a good first gig down, causing it to get fewer impressions. Also, certain kinds of mistakes on a second gig can affect all your gigs (worst-case example: a terms of service violation on one gig may get your account and all your gigs removed from Fiverr, or it may generate a warning that will affect your seller level).

Finally, don’t create gigs targeting  undesirable niches! For example, in early 2022 voiceover for YouTube videos became popular and kept growing. But the majority of YouTube creators looking for voiceover on Fiverr are bargain buyers—they want a low price AND will try to negotiate down even already low prices. Unless you can figure out how to get these buyers to pay more, you do NOT want more of these buyers. So doing something such as making a new gig focusing on “YouTube” may drag your overall business down rather than lift it up.

Finally, Fiverr is very good at matching Buyer Intent with seller qualities—you don’t have to have a second gig to get a lot of niche buyers. For example, a buyer who does a lot of repeat business is more likely to be shown sellers who have a lot of repeat customers, even though neither may be talking about “repeat business”.

Argument For Adding a Second Gig

When you have established a gig with a good reputation, the risk is low for a bigger test such as adding a second gig. When it’s time, you can leave your main gig mostly as is, and try additional keywords you suspect are important on a newly created gig.

Two gigs lets you test more keywords and target more niches than just one does. So at some point you will benefit from the advantages of expanded testing, and possibly even significant additional impressions. However, probably do NOT create a second gig until you are at least a level 1 seller.

If you’re already getting a lot of business in a specific, desirable niche, it might be a good time to create a second gig, and direct customers in that niche coming to your main gig to buy through your second gig, helping it be popular and encouraging Fiverr to show it to more buyers. Also, one gig can boost the SEO of a different gig (and vice versa) by linking to it—a link from a gig to another gig using keywords.

CONCLUSION: Add a second gig, but not before making the first one fairly successful.

But before you being testing, you will need to do some keyword research. Start by writing down and categorizing a few words.

SEO Keyword Strategy

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”—but it really means optimizing to solve the classic “A.I.D.A. Funnel” marketing problem:

  1. Attention: Your ad must catch and hold their attention.
    Option: Face of a professional actor showing eyes prominently is a common attention solution.
  2. Interest: Your copy/keywords must spark their interest. We’ll explain how below.
  3. Desire: Your demo samples and gig description must motivate them.
    Option: Provide social proof, such as testimonials.
  4. Action: Your policies and ease of ordering must make doing business smooth and easy.
    Option: Give action incentives, such as deals with a deadline.

Your future buyers have to make it through each step of this funnel or there will be no order.

However, we often say “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization) instead of “A.I.D.A.”, but mean the same process: Optimizing the four steps of the funnel as links in a chain. If any step is broken, the whole chain is broken, buyers don’t buy, and your business fails. Optimize seriously!

Which Keywords are Best?

Marketing language basics: Every word should contribute to either:

  1. Motivating benefits such as “Fast Delivery” or “One Free Revision”.
  2. Clarifying or distinguishing features such as “American Accent” or “Broadcast Quality”.
  3. Essential positioning such as “Voice Over” or “Female”.

It also doesn’t hurt to specifically be as memorable, attention-grabbing, and reinforcing of a promise of excellent service everywhere you can. And incentives such as time-limited deals or testimonials are worth considering as well.

As an example of wasted words, one seller added “at its Finest” in their second-largest font after “voice over” to their gig image, followed by “Expert Voice Work”. “At its Finest” and “Expert Voice Work” are too cliched to be a motivating benefit, not a clarifying or distinguishing feature, not essential positioning. The space used by those words was wasted. Stronger marketing keywords should have been used. They are more like “filler words” than the optimal words to generate buyer interest.

The AIDA/SEO process usually starts with choosing keywords. So sometimes instead of saying “AIDA or SEO, we simply say “Keyword Strategy”, or “SEO Keywords”.

SEO: Root, Target, Aspirational, Helper & Ancillary Keywords

Generally, your service type (such as “voice over”) and demographic (such as “American” and “female”) are your Root Keywords. Extremely common competitive keywords (such a “professional”) may also be considered secondary Root Keywords, or primary Target Keywords. Root Keywords should be reinforced, but not repeatedly, for example:

Using “Voice over” in your title, and in the print on your gig image is appropriate, though Fiverr doesn’t read the words on your gig image for SEO purposes. But adding “voice over” to your limited Keyword Tags Area is the beginning of overkill, and a missed opportunity to use other Target keywords.

Target Keywords are qualities of your service (e.g. “warm” or “professional”), or variations of your service type (e.g. “video game” or “meditation”). This is where repeated testing really pays off.

Keyword Research How-To Steps

Target keywords should be adjusted at least a tiny bit every month. You need to research what other sellers do, and look at Suggested Searches. Start by searching (as if you were a buyer) for “voice over”, then try filtering and adding words to the search.

Open a Google Sheet, spreadsheet or notepad, and start writing down keywords. Start with ones you have thought of, then add new ones that you find as you search.

One of your indicators of what buyers are searching for is what sellers are offering. If sellers don’t offer it, buyers probably aren’t searching for it by name. At the end of 2022, I did a search for “wellness voice over”. Many of the results had the word “well”, but NONE of them had the word wellness.

This means it is unlikely that any buyers are using the word “wellness” as a word in their search. But the seller I was working with had a lot of clients who used “wellness” in their scripts and descriptions, so “wellness” became an Aspirational Keyword—something people are buying, but not using as a search term. Sometimes this means it is a very small niche, but equally common is that buyers want it, but aren’t using it as a search term.

For Aspirational Keywords, you want to catch those buyers in your net, and in some cases signal to them that you have what they are looking for. To catch them, you need to figure out what related searches they may be using. To signal to them, you can add the Aspirational Keyword to your gig image or in your description.

Another indicator of what buyers are searching for are Suggested Searches. Just below the search box where I searched for “wellness voice over” was a list of Suggested Searches. “Meditation voice over” and “Poem voice over” were two. Clicking on them, it was easy to see that virtually all of the sellers used the term in the search in either or both their gig image. So buyers wanting “wellness” but not using that word in their search may be choosing from among sellers offering “meditation”. If “meditation” was already something you wanted to target, it could be considered a Target Keyword for you and have the side benefit of either reaching or signaling to wellness buyers. Or it could be considered a Helper Keyword to reach wellness buyers.

In the search results I looked for other terms used by sellers. Both “religious” and “sultry” were in use. “Religious” had value to the seller I was working with, but “sultry” was an Ancillary Keyword—acceptable, but not sought after by the seller (she would do it, but didn’t want to spend spend keywords to promote it). A quick search for “sultry voice over” showed it likely wasn’t a helper keyword to “wellness”, but did reveal that “sultry” and related keywords were a fairly large niche (as expected, e.g. keywords such as “smooth”, “seductive”, “sexy”, etc.). The seller agreed to think about considering targeting “classy, smooth and sultry” niche in a test farther in the future.

Applying Your Research in Keyword Tests

First, you’ll need to label your keywords as either Target, Aspirational, Helper or Ancillary. Second, determine your goals. Goals should be based on BOTH your interests and where the money is. If you spend a lot of keywords targeting very small niche, your gig won’t be very successful, and Fiverr won’t help you make much money. You need to target adjacent categories when your preferred category is very small.

For example, let’s say you want to do “religious” voice over, but would accept doing “meditation” voice over. As you might expect, the “meditation” category has a higher volume of work, and that mediation-style voiceover is similar what some “religious” buyers are looking for.

So you might start by spending more keywords in the area of “mediation” so that your gig will be successful, and then keep testing how to augment it in a “religious” direction. You’ll want to add or swap out keywords in one or more locations to begin testing—or create a new gig. See “The Nine Keyword Locations” below for ideas.

While Fiverr encourages testing via additional gigs, remember that the less successful you are today, the more risky it is to your income to spread your impressions budget across multiple gigs. And if you make too many changes all at once, your gig may be penalized. This is why you need to plan changes over time, and make your next planned changes every month.

Two Versions of Fiverr Gig Titles:

  1. URL Title: A gig’s first title generates its URL, and that URL is unchangeable, so get it right!
  2. Display Title: For people to read. Can be changed.
  3. SEO Title: Old option, now removed by Fiverr.

Ten Locations for Keyword Tests

Gig titles, tags, and description need to reinforce the same basic and popular keywords. For voice talent, include “voice over” as your Root Keyword. Your five best keyword tags should be:

  1. Standard: Similar to what others are using.
  2. Attention-grabbing.
  3. Reinforcing service excellence.

The main areas containing keywords, in order of importance to Fiverr, are:

1. HIGH VALUE

1.1 Gig Display Title (important to Buyers)
1.2 Search Keywords
1.3 Tone Tag Keywords

2. MEDIUM VALUE

2.1 Work-Type Keywords (but there are more common types of work than allowed keywords)
2.2 Gig Description (Best practice: include some key FAQs near the top)
2.3 Gig Image Display Text (important to Buyers)
2.4 Gig URL Title

3. LOW VALUE

3.1 Gig FAQs (critical to controlling your policies)
3.2 Gig Video Display Text (if any–affects only buyers)
3.3 Gig Image Name and EXIF metadata (show up in Google search)

Tip: Name Your Gig Image(s) Using Keywords

Remember: You can provide up to three images per Fiverr gig.

Google will show your Fiverr image in some search results. So give the image a file name that helps promote your Fiverr gig if you wish to such as “quality voice over Fiverr username.jpg” (change “username” to your Fiverr username). Fiverr has also said that it takes image metadata into account, though few think it makes much difference in Fiverr search results.

The “hidden info” on your image, the EXIF metadata, can be edited by filling in IPTC fields such as “creator”, “description”, etc. Google will read the content of IPTC fields in the EXIF metadata and make them available in search results (Google says “Google Images exposes IPTC metadata in search results whenever it is available.”)

A free tool to add/edit the metadata of your image, and more about the IPTC standards for image metadata.

Related Factors

While there are many factors Fiverr uses to determine how many impressions your gig receives, and your reputation is the biggest factor (avoid penalties!) here are a few less-obvious ones:

  1. Your gig has a button (love symbol) to bookmark. If anyone bookmarks you for future use it can help your reputation. Suggest someone bookmark your gig to make it easy to return to when thanking after the order, and if negotiating a custom order.
  2. Share your gigs outside Fiverr using social media like: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn etc. and get people to click. Get a URL to share here.

Choosing Tones

When you’re new, we suggest using the guide below, and choosing 3-5 from the “Business” section, and any remaining from the “Acting” section. You want to stick to popular keywords when you’re starting out.

Choosing Work Purposes

Similarly, stick to the most common kinds of work, three examples shown above.

What search tag keywords should you add to your gig?

Here, you can target things closer to your preferences, but be sure to do the keyword research outlined above. When you’re new, it’s good to add “YouTube”, and remove it later.