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What to Look for on a Voice Over Talent’s Website Before Hiring

January 22, 2020 by Debbie Grattan

hiring voiceover talent concept

When you’re searching online for a voice over artist, your first impression is likely to come from their website. A polished and professional site gives you a sense of a polished and professional voice actor. But the decisions involved in hiring voiceovers (voice over talent) shouldn’t stop there. There are several elements every serious voice over actor’s website needs to truly make the cut.

A Clear Message

When you land on a site, you want it to get right to the point. You should quickly be able to ascertain the type of voice over work this person does, how long they’ve been doing it, and a sense of if they align with your project or not. It should also be clear that the person is, in fact, a voice over artist. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to land on certain websites that are highly advanced and look amazing – yet give visitors no clue about what the business actually does.

Bio Section 

While you may get a bit of information about the voice actor on the homepage, a strong site includes an About section with a more comprehensive biography. A detailed bio provides a fuller picture of the voice over talent’s background, experience, training, past and current clients, and other pertinent information that lets you know if it’s a good fit.

You may also be treated to additional info, such as their location, hobbies, family life, and passions, which can be helpful for building rapport and a working relationship.

Testimonials

Testimonials are powerful proof that the voice over talent knows what they’re doing and can deliver the same level of service for you. Because they’re unbiased opinions from actual clients, they go a long way toward establishing trust. In fact, a single testimonial from a satisfied client can be far more persuasive than a whole page of information from the voice over artists themselves.

Audio Samples 

Audio samples of a voice over actor’s work are crucial. Look for voice over demos as well as a portfolio of recordings from actual projects. Demos may sound terrific, but they always sound terrific. That’s because they can be edited to perfection. Recordings from actual projects provide a better sense of what the voice actor can achieve without the benefit of endless editing. Both types of audio samples are essential for giving you an overall idea of a voice over actor’s range and capabilities.

Responsive, Professional Website Design

If the voice actor’s website appears neglected, outdated, or doesn’t have a responsive design that allows it to be viewed on any device, it could be a red flag. Neglected or outdated sites may be a sign of someone who is not on top of their game. Sites that don’t have the latest advancements, such as responsive design, could indicate the person’s recording equipment or tech skills required for editing and recording may be just as far behind.

Fast Loading Speed

Slow websites can color your judgment of a voice over actor before you even read or listen to a single word on the site. One study found that more than 50% of Americans were prone to feeling “much more negative” about a business if they have a slow-loading site. The negativity was strong enough to cause 73% of visitors to move on to a rival website if the rival site was faster.

Because voice over websites contains multiple audio and even video samples, loading speeds can be extremely slow if sites are run on inferior web hosting platforms. But find a site that’s run on a high-performance web hosting platform like Pantheon, and you’ll find speed as well as reliability. If the voice actor is smart enough to invest in a top-notch hosting platform, they’re likely to be just as savvy when it comes to high-end recording equipment.

Now that you have an overview of the most important elements on a voice actor’s website, making your hiring decision can be a lot easier. The process of elimination is likely to narrow down the options greatly, leaving you with experienced, professional voice over talent that delivers a final recording as polished as their website.

Filed Under: For Voice Over Clients, For Voice Over Talent Tagged With: Featured Character, Featured Commercial, voice over website

Is Your Voice Over Talent Website Mobile-Friendly?

December 3, 2014 by Debbie Grattan

If you are a working voice over talent, you know it’s imperative that you have your own personal website to showcase your talent. Everybody knows that, right? But did you know that your site’s “mobile-friendliness” is going to become a more and more important factor when it comes to your search ranking and visitor interactions?

Is Your Voice Over Talent Website Mobile Friendly?With the state of technology today, just having a voice over talent website isn’t enough. It also needs to be easily viewed on mobile devices.

Failing to address this aspect of your web design is likely going to hurt your search results at some point in the very near future (“Does Not Having a Mobile Site Affect Your SEO?”) as well as cause issues for your visitors when they can’t access your demos or get the information they need to determine if they’d like to hire you.

What a bummer it would be to spend of the time, effort and expense to get visitors to your website, only to have them leave immediately simply because they can’t access your site on their smartphone or tablet.

If your site isn’t easy to read, or the features aren’t working as they were intended, or visitors can’t listen to your demos quickly… They are going to bounce, and move on to the next voice over talent website on the list. Opportunity (and potential income) is lost, just like that.

How Many Voice Over Talent Searches Are Now Initiated From Smartphones?

According to the January 2014 Pew Internet Research Project, 90% of Americans have a cell phone and almost 60% of American adults have a smartphone.

A solid 60% of adult cell phone users access the internet from their phones.

If you’d like to know how many of your visitors are accessing your voice over talent website via a smartphone, you can get a pretty good idea of that number in your Google Analytics account. I just looked at the past month’s data for my site, and 40% of new users were on mobile devices (30% smartphones, 10% tablets).

On a side note, if you haven’t yet set up Google Analytics for your website, do yourself a HUGE favor and get it done ASAP. There are plenty of articles online that can walk you through the process, or just use Google’s step-by-step checklist. You might need some help from your web designer to get the GA tracking code installed, but if your site is on WordPress, that step will be a breeze! My site is still in HTML so when I set this up originally I had to copy and paste the tracking code into every page manually (eventually I just put it in my footer section so that it would appear on every page). It took a little time but it was easy to do and totally worth the effort!

There’s An Easy Way to Test Your Voice Over Talent Website For Mobile

Just this morning I learned about this Mobile-Friendly Test created by Google. You can plug in your voice over talent website URL and get it analyzed quickly to find out if your site is indeed, mobile-friendly.

Give it a try right now and find out if your website is mobile-friendly. Please tell me what result you got in the comments section below. We can do a little informal survey.

If your website passes the test, then you can rest easy knowing that you are in good shape when it comes increased traffic from mobile users.

If your voice over talent website doesn’t pass the test, there are a few things you’ll want to consider:

You will probably need to redesign your site a bit to make it more mobile-friendly.

Currently, there are two common ways to go when it comes to upgrading for a more mobile-friendly design:

1. Create a separate mobile website that is designed specifically for mobile devices.

OR

2. Redesign with a “responsive design”, which will allow you to have just one site to manage and it will configure automatically to adapt to whatever device is being used to view it.

You can do a little research on this topic and get a good understanding of the pros and cons of both approaches (“The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Website“). I recommend you read several articles and talk to your web designer.

My Voice Over Site Needed an Upgrade This Year

I went through this process myself a few months ago. I had my designer create a mobile version of my site back in 2010 but it was not quite up to snuff for 2014. So, I had it redesigned again this year. You can check it out from your mobile device (just search for Debbie Grattan on your mobile browser) or from your desktop computer.

If you do take a spin through my site, please let me know what your experience was like and if you encountered any issues along the way. User experiences can vary a bit depending on what device is being used to view the site so it’s important to test it on several different platforms (iphone, android, windows phone, various tablets, etc.).

I opted to create a separate mobile site that looked like my desktop voice over talent website, but was streamlined and built more for speed. My regular site has a lot more text than the mobile version and by creating the separate mobile site, I had total control of how the site would look on a smartphone.

I’m actually planning another redesign in 2015 to move to a totally responsive design. That seems to be a better way to go for many business owners, including voice over talents, since it is generally easier to manage one site than two. More on that in the coming months.

Please share your comments below. Is your website passing the mobile-friendly test?

Filed Under: For Voice Over Talent Tagged With: voice over website

When Your Voice-Over Website Keyword Search Rankings Go Missing

September 30, 2014 by Debbie Grattan

When SEO rankings go missing
I’ve been observing some interesting shifting in my Google, Bing and Yahoo rankings over the past few months. Most notably, I experienced a big drop in Google for one of my core voice-over website keyword phrases, while seeing some equally big gains in Bing and Yahoo across many different keyword groups. I have been working on getting that core phrase back to page one for several weeks now and I do hope and expect we’ll be able to do that soon.

when voice-over website search rankings go missingIn the process of reviewing my search engine rankings, I noticed how highly some of my other platforms are appearing, even when my personal website can seem rather incognito at times.

My Linkedin profile is pretty heavily optimized and I’m really glad to see such a positive result from the necessary time and energy I took to do that. I see my name coming up frequently due to my Linkedin profile, and often it appears on page one. Of course, Youtube videos are a huge help and I’ve optimized over 200 of those during the past few years, so they’re just politely hanging out there in cyberspace, popping up repeatedly in various searches. Then there’s my Facebook profile, which also can pull some decent rankings for certain keywords.

Optimizing Beyond Your Voice-Over Website Can Be a Huge Help

This situation shows me the importance of being optimized across several platforms, besides just my own voice-over website. If I was relying on just my website alone, I’d be feeling a lot more pain right now, while I’m waiting for things to get back on track.

The latest addition to the mix is a reworking of my Thumbtack profile. This most recent round of search rank checking was the first time I saw Thumbtack profiles appearing highly ranked in searches, so I took notice and did some dusting off of my Thumbtack voice-over profile, which I quite frankly had kind of forgotten about. I linked up several video samples and did some Q&A postings (I really like that feature). I’m not sure if I’ll get any work opportunities from this platform, but I’d be happy just to see my profile popping up in relevant searches. Just one more way to get my name in front of people and hopefully encourage them to check out my voice over website.

So, the take-away lesson is, spread your search engine optimization out on many platforms, so you always have some visibility on the web regardless of what your personal website is doing!

Debbie Grattan as been working as a professional voice over talent since the late 90′s. She has collaborated on thousands of projects and teamed up with hundreds of production companies, marketing and advertising firms, commercial voice over recording studios and corporate/business clients around the United States and throughout the world. Listen to her Voice Over Talent Demos and request a Voice Over Services Quote for your upcoming project on her voice-over website.

Filed Under: For Voice Over Talent Tagged With: voice over website

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Debbie Grattan is a top-rated professional female voice over talent with more than 25 years of experience delivering voice over services worldwide. She regularly records commercial voice overs for radio and tv as well as infomercial voice overs and direct response marketing for children's toys, health, fitness and beauty products. Other specialties include female narration voice overs for corporate narration, web videos, tutorials, explainer videos and technical medical narration. Debbie also provides phone-related voice over services including phone prompts, messages-on-hold and outbound phone marketing for companies in the United States and Canada.

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