How important is SEO to your theatre or arts web site?
It’s just about the most important thing there is.
It’s no longer enough to simply publish some stuff somewhere on the internet and hope everyone finds it. That’s kind of like leaving an old TV next to the curb and waiting for it to disappear.
You have to optimize your content so that the hordes of potential customers and audience members who are looking for what you have can find it. The second someone types in whatever comes to mind as a description of what they want in Goggles, you want your results to be on top. And you do that through SEO.
As a little example of how crucial SEO is, consider the following search:
“review ashland long day’s journey into night”
When I search, I see the review I published yesterday already in number three position – second only to the OSF web site and the Ashland Daily Tidings review.
How could that be? Many, many much larger media have reviewed this show at OSF. So why don’t they come up higher in the results? SEO. If my blog can come back at number three, that shows you how important SEO is. So if you’re a little upstart business or arts group, it doesn’t take money to make it easy for the world to find you on Goggles.
How do you do this? In a nutshell, your content has to match what people are searching for. So here’s a real easy example. If you have written a theater review of a show, make it real easy for the world to find it by putting all those words in the title.
Like this:
Theater Review | LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT by Eugene O’Neill at Oregon Shakespeare Festival
If instead you decide to title your review something clever like:
America’s long play of suffering by guy from Connecticut comes to Oregon’s biggest stage
…then your content just disappeared in the results. Because no one is searching for those words. You have to give Goggles some way of knowing what your stuff is.
Nutshell: If you want to go beyond simply publishing something on the electronica net and get to the really exciting part where someone else actually reads it? You have to learn your SEO.
Until you do, you’re writing a private diary in a very small room.
