What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is essentially managing and/or optimizing your business’ search engine presence and ranking in terms of results and more. In simpler terms, as a business you want to be the result of different search queries and keywords that pertain to the audience you are targeting. This is because even if you rank fairly well amongst other businesses for specific searches, people will most likely not even click on your site due to it not relating to the searcher’s wants and needs.

While being at the top of a search result is key, there are other aspects to search engine optimization that contribute to a sufficiently optimized digital marketing campaign.

This includes:

• The words in your URL
• Title and Header tags
• The main content of the webpage

Ultimately, everything matters when optimizing your search engine rankings, down to every character on your website. The words in your URL should somewhat directly translate to the keywords that you bid on. In addition to the URL, the wording on your title and header tags, and how they connect to your digital marketing strategies carry a significant amount of importance as well. 

The point I’m trying to make here is that every aspect of your webpage, whether it be the images, the body text, tags, links, and everything in between. It must all be sufficiently optimized to the levels your business has set, to be successful in your digital marketing endeavors.

How it Relates to Film

The main way it relates to film is typically through smaller, indie filmmakers and studios. Most big film studios don’t worry too much on selecting keywords and SEO simply because they can just rely on more standard film marketing practices, like posters, teasers and trailers, interviews, and other forms of promotional art.

For indie filmmakers making lower-budget short films, they need to rely more on tactics like word of mouth, social media posts, and of course, SEO. There is certainly a market for people who search and browse for new and upcoming indie short films, myself included.

Even if, as a filmmaker you don’t know much about digital marketing and keyword bidding, at the very least you must optimize your website and/or landing page for the film to coincide with both the tone of the film itself, as well as the target audience for whom the film was ultimately made for in mind.

All in all, while many think the need for SEO is slowly dwindling, it has been shown countless times just how important it is for business to learn and understand efficient search engine optimization, from the film world and beyond.