The 10 Stunning Similarities Between SEO and Voice Over
- Chris Butera
- 2d
- 15 min read
Updated: 12h
At the time of this writing, I’ve been doing voice over and SEO professionally for a tad over four years, and I couldn’t help but notice some similarities. These industries are very different, but there is a startling amount of overlap.
The more time I spend with the two, the more similarities I see. It’s kind of weird.
Here’s 10 I discovered.
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SEO is Dead, So is Voice Over
For some strange reason, everyone wants SEO and voice over to die. Every few years, something happens in the tech and entertainment/freelancer spaces and the skeptics suddenly appear. They start shouting from the hills about how SEO and/or voice over is dead.
Examples of industry hexes include:
“SEO/voice over is dead.”
“This new thing killed it.”
“Rates are going down.”
“Fundamentals don’t matter, it’s all about this new thing that killed it.”
“People don’t want to hire talent anymore, go do something else with your life.”
At the time of this writing, I haven’t been in either world that long, but I’ve seen enough to know that this happens in cycles.
Alleged voice over “death knell” moments include but are not limited to:
The rise of pay-to-play sites (websites where you pay a subscription fee to access auditions, which you could book and make money from without the need of a talent agent or manager)
The “rate killer” known as Fiverr
AI
While AI is weeding out much of the bottom-of-the-barrel voice over jobs, it has not killed the business.
SEO’s “dead” phases include but are also not limited to:
Google Core Updates that kill spammy SEO practices (e.g., the Vietnam flashback-inducing Penguin update)
Shifts in search algorithms
Also AI
The AI one has sparked debate on what to call the AI Search era. Some say GEO, some say AEO, AISEO, or some other ridiculous term they made up because it sounded cool in their head.
It’s just SEO. Pick the time, place, and weapons, we can fight about it. Just lock in the Netflix contract so we can make money off this thing.
No one knows why, but for some wacky reason, people seem to despise these two industries and want them gone. I wish them well.
The funny thing is, SEO and voice over do not and will not ever die. They go through downturns, but they adapt, thrive, and spit in the eyes of their critics.
The Average Person Does Not Understand What the Job REALLY is
Voice over and search engine optimization are two strange mystery jobs that the average person has heard about, but doesn’t really know what they are.
Most people think that voice acting is reading into a microphone to make money magically appear into your bank account. If only it were that easy.
In reality, voice over is:
Marketing
Sound engineering
Running a small business of one (aka the smallest business)
Extreme reading comprehension
Extreme music and tonal comprehension
Psychology
Acting
Fun fact: The voice over part of voice acting is the thing that you spend the least of your time on because everything else takes center stage.
When you actually get to perform the service you sell, voice acting is:
Taking a script and analyzing it to bits
Understanding the target audience
Knowing the cadence and necessary emotions the client needs their audience to feel when delivering those words before you hit record
Being able to execute all of those things through your voice, tone, and inflections with speed and precision
If you can do that and get good with your marketing, you can make money; but that takes a ton of time, skill, practice, and patience. Although they may think they can, not everyone can do this, and that’s why there’s so few of us that actually work.
SEO on the other hand, is an even stranger sorcery to the average Joes and Janes.
Most people have no clue what search engine optimization is, or that it falls into the marketing category. At best, they might think it’s throwing keywords at content for money. That’s not the half of it.
In a nutshell, SEO is exactly what it sounds like: it’s optimizing content so that it gets picked up by the search engines (and now AI, too).
You do this with:
Structure
Data
Infographics
FAQs
Tables
Keywords and key phrases
Content that answers questions and solves problems
Content that is helpful and displays E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness)
SEO means taking all that into consideration while creating a pleasant experience for the user.
It’s about learning how the internet works and what it likes so that the people you want to find you can.
In short, SEO is a form of data science disguised as marketing, and it’s awesome.
Fun fact: Voice over requires some form of SEO, such as optimizing your website and profiles on various pay-to-play sites. SEO may sometimes require voice over when an explainer video is being produced, but that’s kind of broad (most companies use voice actors for explainer videos).
Historical Industry Hate
While some would say the more talented actors and marketers live in these spaces, voice actors and SEOs almost never get the recognition they deserve. At least until recently (more on that later).
The entertainment world has historically thought of voice actors as “lesser than” and not as important as their on-screen counterparts. Part of that is due to not understanding what the job entails, part of it is from the “I want it to die” crowd, and part of it is some weird superiority complex.
Unlike on-camera actors, who are chosen based on their appearance before their talent, voice actors are largely unseen. We’re hired for a role based on our unique voice print, and what we can do with it.
Most people don’t know what the average voice actor looks like and couldn’t pick a six-figure talent out of a lineup.
Although we don’t make nearly as much money as the on-camera half of the business, we still get to make money, sleep in our beds at home every night, and live normal lives without paparazzi shoving cameras and phones in our faces every 30 seconds.
We also don’t have to rely on agents to help us get most of our income. That’s awesome, and frankly, sounds like a better trade.
Lots of people and businesses, however, do not and have not ever liked the idea of SEO. Companies that work with SEO agencies have historically been skeptical of the work we do and many don’t think it works.
While there are charlatans in SEO (more on that later), if an SEO is doing all the right things for your business, they’ll get you results. However, spam is spam, and it gives SEO a bad rap.
SEOs won’t find a ton of help or love across other departments minus developers and UX folk, who have a much better understanding of what they do. They usually work in tandem and speak or understand the jargon.
Unfortunately, SEO is a section of marketing that doesn’t get enough investment despite being one of the best areas your company should invest in. The hate has always come from skepticism, and some people who want it to die.
That being said, recent times have created more awareness and affection for voice over and SEO, which is baffling, nice to see, and sometimes problematic.
The Sudden Sexiness
SEO and VO awareness are changing the way many look at these industries. Conventions, pay to plays, and acting coaches have seen rises in voice actors attending, learning, signing up, and appearing for panels and autographs. Search marketing has also seen more investment from businesses as they increase SEO adoption.
The weird thing about these areas getting their flowers is that they slowly started receiving them within the past decade. We can thank the internet and the nerds that explore it with good intentions for that.
We appreciate the recognition. That said, these things don’t come without their issues. For example, more people are getting into both voice over and SEO than ever. This is good, but it also means there are a ton of “former haters” barging onto the bandwagon.
On-camera actors have seen their side of the industry get railed by the following:
Strikes
AI
Production company consolidation, relocation, and divestment
These factors have been leading to many of them looking at voice over, the red-headed stepchild of the acting world, and elbowing their way in. While it’s true that some actors have always done both, career voice actors, for the most part, are not switching to on-camera acting.
Marketing and salespeople who once loathed SEO are seeing everything tumble into AI (according to them), despite search engines still having an overwhelming stronghold over Search. They’re seeing all the kitschy SEO terms and AI chatter and feel left out, and don’t know how it works. The SEOs are several steps ahead of them and finally look like the content and data gods they always were.
Skepticism is tripling down due to FOMO, and everyone is suddenly an armchair expert on AI technology.
This is still new tech. It’s constantly evolving. No one holds all the answers. SEOs are just better equipped for this because they have always been resilient and adaptive.
It’s unclear if the SEO haters are jumping ship, but the SEO chatter is growing, and that’s a beautiful thing.
That being said, the SEO chatter and steady influx of new voice actors are also leading to a rise in snake oil and their charismatic salespeople/gurus/self-proclaimed experts that pollute both industries.
The AI Explosion
This one is not fun, and can be said for many industries, but AI has its tentacles in voice over and SEO.
Every uncanny valley YouTube ad for a product you know is garbage? Very likely that off-putting voice over you heard is AI.
Every generic looking website and em-dash ridden article, post, meta description, etc.? You can bet your bottom dollar it’s AI. It sucks, but this is the world we’re in.
That being said, the SEOs and VOs using AI as tools are having very productive experiences.
Humanization, proper prompting techniques, the ability to build smart custom GPTs and smart workflow automations lead to better, stronger results. When you use AI for speed, you get slop. When you use it with purpose, good things happen.
Since I’m one of the few people in the world who does both for a living, I use AI for the following:
Content briefs
Brainstorming
Help creating landing pages
Email outreach and drafting
FAQs
Keyword research
Understanding user behavior and intent
I also have an AI voice clone to help me understand the landscape, plus I was morbidly curious about how good the tech was (ask me how I scare friends and family).
There has also been a quick boom-bust for AI in terms of praise and backlash. The AI gold rush cycle was so fast that we’re now seeing fatigue and cracks in the tech that’s leading to the “AI bubble” theory and reversal of tech use.
Companies who replaced customer support teams with AI, such as Klarna, have had to re-hire the people they axed because the AI sucked and cost them money. So much for the IQ/personality test they once (and might still) require as part of their hiring practices.
AI first? Finish last.
Ad agencies I’ve spoken to that were once gung-ho about AI voice overs have either stopped using it or save the option for cheap clients.
It turns out that AI voice overs do not perform as well as a human voice and sometimes cost more than a human voice over would have due to unnecessary takes and editing.
This happens because:
The AI usually can’t nail it in one take
Inflections are off
Basic words are mispronounced
The AI voice over sounds hollow
AI can’t emote, and if it can, it can’t do it well enough. The tech is getting better, but it’s not there yet, and the juice isn’t always worth the squeeze.
The average person is also noticing the limitations of AI and how it’s not as revolutionary as the tech bros and so-called "geniuses" in the C-suite and investor class are making them out to be.
Like iPhones, every update is a new feature no one asked for followed by a slight improvement on something everyone forgot about. In the process of making said updates a bunch of basic functions that used to work are now broken. These updates feel rushed, barely tested, and make the product worse.
People are also so used to being forced to use AI for their work and /or using it for their everyday tasks that they can spot AI slop in a second. Despite the rush for adoption by the C-suite and tech “gurus,” employees are using it less. I’ve also seen Linkedin posts from executives saying they miss typos because you can tell it was written by a human.
Nostalgia. For a typo.
A Constant Need to Adapt
This can be said for any industry, but if you want to grow, succeed, and continue to do both, you must keep up with the current trends. You can’t rely on your laurels and old practices. This will eventually catch up with you and you will fade out of the industry.
Voice actors need to keep up with what commercials sound like: meaning the delivery, tone, types of voices being used (yes, that matters, too), and products being sold. Every five-ish years a new demo is needed to keep up with said trends. That means new coaching is also needed for said demo.
They also need to take a look at best email marketing practices as those evolve, too, plus learn various other sales and marketing techniques to help stay relevant.
SEOs need to adapt by:
Monitoring algorithm changes,
Updating sites and pages according to said changes,
Spotting user behavior shifts
Identifying new content types and structure, schema markup,
Learning new tech
Implementing said tech into their workflow
A ton of other things that will be talked about at conferences and in various SEO groups
Nuanced Training is Required to Succeed in Both Worlds
Voice over and SEO are specialized fields. Anyone can learn these skills, but not everyone can do them well.
Search Engine Optimization requires:
A deep understanding of the internet
Critical thinking
A willingness to experiment
A dash of psychology to decipher user behavior
An eye for design
The ability to analyze data and pivot in real-time
Voice over is a combination of:
Acting
Reading comprehension
Active listening
Psychology
A touch of sound design
A hint of musicality
Nuanced training is necessary to succeed in both worlds. Voice actors can get training through coaching, acting classes, peer workout groups, conferences, and free stuff on the internet such as helpful articles, podcasts, and webinars.
SEOs will train through their work, which means tons of trial and error. They’ll need to learn content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace, as well as some basic programming languages like HTML and CSS (the brave and the bold will tackle JSON, Python, and Javascript).
There are also free SEO resources available (podcasts, articles, and webinars), and certifications you can obtain to help pad your knowledge (Hubspot and Google to name a few). There are also plenty of conferences you can attend, but nothing works better than experience.
Charlatans
Since the dawn of time, the new and clueless have always stumbled into someone ready, willing, and able to take advantage of them. Voice over and SEO are no different.
In both industries, there are loads of bad samaritans and Razzy-worthy actors that have a knack for convincing people with dreams and good intentions to part with their money on the promise of guaranteed results. The only product they deliver is despair.
For the SEO snake oilers, you’ll see these hacks offering the following:
Backlinking services loaded with tons of spammy links
Keyword stuffing
Poorly structured (and sometimes poorly coded) everything,
A boatload of other grab bag “solutions” guaranteed to kill your site and brand reputation in the next Google Core Update.
In the AI segment of SEO, you’ll find loads of so-called “services,” (let’s call them “plastic shovels”) pledging AI visibility, citations, and business from AI. Some will promise content that will help you rank, but the content is all written by AI, not fact-checked or humanized in the slightest.
Even the company sites for these “problem solvers” are made using AI, all of which is their “proprietary AI tool” (aka. the custom GPT someone made in less than an hour).
There’s even a few SEO influencers and YouTubers slinging the sludge. They have no idea what they’re talking about. They either don’t or barely keep up with current industry trends, but they figured out how to win on those platforms and spread their misinformation. That’s dangerous.
In voice over, it’s simpler but similar. They claim to be coaches. For the most part, these folks haven’t done anything in years, but they act like they have and still do. They also don’t keep up with trends.
For the “coaches” who do work, they do a lot of bottom-of-the-barrel gigs where direction is not needed. You wing it and the client uses whatever they give you. At best, you make beer money (but hey, exposure!).
Some of these coaches haven’t been in the game that long, but they put the coaching shingle out there because they feel that they can teach the noobs something about nothing. At best they teach career killing, wheel spinning, and burnout 101.
Worst practices for voice over include:
Signing up for every pay-to-play website.
Being super active on every social media site.
Joining and being active on every freelancer site.
Bad and/or spammy marketing practices.
Claiming that direct/email marketing “doesn’t work” and is “bothering someone” (weird, because that’s what makes me money).
Assuring new talent that they don’t need professional voice over demos and that they can make them at home.
Teaching very outdated industry trends.
Telling new talent that they don’t need coaching.
Offering courses for all of the above and more that are loaded with misinformation
Convincing new voice actors that they should charge less than seasoned pros. Some even have “beginner,” “medium” and “expert” level pay suggestions. These are not based on any industry standard rates such as GVAA, Gravy for the Brain, or SAG-AFTRA. The price is whatever seemed right in their head at the time (this one pisses us off the most).
Pro tip: The agencies hiring voice actors don’t know or care how long you’ve been in the game. They just want to know you can do the job. They will pay you what you quote.
And yes, there are loads of sludgeslingers on YouTube and the socials for VO, too. The amount of misinformation is nauseating. What’s sadder is the rabid cult followings they receive. It’s very difficult to convince these talents that they’ve been duped. I’ve seen legit voice over coaches with decades of experience get into heated arguments with new talent while trying to convince them to leave the dark side. It hurts to watch.
Another angle of voice over charlatans are the demo mills. These places promise new talent that they’ll be “demo ready” in a few lessons (sometimes THAT DAY). They take their money and record them reading the same copy they’re going to give other hopeful voice actors instead of original material.
In exchange, the demo mills give the aspiring voice actors an awful, sloppy, and unusable voice over demo that will never get them work.
The worst part about all this is there are legit SEOs and voice over coaches who teach all the right things, have excellent and helpful courses, and know what they’re talking about. Unfortunately, predators will always exist, waiting for the noobs, the uninformed, and the misinformed to show up.
Heavy Talent Churn
This can also be said of other industries, but voice over and SEO see a very high churn rate. Most SEOs stick around between 2-5 years, while the average voice actor barely makes it to one.
There are lots of people who think they can do these things, but once they understand just how much goes into them, they leave as quickly as they entered. That sucks.
Churn is a necessary evil of all industries, but VO and SEO have some of the quicker revolving doors. If you stick with them and are both adaptable and patient, you’ll go far. It just takes time, patience, and understanding.
Failure to adapt, burnout, bad practices, the need for overnight success, and impatience will kill any career — especially these two.
Kind Communities
Many industries, such as sales, finance, and on-camera/theater acting, are cutthroat. There are nice people in said industries, but they’re few and far between.
Voice over and SEO, however, are full of generous, helpful people. They help foster and mentor new talent, and can lift them up when they’re unsure of themselves. Many at the top are easily approachable and offer incredible advice to steer folks in the right direction.
Chances are it’s because both are niche industries that are more collaborative than competitive. The similarities may also contribute to stronger, tighter-knit communities. Plus we’re all nerds!
You can find plenty of online and local communities depending on your location. Ideas are often shared, challenged, and expanded upon. Both are cool places to be.
Conclusion
While on the surface, Voice over and Search Engine Optimization are very different things, there’s a wacky overlap between the two. These uncanny similarities might be a case for common ground in niche fields, and might be found when comparing voice over to other specialized fields.
That said, I’m not a botanist, so I can’t give you those similarities, but here’s a quick recap of what VO and SEO have in common.
Despite constant predictions of their demise from skeptics, both industries consistently prove their resilience by adapting to every new technological shift.
Public perception oversimplifies both roles, failing to realize that "reading into a mic" and "using keywords" actually require deep expertise in marketing, psychology, and technical execution.
Voice actors and SEOs have traditionally been treated as "lesser" counterparts to on-camera talent and traditional marketers, often working behind the scenes without proper recognition.
Both fields have recently seen a massive influx of interest and investment as outsiders realize the stability and importance of these specialized niches in a digital-first world.
While AI generates "slop" at the bottom of both markets, true professionals in both fields are thriving by using the technology as a sophisticated tool to enhance their human-led workflows.
Success in both industries requires being a perpetual student who can pivot alongside rapidly changing trends, from shifting search algorithms to evolving vocal delivery styles.
Both fields demand a highly specialized mix of technical proficiency and creative intuition that can only be truly mastered through hands-on experience and trial-and-error.
Because they are complex careers, both industries are plagued by "gurus" who sell misinformation and low-quality shortcuts to uninformed beginners.
Both paths see a revolving door of newcomers who leave quickly once they discover that the actual workload is far more demanding than the "easy money" myths suggested.
While competitive niches, both SEO and VO are defined by supportive, collaborative communities of "nerds" who are eager to share knowledge and help others grow.
Despite being radically different industries, voice over and SEO have striking parallels.
Both are resilient, misunderstood disciplines sitting at the intersection of data and human connection.
While they face threats from AI slop and predatory "gurus," the pros who treat these crafts as lifelong studies rather than get-rich-quick schemes are the ones who thrive.
By embracing the constant need to adapt and leaning into their supportive, niche communities, VOs and SEOs who can weather the high talent churn prove that these industries are continuing to evolve into more essential components of the modern landscape.
