How to Optimize Your Fiverr Gig for Maximum Success
Introduction
My friend just made $800 this week as a complete beginner on Fiverr. Just last week, he had made zero. The only difference is I showed him how to optimize his gig SEO. Now, those orders are still in place. He’s still going to have to complete them to earn that money, but that’s $800 worth of client work obtained on Fiverr as a complete beginner in his skill. I’m going to take those same lessons that I gave to my friend Taimur and give them to you so that you can apply them to your own gigs, regardless of how far along you are in your Fiverr journey. I usually charge $200 an hour for this type of consulting, but this will be completely free, not holding anything back.
The Importance of SEO and Search Rank
The biggest reason you aren’t achieving success on Fiverr is your SEO and search rank position. Fiverr publishes data on search rank and sales, and we can see that the number one ranking gig for any search term in general gets about 30% of the sales for users searching for this. This is followed by around 15% for number two, 11% for number three, 8% for number four, all the way down to amazingly 2.5% for the 10th ranking result. And you can completely forget it if you are ranking on the top page. This is why ranking your gig is so important. By going from the 10th rank gig to the number one gig in a search term, you can 10x your sales coming in for your keyword.
Six Steps to Optimize Your Fiverr Gig
Step 1: Niche Down
I know what you’re thinking: there are hundreds of gigs out there, and many search terms are going to be incredibly saturated with sellers. But by niching down, understanding and utilizing SEO, and boom name’s Connor, and I’ve made over six figures selling on Fiverr and taught others to make way more. My goal is to put out free content like this to help others achieve their dreams of working for themselves and achieving time and location freedom.
SEO Tips
SEO can be very complicated, so I’ve done my best to make this easy to understand and follow, even for a complete beginner, and yet still be very powerful and how it can affect your gig. To do so, I’ve broken it down into six easy steps to follow, and at the end, I’ll disclose the complete formula that Fiverr uses to rank your gig.
I’m talking about this one first because it’s going to affect every single other step of Fiverr SEO. There are a ton of other sellers on Fiverr, and if you’re going to enter a general market like logo design or video editing, you’re going to be competing with thousands of other sellers offering the same thing, some of whom have been selling for over 10 years. It’s much better to narrow down your pool by niching down.
logo design
What type of logo design do you do? Modern logos, logos for restaurants, logos for products or brands. Think about what you specialize in and what you like to do, and just know you could always broaden up in the future.
On the video editing side of things, what type of videos do you edit? Wedding videos, TikTok videos, Twitch live stream cuts. By being specific first off, you’re helping your listing rank better for those specific search terms by having them in your listing title, description, in images as we’ll get to in just a minute.
And in search terms that are much easier to compete in than the general ones like logo design and video editing specifically, but you’re also going to be signaling to potential clients that your services are specifically tailored towards them. If you’re a buyer looking for someone to edit your wedding video, and you see someone offering video editing services and another person offering wedding video editing services, which one are you likely to click on?
If you cater to too big, you’ll end up like this for every person searching for your gig. That’s why narrowing down can be so effective. Disqualifying buyers could also be helpful for this too. By saying, “I don’t work with TikTok videos, dance videos, etc.,” the buyer that doesn’t fall into that boat will feel even more like your work is tailored towards them.
Step 2: Title Optimization
This brings us to number two, which is title optimization. A big thing here is to create a short, simple title without repetitive terms. Remember, repetition does not affect a gig’s visibility. If you are a video editor, and you include “video editor” one time or three times in the title, it does not make a difference to the SEO.
Use search terms once either in your gig title or tags to maximize the limited space. Then, a big thing here is to create a consistent brand, and what I mean by this is a username with a phrase or word related to your area of expertise to reinforce your gig services to potential buyers, along with a profile image that also reinforces this.
It’s much better to only offer one type of service per account so you can seem like a unified, specialized expertise brand rather than a collection of unrelated services. Your title is also the first opportunity to put your niching down into action, where you can put “restaurant logos” or “wedding video edits” in the title. One of the four big factors that Fiverr will rank your gig on is relevance to the search, and the title is the first and most important spot to put that into action.
And that’s impossible with a generally worded gig, and that’s what you need to niche down so you can be relevant to specific searches.
Step 3: Gig Image and Listing Optimization
The next opportunity to increase relevancy brings us to number three, which is gig image and listing optimization. Your listing is your digital storefront, and if it looks bad, no one will click.
We’ve got our title down, but now we need to get a good gig image. And if you’re a beginner with design, Canva is a great place to start, and they actually have a ton of templates for Fiverr listing specifically. The big thing here is to compare your listing versus others in the field and get others’ opinions on it to make sure it stands out and looks professional.
Also, if you are listing a personality or video-based gig service, it’s super important to use a video as this will affect your gig. If you’re a designer or artist, you don’t need to worry, and a great gig image will do the trick. But if you are in music, voiceovers, video, or consulting-based services, a video will rank better and get you more traction with the audience.
The game
The game of Fiverr is all about connecting with your clients on a personal level, and videos provide a great way of doing that, as does your description. Definitely use your description to describe what you’ll do, all the elements involved, and include all the relevant keywords for your niche, subcategory, and any qualification or disqualifications. But also try to insert something personal, and this means definitely including any qualifications you have, such as your school or training, or a reward.
But also something personal, something you like doing, a hobby, something that will make you seem more like a person rather than a computer screen. And then finally, you’ll need keywords. Use keywords from your niche. You can even use SEMrush to see the best keywords and what search volume each one is getting.
And also for your whole gig, check and see what others are doing in the space. What keywords are they using? What are they including in their description? And take inspiration. Don’t flat-out copy. Use this as a jumping-off point and go from there.
Step 4: Reviews
This moves us on to number four, which is reviews. Reviews are the most important metric when it comes to ranking your gig, but they’re also the hardest to get, especially when you’re starting from the beginning. But I figured out the best method to getting your reviews from the beginning.
When you’re starting out in Fiverr with zero reviews, getting your first order is so hard because you’re competing against all the other Fiverr gigs that have zero reviews. It’s hard to differentiate between them. That’s why I recommend tapping into your audience outside of Fiverr to see if anyone needs the service you are offering. This could be a following. This could be friends.
Getting orders to come in after your first review will be infinitely easier, and you’ll be able to find clients just from ranking on Fiverr. The biggest thing from here is, as you get more reviews, you will rank higher.
So make sure first off to go over the top on your first few deliveries and then two, always make the ask for the review. A lot of buyers just simply won’t think to do so, and all it takes is an ask after you’ve done a great job, and they’ll do it. But hand in hand in the ranking system with reviews is order calculation, the number of total orders, specifically the number of orders in the last 90 days.
Step 5: Continuing to Get Orders and the Progression Strategy
This brings us on to number five, which is continuing to get orders and what I call the progression strategy. When you’re starting from the beginning, you aren’t going to have a ton of reviews. That’s why I recommend competing on value.
Started by offering the most value I possibly could for $5. I was more worried about getting some orders in and getting some good reviews for them. I was completely viewing this as an investment period.
Furthermore, I call my strategy the progression strategy by starting with the most valuable possible for the lowest rate. As the reviews come in, I can slowly bring my prices higher and higher until I’m finally offering the price that I want to.
Step 6: The Full Fiverr Ranking Formula
So this now brings us to the full equation for ranking on Fiverr. What Fiverr takes into account for their SEO, but before we get to the formula, there’s one other thing that’s going to help you, and that’s the new arrival boost. When you first list your gig on Fiverr, Fiverr is going to add a little new arrival tag to this, and it will be a little boost in the search results and throughout the Fiverr pages, and this will help you out a lot.
So it’s important to take advantage of this when you are a new arrival in Fiverr. Put everything we talked about to use from the beginning because it’s going to be much easier to jump into success while you’re a new arrival than if you wait until you lose that boost and try to do it after the fact. So again, this is only a very small thing, but it’s much better to put everything to use from the jump when you have this new arrival bonus rather than waiting for it to fade before you start taking action now.
Formula
Taking a look at this formula, the first thing is going to be your review average, that is your average star rating in reviews on the five-star scale. Now, this is then combined with the number of orders, specifically the number of orders you received in the last 90 days. The third consideration here is your relevancy to the user search, and then finally, the fourth one, which we haven’t talked about yet, is the level status.
Fiverr has a series of levels that are available to Fiverr sellers to reach when they hit certain metrics from selling on Fiverr. Each level comes with new perks, but one of the perks is, by each level, Fiverr will give you a boost on the search. These levels include level one, level two, until finally, top seller. Now, ranking and search is a big benefit of leveling up.
Bonus: Promoted Gigs
One of the benefits brings us on to number six, and that is the shortcut: promoted gigs. Somewhat recently, Fiverr revealed a new tool called promoted gigs, which allows you to pay to advertise your gig on Fiverr. Now, it’s only available to leveled sellers, but by using it, you’re able to set a daily budget and skip above all the other gigs and show up much higher.
Now, there aren’t too many controls with it, and yes, it will cost you money, but I found it well worth it to run with a $5 or so budget for a day. Fiverr will show you how many impressions your gig has made through the ad, as well as how many sales and conversions it has started, so you can keep in mind and know whether your investment is worth it. Keep in mind, promoted gigs are only available to leveled sellers, so you’ll have to work towards those requirements to hit the metric and get running.