Are enough people finding your website?

 
If you're a professional magician looking to book more shows, you already know a good website matters.

It shows a client you can solve her problem. It gets her excited about working with you.

 
But a website nobody visits is a business card sitting in a drawer.
Something has to send people there. SEO — Search Engine Optimization — is my favorite method. It's kept me on Page One of Google for years, and I haven't spent a dime on marketing for shows in a very long time.

 
Before I tell you what I do, though, I have to deal with something.

Because you probably don't. And honestly? You shouldn't.

 
Here's what happens to every working magician with a website.

 
An email lands in your inbox: "I was reviewing your site and noticed several critical errors." Then a phone call from someone promising Page One in thirty days. Then a guy at a convention tells you he paid a company $500 a month for a year and got a spreadsheet and nothing else.

 
So SEO gets filed under "scam," right next to the fellow selling the Facebook ads course.

 
I don't blame you a bit. Those people are selling smoke.

 
But notice why they can sell it to you. Nobody has ever explained what SEO actually is. The mystery is what makes the con possible — you can't spot a bad job when you don't know what a good one looks like.

 
So let me take the mystery out of it. Ninety seconds, no jargon.

You've walked a dealer's room. You know the table by the door does four times the business of the table in the back corner by the restrooms. Same dealer. Same product. Same prices. The only difference is who walks past.

 
Google is a dealer's room where about ten tables fit on the front page. Everybody else is out in the hallway.

 
So how does Google decide who gets the table by the door?

 
It asks a great many questions about your site. Nearly all of them roll up into three.

 
1. Do the words on this site match what the person searched for?

 
Someone types "magician for kids birthday party Cleveland." Does your site actually say those things — in the page title, in the headline, in the copy? Or does it say "Award-Winning Entertainment for All Occasions"?

 
2. Can Google read this site, and does it look well kept?

 
Google sends a program to crawl every page you have. If pages are broken, duplicated, hidden, or mislabeled, it either can't read them or it decides the place is neglected. You never see any of this. It happens under the hood.

 
3. Does anybody else on the internet point to it?

 
When another website links to yours, Google counts it as a vote. A site with real votes outranks a site with none. This is the part the smoke-sellers abuse — they sell you counterfeit votes, and Google penalizes you for having them.

 
That's SEO. The words, the plumbing, and the votes. That's the whole thing.

Almost every magician who has paid for SEO paid for one of those three. Usually the first one. Somebody stuffed keywords into his copy, sent an invoice, and moved on.

 
But a site with great words, broken plumbing, and zero votes doesn't rank. Neither does a site with spotless plumbing and vague copy.

 
You need all three working together. That isn't an upsell. It's just how the machine works.

 
Which brings me to what I do.

I do all three. On your site. For you.

 
Other than answering some questions up front, you don't research anything, write anything, or touch anything.

Here's what each part means in practice.

I learn your business, your territory, and the markets you actually want — birthdays, schools, corporate, libraries, whatever pays you best.

 
Then I research what buyers in your area are really typing into Google. It is rarely what magicians assume. (Almost nobody searches for "illusionist.")

 
Then I write your pages — copy that ranks and sells. Ranking for a search that doesn't convert is a hobby, not a business.

 
Everything is written for you alone. I don't recycle copy. I don't even use something I wrote for another magician as a starting point.

 You get 100% original pages, built from the ground up, for you.

 
You also get:

 
• Your "online ads" — the title and the description Google displays for each of your pages in the search results. Most magicians let their website builder generate these automatically, which is roughly like letting a stranger write your ad copy.

 
• My recommendations for making the site work harder, both for Google and for the human being reading it.

 
• Free consulting on placement, so the new copy fits your existing design instead of fighting it.

This is the part nobody has ever done for you. It's also the part quietly holding most magician sites down.

 
I reviewed a magician's website this summer. Forty-four live pages. Nineteen of them had no link pointing to them from anywhere on the site — Google had found them and counted them, but no visitor could reach them. Two of his most valuable pages existed twice, at two different addresses, competing against each other for the same search. And the description Google displayed under one page read, word for word, like a note he'd typed to himself years ago and forgotten.

 
His selling copy was good. Genuinely good. It didn't matter, because the plumbing was leaking.

 
So now I go through a site the way an inspector goes through a house. Broken links. Duplicate pages. Orphaned pages. Missing or wrong page titles. Images with no labels. Sitemap problems. Pages Google is indexing that it shouldn't be, and pages it's ignoring that it should.

 
On my own site, that pass turned up 23 broken links — fourteen of them dead ends — plus four pages leaking into the search results that had no business being there.

 
You will never see this work. You'll see it in your rankings.

Remember the third question — does anyone else point to your site?

 
There are two ways to get links. You can buy them, which works beautifully right up until Google notices, and then your site is worse off than before you started. Or you can put something on the internet that's worth linking to.

I do the second one.

I produce short animated whiteboard videos — the kind where a hand draws the story while a voice explains it — about the things your buyers already care about. Sixty seconds. Your show, your branding, your market. They go up on your YouTube channel with your website link in the first two lines of the description, where it actually counts.

That's a genuine link, from one of the largest websites on earth, attached to something a human being might really watch.

No link farms. No buying. Nothing Google can penalize you for, because there's nothing to hide.

I already produce five of these a month for one client across his three sites. Your engagement includes a starter batch of your own. If you want to keep them coming every month after that, we can talk — but nothing about the SEO work depends on it.

Fair question. Three answers.

 
I studied this properly. Google guards its algorithm, so I learned from the people who spent careers working it out — and I keep learning, because SEO changes constantly. I'm an SEO-Certified Copywriter through Heather Lloyd-Martin, one of the original pioneers of the field, going back to the last century.

I've done it with my own money on the line. I put SEO into my own site, watched Google change the rules over and over, tested, measured, and adjusted every time. The result: Page One for years, and people from all over the country contacting me to ask whether I'll travel to their town.

I know your buyers, because they're my buyers. Twenty-plus years as a full-time professional magician — birthdays, schools, corporate banquets, trade shows, libraries. I know what a PTA president types into Google, because I've spent two decades getting hired by her.

An SEO company knows search engines. I know search engines and I know the person booking your school assembly, the parent booking your birthday part show, or the HR director looking for holiday party entertainment.

I don’t expect you to take me at my word. I’m not famous. I’m not on TV. I’ve never been on Fool Us or AGT. And I’ve never won any awards in magic competitions. The ‘acid test’ comes from the folks who have trusted me to deliver the goods.

Here are comments from a few of my clients:

“After 4 months of having Cris Johnson use his marketing expertise to boost my business after COVID, I made so much money I could afford to buy a copy of the Daredevil #1 comic book.”

"Cris has recently worked on copy for a complete website, email campaigns, and autoresponder copy for my new venture. He did an amazing job with the complete project. Cris is also a wizard with SEO and has helped me, in a very short time, reach number one on google search."

"Cris is an excellent copywriter with a vast knowledge of digital marketing. He’s smart, conscientious, punctual, and thorough. He’s a great communicator and an all-around nice guy. I'm getting very regular inquiries, Cris -- THANKS!"

I won't promise you Page One in thirty days, because anybody who does is lying to you.

Here's the honest version.

SEO is slow. Google has to re-crawl your site, decide the changes are real, and then decide whether to trust you more than the sites already sitting where you want to be. That takes months, not weeks.

And the first thing you notice usually isn't a ranking. It's an inquiry from somebody who found you a way they never could have before.

If you need results faster than that, run Google Ads. I do that too, and I'll tell you straight if it's the better fit for your situation.

But if you want the thing that keeps working after you stop paying for it — the thing that has quietly fed my family for twenty years — this is it.

Getting my site to rank on Page One of Google search results has been worth at least $1.5 million dollars. Effective SEO has allowed me to buy two homes, three new cars, and provide for my family over the years. I honestly don’t know where my life would be if I had not mastered this skill.

Recently, one of my clients happily shared me a screenshot of his total earnings since investing in my services a little over a year ago: $202,165.00.

By his own admission, his business was in a crater after COVID. He was contemplating retirement. Now, he’s as busy as he ever was.


Knowing what this work is worth, I could charge what the big SEO firms charge. I'm not going to. I've been where you are.

But I'm not going to put a price on this page, and I want to tell you why.

Magicians' websites are all over the map.

I've worked on sites with four pages and sites with forty. Sites built beautifully last year, and sites built on a platform that stopped being updated in 2014. Guys working one county, and guys working six states. Birthday performers, school assembly presenters, corporate close-up workers, library acts — all with completely different buyers typing completely different things into Google.

Those jobs are not the same job, and they can't honestly carry the same price.

So if I posted a number — or even a range — one of two things would happen. Either I'd be charging you for work your site doesn't need, or I'd be quoting a job I can't actually do for that money. Neither one is a good way to start.

Here's what I do instead. We talk first, and I go through your site with you. Then you get one number for the whole engagement — words, plumbing, and videos together — and you decide.

Depending on your market, most magicians earn it back in a handful of birthday shows, a couple of school shows, or one good corporate gig.

Can you see the possibilities?

I have some bad news.

 
I'm one person. I can only take a limited number of magicians at a time — and after the SEO work, most of my clients stay on for other services, which fills the calendar further.

I also still perform 100 to 200 shows a year. (Let's be honest: would you take marketing advice from someone who quit performing?)

That means fewer openings than there used to be.

If you want one of them, fill out the contact form now, while you're thinking about it. If you don't, it may be months before I can find room for you.

Every month you wait is a month your site isn't climbing. That means fewer prospects, fewer shows, and less money in your account.

Effective SEO gave my magic business the one thing most magicians never get: stability. A calendar that fills whether or not I feel like hustling that week.

I can help you build the same thing. But you have to take the first step.

--Cris

P.S. You don't have to understand SEO to profit from it. 

You just have to stop letting the smoke-sellers convince you it isn't real. Three things decide whether Google puts you at the table by the door: the words, the plumbing, and the votes. 

I do all three, on your site, for you.