Clients reach your profile several ways. Knowing which fields drive each one tells you where to spend your effort.
The routes
Search. Clients set a location and apply filters — occasion, genres, hourly rate, rating, experience, extras, profile tags, and switches for verified and Platinum DJs.
Guided Search. A five-step wizard: where the event is, the occasion, genres, extras, and budget. It produces the same filtered search.
AI Search. Clients describe what they want in a sentence — "an energetic DJ in New Jersey who plays Pop and Country and uses a fog machine" — and we match it against profiles.
Browsing pages. Occasion, genre, and extras landing pages that list DJs.
Your live events. Gigs you publish appear in Discover and on your profile, so someone browsing what's on locally can find you through a night you're playing rather than through a search.
Search engines and AI assistants. Your profile is indexed, so people find you outside DJfindr entirely.
Direct. Your DJ Link, your QR code, your widget, or a client returning.
The critical thing about filters
They exclude rather than rank. A client filtering for Wedding and Latin sees only DJs with both. If your profile is missing one, you don't appear lower — you don't appear.
So the fields below aren't about optimisation. They're about eligibility.
What decides whether you appear
Service areas. The biggest one. If a client's venue isn't inside a city or state you've added, you're not in that search at all. See Primary Location and Service Areas.
Occasions and genres. Same logic. See Choosing Your Occasions and Genres.
Hourly rate. Clients set a maximum. Above it, you're excluded.
Extras. A client filtering for a photobooth only sees DJs offering one.
Experience and rating. Both filterable.
Verified and Platinum. Both are exclusion switches.
What decides whether they message you
Once you appear, a different set of things matters — and analytics will tell you which stage is failing.
Lots of profile views and no requests means people are finding you and not being convinced. That's your mixes, bio, rate, and policies.
Few views means you're not appearing. That's the filter fields above.
See Profile Analytics.
Being found outside DJfindr
Your profile is indexed by search engines and readable by AI assistants. A complete profile with a real bio, filled-in genres and occasions, and actual mixes gives them something to work with. A sparse one doesn't.
Availability
Search doesn't filter by date. Clients find out you're busy when they send a request. So keeping your calendar accurate stops you fielding requests you can't take. See How Your Availability Affects Incoming Requests.