SEO for musicians
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a hot topic for any business; appearing in the top 3 results for a particular search query can mean the difference between loads of clients and none.
But is it any use to bands and musicians?
Well, yes. For two reasons:
First, you need people who like your music to be able to find your website when they search for you (and quite possibly, you want it to appear ahead of any Facebook or Soundcloud pages.)
Second, you want people who might like the specific type of music you make to come across you when they search for that genre.
So, in this week’s article we’re going to take you through some of the basics of optimising your band website for search engines.
Site title
The first thing you need to look at is the title of your site.
The site title is the text you see at the top of your browser window; but it’s also the text that search engines consider as crucial in determining what your site is about (and will display first in search results).
It simply has to include your band name.
If you use generic page titles such as ‘Home’ or ‘News’ that contain no reference to the band name, then chances are that you are going to struggle to be seen in search results. So always, always put your band name in the title.
Now, this is not necessarily going to win you any new fans or visits from people who haven't heard from you. But it does mean that anyone who HAS heard of you will now be able to find you much more easily.
Meta description
Next, you need to move onto your meta description. Your meta description is text that is not visible on your site, but rather stored within the HTML code.
You need to ask your web designer (or yourself, if you’re the web designer in the band!) to edit the description so that it contains a couple of lines of text about you and your music.
The text you enter here is not indexed by search engines, but it is displayed in search results — and if it is relevant or appealing enough to the people searching for your music, it will be more likely to generate clickthroughs to your site.
The more clickthroughs you get, the more search engines will consider it a quality result, and accordingly will tend to display your site more often in search results.
You can view a more detailed overview of how meta descriptions are used by search engines here.
Headings and body copy
A lot of people who design music sites like to forgo text for big impressive visuals and video content.
Although strong visuals are indisputably important for bands, it's extremely important to include quality text-based content on your site too.
This is because search engines love words: they help them understand what a site is about, and give them something to index.
Within your site there are two main types of text that you need to worry about: headings and body copy.
Headings are important because search engines effectively treat them as 'tags' for categorising site content. So, wherever possible, ensure that they accurately describe what people might be searching for: instead of a heading of ‘Gigs’, try ‘Gigs by [Your Band Name]’.
There are various types of heading tags – H1, H2, H3 and so on. The H1 is the most important tag - it indicates what the page is chiefly about, and as such should only really be used once on the page. A H2 is a sub-header, and a H3 is a sub-sub header. You can go all the way down to H6s if you like...but focus most attention on H1s and H2s when structuring your page headings.
Clean URLs and internal links
Clean URLs
So that search engines can categorise your site properly, it's important to use 'clean' URLs which have a simple structure and are easily understood by search engines.
This means that instead of using a fairly impenetrable URLs like ‘www.myband.com/1252/content/sdjgasd.php’, you should create a URL such as ‘www.myband.com/online-store’.
(The dash is important, because search engines usually treat dashes as spaces.)
Using clean URLs which include keywords helps search engines index content more easily.
Internal links
When creating links within your site to other pages, avoid using vague phrases like ‘click here’ or 'read more' as your anchor text.
Instead, insert keywords into the link title, i.e., ‘Read about our gigs’. Again, Google picks up on the keywords and this helps your pages appear in relevant search results.
External links
A crucial part of how your site performs in search hasn’t got much to do with how you optimise it; it’s about how many other sites link to it.
Search engines count external links (or 'backlinks') to your sites as ‘votes’ – the more the merrier, therefore, when it comes to ensuring your site appears at the top of the results.
Accordingly, it’s really important to get links to your site on as many other sites as possible.
However – and to misquote Morrissey – like some girls’ mothers, some links are better than others. Sites that have a lot of external links pointing to them effectively cast a greater vote for any links from them.
For example, if your band is featured on The Guardian website (which has a lot of links pointing to it), Google will take note and is likely to bump you up its search results far more enthusiastically than if you are featured on a small-time blog.
Also, it's important not to create or buy spammy backlinks to your site; this can actually result in your site being penalised by search engines.
Casting the net wider
Most of the tips above are focussed on making your site appear in search results when people type your band’s name into a search engine.
If you want to cast the net wider, and use SEO as a way to attract new listeners, then you’re probably going to have to start referencing other artists (in a similar genre) within them on your site. This is because more people are likely to be searching for established artists than you.
So think about creating content about your influences, writing blog posts about your favourite artists’ best albums and so on.
But blogging is a very time-consuming activity, so it’s important not to just dive in straight into it. You need to do keyword research first: identify phrases that people are actually searching for (using keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush), and then craft content around topics that you know people are interested in.
Once you’ve done that, it’s a case of reaching out to other bloggers and site owners, asking them to link to your posts (as discussed above, having more external links helps your content climb up the search rankings).
Ultimately, search engine optimisation is a pretty simple process; it’s about choosing the right keywords, putting them in the right places, and ensuring your site is well linked to.
Good luck!
See also
You may find some of these other SEO resources helpful: