There are many reasons why, as a musician, a band, or an orchestra, you may want to drive more traffic to your website. If you’re simply an artist wanting to direct fans to your own curated online portal, so you can relay and display exactly want you want to and in the way you see fit, that’s a reason itself. If you’re a musician looking for a band or looking to collaborate then you may have a website demonstrating your talents on a specific instrument (or instruments, for you overachieving clever clogs types) and perhaps relevant past experience, that you want people to be able to find easily through search.
Similarly, if you’re a session musician looking for studio or tour work, your site may function as a place to host your musical CV, demos and live performances, and you want it to be as discoverable as possible.
So how does one do this? There are ‘pay per click’ and other paid advertising options available, but what we’re looking at here is the ‘organic’ (free!) alternative: search engine optimisation. Or SEO. Though quite self-explanatory, let’s explain it anyway. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the quantity (and quality i.e. relevance) of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.
SEO can be a trifle intimidating for beginners, due to information overload and the knowledge that Google et al are forever meddling – sorry, making constant, carefully considered updates – to the search engine algorithms. This won’t matter that much for many of you, as all you’ll really need to be concerned with is making it easy for search engines to identify that your website is the official one for your band; so you’ll just need to make sure the domain, the content and the imagery reflect this!
But for others; for the musicians who are looking more to be found for their skills and credentials than their name, or bands and orchestras who are looking to be associated with types of events (wedding, parties, Trump rallies etc), styles or locations, SEO is key.
With this in mind, we have put together what we deem to be the most important and most effective SEO tips for beginners that will help you crack the code of SEO.
Content is kind! Whether it’s images, tour / studio diaries, song lyrics or poetry, creating content that people want to check out (and hopefully share) will drive traffic to your site. If you’re a composer or songwriter, posting content about your credentials, processes and workflow, alongside your actual work, will increase the likelihood of people finding your website (and you). If you’re brass band who specialise in playing 90’s rave anthems, then your content needs to scream this (or at least say it loudly and clearly). If you’re a session guitarist looking for work, or a cellist looking for an opening in an orchestra in specific area, make sure your content reflects this. If you just have videos and your name rather than accompanying text content describing your music, past experience and future objectives, Google won’t be able to match your website pages with the queries that you and your cello are the answer to!
Among the top SEO tips for beginners, the best way to master SEO is by learning from your competitors (or contemporaries; a nicer way of looking at them). There are lots of free and cheap tools available to help identify which keywords they’re ranking for, which websites are linking to them, and what opportunities you’re missing out on.
Based on these insights, you can come up with a strategy that matches (or is better than) your competitors. So if you’re a party band looking for work in Manchester, simply find out which bands are ranking highest for queries like ‘party band Manchester’, ‘wedding band Manchester’ etc. and see what they’re doing to achieve this. Some stuff will be obvious; the content they have on their website pages and how it’s formatted, the keywords they use in the all-important title tags and perhaps how fast their site loads. For other things, like which and how many third-party sites link to them (along with keywords, the links that point to a site are a huge ranking factor determining positions in search results), you’ll need to use specialist software to carry out a deep audit. From this you might discover a strategy you can implement or at least specific places where you might also get a link, such as directories and music forums, blogs or fanzines).
This won’t always be a necessity, but looking for which keywords people search for within your niche and in what numbers may well help boost traffic to your site, by informing which keywords you include in your content. For instance, if you know that 100 people a month search for ‘punk bands Manchester’ but you live in nearby Stockport, and ‘punk bands Stockport’ only gets 10 searches a month, you might want to optimise your site for the former. If you’re a piano tutor, a session musician, a vocalist, a percussion player – it doesn’t matter what your musical vocation, knowing what keywords people search can help you get more traffic to your site and get more work. There are lots of keyword research tools available, many of which are free or have free trials with, so consider whether keyword research should be part of your SEO strategy.
Whether it’s just your band or artist name or additional keywords related to your work, there are certain elements, certain places, where these words should be included in order for you to maximise your chances of ranking well and getting traffic. This includes elements like page title, meta description, URL, and header tags. Rather than going into all of these here, we’re going to direct you to this handy guide from search engine experts MOZ. If you’re a band and simply want your official website to appear Top of the Pops in the search results, on-page optimisation, along with having your band name in your domain, is your best bet.
Fixing any technical issues on your site that could be affecting your SEO efforts is key. Such issues might include broken links (where a link goes nowhere or to an error page, either because the link address has a typo or the page has been removed), indexing issues (i.e. your site is not being indexed by Google for some reason) and mobile usability issues. Make sure you use Google’s (free!) tool Search Console to get information from the Big G themselves (Google, not God) about any technical issues on your site, especially if it’s just launched. The tool sends you email alerts so you can quickly identify any indexing issues, 404 errors (where a page cannot be found), server errors, and security issues on your site. This means you’ll hopefully be able to fix them before they begin to affect user experience and rankings.
User experience is a crucial element in SEO because ‘dwell time’ (the length of time a person spends looking at a page after they’ve clicked a link in search results before clicking back to the results) significantly influences your search engine ranking. The better your site user experience is, the longer your dwell time will be! Besides this, a bad user experience increases the ‘bounce rate’ (a bounce is when people leave a site having only viewed one page), which negatively affects your site performance. That’s why enhancing user experience and making your site content as interesting, relevant, fun and full of interesting features as possible not only leaves your visitors satisfied, but also helps lead to more visitors in the first place! So make sure your site looks great, contains all the stuff you would expect to find on it as a visitor, with an intuitive structure and easy navigation. Clearly segment your pages, so you don’t have tour dates, merchandise, song lyrics, gig photos and your 5,000 word manifesto for world peace on the same page. Make life easy for search engines and people, and you’ll provide a great user experience whilst maximising traffic.
We hope these tips have helped shed a little light on the murky world of SEO and you can apply at least some of them to your band or musician website. Don’t forget, there are plenty of resources and free SEO audit tools online to help you sharpen your optimisation ninja skills further.
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