Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool used by marketers around the globe. Effective SEO can boost your ranking on Google and ensures that your target audience finds your business before they find competitors.
However, SEO is underutilized by many musicians who’d rather work on a new song than spend time addressing bounce rate or dwell time.
Even if you understand the importance of social media and YouTube Shorts, you may benefit from a more robust approach to digital marketing and SEO.
What Is SEO?
For the uninitiated, search engine optimization can be a daunting topic. However, content marketing specialist Andrew Dennis explains that SEO is really just “an umbrella term that represents a variety of practices, strategies, and techniques that can help a website appear higher up in the search results.”
SEO works by understanding the algorithms that search engines like Google and Bing use. These search engines use complex, machine-learning algorithms that can “learn” from data and forge connections between related information.
Search engine algorithms collect data by “crawling” websites and the underlying HTML code on each site. However, these crawlers will only learn about new pages if there are external links that lead them to the site. This means that effective link-building, in which you earn links to your site, is important for your overall SEO marketing strategy.
Search engines also use keywords to make connections between content and help users find the content they want. For example, if a user searches for “wedding DJs,” then the sites that appear will probably include keywords focused on “wedding DJs,” too.
Benefits of SEO
Effective SEO can help improve your ranking on search engines like Google and ensure that your target audience can find your site. SEO can also improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing, as the right users will be landing on your site. This can be a real boon for your digital presence and lead to more organic traffic, better local searches, and improved branding. As a result, you may see more people at your shows and more downloads of your songs.
Organic Traffic
Improved organic traffic is an SEO professional’s key metric for assessing the effectiveness of SEO strategies. As a musician, improved organic traffic can improve the success of your business by bringing human traffic with higher conversion rates and a genuine interest in your music.
Organic traffic can also improve your overall SEO ranking. Google ranks your site using organic traffic as a metric for relevancy and reputability. So, more organic traffic will lead to more users in the future, which could mean more listeners.
Local Searches
Improving your SEO can be particularly useful if you provide a musical based service in your town or city. For example, if you offer guitar lessons, effective SEO will ensure that folks in your area find your business when they need a teacher.
Local SEO also works on Google and Apple maps. So, when users search for guitar lessons or a local gigging artist, they’ll be more likely to find you due to your comprehensive SEO strategy.
Improves Your Branding
As a musician, you need a strong brand presence to stand out from competitors and land gigs, clients, or record deals. Addressing your SEO strategy can help you refine your branding and give you a clearer idea of how you compare to competitors.
For example, if you’re a local, SEO analysis can help you visualize your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. You may find that competitors outbid you on keywords like “event DJ,” whereas you may be able to outbid them on keywords like “wedding DJ.” This improves your personal brand awareness and helps you develop your niche.
How to Improve Your SEO
There are a few routes you can take to improve your SEO. Depending on your budget, you may choose strategies like link-building, website redesign, and content writing to boost your ranking on Google.
Start by improving your on-page SEO. You can boost your own on-page SEO by writing quality content and organizing your site in a way that makes sense to users. For example, if you’re an aspiring vocalist or budding electronic artist, write a musician bio that clearly states your style, previous experience, and accomplishments.
Once you’ve created some high-quality content, you can focus on off-page SEO. Off-page SEO helps search engines link your site to other, similar websites. Get started by sharing your high-quality content on social media sites and look for opportunities to write hosted content. You can pitch ideas to similar publications and capture a larger audience by writing about relevant issues in the music industry today.
Technical-SEO may be beyond your current interests and skillset. Technical SEO improves the architecture of your site and ensures that search engine algorithms can find and understand the HTML code on your website.
While learning code isn’t a great use of your time as a musician, you can still improve your technical SEO by finding and fixing broken links on your site and ensuring that your site navigation doesn’t lead users to content silos.
SEO is a powerful tool for musicians. An effective SEO strategy can boost your ranking on Google, help your target audience find your website, and strengthen your brand presence. You can turn your digital marketing to 11 by writing high-quality content, sharing links on social media, and getting in touch with an SEO professional who can help improve your technical SEO.
By Indiana Lee.