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With over 70,000 active searches per second on the most popular online searching, Google, and other online search engines, the importance of developing a strong SEO strategy for musicians cannot be over-emphasized, for whatever kind of business or career it is that you are building.
But mind you, one key thing you need to understand when planning your music SEO strategy is that SEO for everyone is not the same as SEO for musicians.
A slightly different and unique approach is needed when planning SEO strategy for musicians which requires a basic understanding of your fan’s online journey. I’ll tell you why in a bit.
General SEO Explained
Billions of people keep using search engines daily as a result of the vast amount of free, easily accessible worldwide information. These days, there is nothing that the internet does not know.
Remember, people are constantly searching, looking for the kind of products and services businesses have to offer. Showing up in related search results would go a long way to increase brand awareness and turning new visitors into regular customers.
The work comes in the fact that there are thousands of people offering similar or same types of products and services. This makes it quite difficult for one to be singled out of the thousand others, with a very high number of competitors, the chances of them showing up in a search result when a related product is searched for is quite low.
This is where search engine optimization comes in.
SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website by ensuring that your site appears in a higher (upper) position on the list returned by a search engine.
This is all based on the human behavioral tendency to click on the results that at the top of the list. Let’s face it, once they see what they are looking for at the top, they don’t bother scrolling all the way down.
Think back to the times you have searched on the internet and test it yourself.
Understanding how search engine algorithms work and utilizing it to make your website easier to find by these search engines is key. This includes using relevant keyword phrases of course, after doing extensive keyword research, paying attention to your tags and alt descriptions, making your site very easy to navigate, posting well-structured and organized contents, making your site user and mobile friendly, paying attention to your internal linking structures and back-links, making sure your site loads fast by optimizing the images you use and so on.
SEO for musicians helps to promote the musician’s songs through Search Engine Optimization. This aids the musician’s music marketing by creating another channel within the musician’s planned music strategy.
SEO For Music Marketing:
SEO is a very important marketing strategy and musicians should take advantage of this during their website building process.
With a fully optimized website, selling music and merchandize may generate extra money as well as turning potential fans into advocates of your music.
It is very important to get the right information about you, in front of the right people who are searching for you, at the exact time they are searching for you.
Things A Musician’s Website Should Have:
To create the perfect SEO strategy for musicians, there are required things your music website should have. These things are required to create a better user experience whenever traffic is driven to your website and users use your website. Here’s an article on how to drive traffic to your website. The following are the required things your music website must have:
- A music player for streaming original songs.
- Video player
- A web store
- Email list
- Links to social media profile
- Press releases and press photos
- A music calendar and tour dates.
Understanding Your Fans:
SEO for musicians starts with the fans. When building your fan base, bear in mind that your online audience will go through series of stages to reach a goal they have in mind.
SEO for musicians is about creating a very positive experience for your audience at every stage of their journey to reach you.
For your SEO strategy, you need to understand firstly, your fan’s online journey and the stages in this journey that a SEO strategy will be of importance and relevant to you. And that means knowing search engines actually get involved.
SEO Strategy for musicians- The Fan Journey
Your fan’s online journey to finding you is relatively grouped into 5 stages:
- Discovery
- Exploration
- Purchase
- Retention
- Advocacy
Discovery/Awareness Stage:
This is the awareness stage, the stage where a fan first comes across you or your music. For most businesses, this is where SEO begins, but for you as an artist, it is of no relevance to you here.
This is because search engines barely play a role in creating awareness about you.
Think about it, no one discovers a new artist by going on Google to search ‘New artist…’ So at this stage, you see that it is of no importance to you. It is most likely that your audience will first come across your music some other way. Probably on a friend’s come, on a music channel, or through any other means.
Exploration Stage:
To create a successful SEO strategy for musicians, you need to learn while exploring. This will aid you to create a sustainable SEO plan.
Say a potential fan first discovers your song on a friend’s mobile music player loves what he hears and wants to know more. It is most likely he would first check the name of the artist or probably hold on to some of the lyrics that got stuck in his head.
He would want to know you more, who you are, what you look like and then, he’d search for you and your lyrics on the internet.
This is where SEO begins for you as an artist. This is your chance to show them all you’ve got. Give them a pro selection of content for them to check out.
- Show them your website so they can learn more about you.
- Your social profiles and interviews so they can learn more about you.
- Your music stream so they can listen to your sound
- Videos and images so they’d get to know what you look like
- Press releases and tour dates so they can see that you are active and know when you are playing in their town.
- Reviews so they can see what others are saying about you.
Purchase:
This stage is important for any artist who wants to build a sustainable career. You need to make money to keep moving. Search engines are relevant for you at this stage. A key thing is making it very fast and easy for fans to spend money on you and your music.
Things Your Fans Would Want To Find During Purchase:
- Tour date information and concert ticket.
- Somewhere to buy your music for download.
- A store to buy physical music formats and merchandize.
- Your profile on major streaming services to easily listen to your music.
Use search engines to help your fans find different ways to spend money on you without having to do any digging around.
SEO strategy for musicians can also aid you in achieving your sales goals and get your fans to purchase things you require them to.
Retention:
In the music industry today, there are thousands of music artists releasing thousands of songs and contents regularly. This makes it difficult for fans to have a long attention span. Having attention on you is not guaranteed.
Search engines can’t help you much here. Most of your retention is going to happen somewhere else like social media, mail lists, spotify, not here.
As long as your fans can still find you when they search for you, that is all search engine can do for you at this stage of the fan journey. So it won’t be a focus for your SEO strategy for musicians.
Advocacy:
At this stage, you have already won the hearts of your fans. They have become loyal fans, loyal to you. They follow you and you have created some sort of relationship with them.
They do a lot of advertising for you by sharing you and your music to people around them. Like sharing your new release on their WhatsApp status, or using your new song in a short video clip for an Instagram story.
They help you create awareness without even knowing it. They are you ideal, devoted fans.
At this stage, search engines won’t be of much use to you, because your fans at this stage do not need to search for you, they already know exactly where to find you.
Takeaway:
SEO strategy for musicians is as important as other methods of music promotion online.
Planning a successful SEO strategy for your music website requires and in-depth understanding of your fans and their online journey trying to reach you.
Be sure to take advantage when they search for you to show them all you’ve got, at the exact time they are looking for you.
