Take your online presence to the next level with search engine optimization (SEO). This straightforward guide will teach you everything you need to do to get started.
by Wes Walls from Bandzoogle
If you’ve recently made a music website, you can take your online presence a step further by optimizing your band’s ranking in search engines.
This is called SEO (search engine optimization) for musicians, and it makes it easier for your fans to find the information about you that they want.
Whether you want to discover the best SEO keywords for musicians, or just want to have your songs, social profiles, and events show up in Google searches, this checklist will help you get started.
SEO checklist for musicians
▢ Create a keywords list
Brainstorm, research, and make a list of the keywords you want to rank well for. The list may be short – just your band name with some variations.
▢ Build a band website
Make sure you choose an SEO-friendly platform to host your website.
▢ Add lots of content
Add all relevant content to your website that you have available, organized on separate pages, such as:
- Your artist bio
- Your music with song lyrics
- Your videos and images
- Your gig calendar
- Your merch for sale
▢ Set up a custom domain name for your website
Make sure you’ve got a custom band website domain name.
▢ Secure your website with HTTPS
A website with a secure domain will rank better in Google search results.
▢ Optimize your website content for search engines:
- Add a custom title tag and meta description for each page of your site
- Make sure every page has some text content
- Organize h1/h2/h3 header tags on each page
- Add alt text to images where possible
▢ Give each page of your site a nice descriptive URL
This will help tell Google what each unique page on your website is about.
▢ Add content pages to your website for any target keywords you want to rank for
For example, make a Store page on your website if you want to rank for store-related keywords.
▢ Link to your website from all of your social profiles and platforms:
- Instagram bio
- Facebook page
- YouTube video descriptions
- Twitter profile
- TikTok bio
- Bandsintown artist page
- Bandcamp artist page
▢ Add links on your website pointing to all of your social profiles
And link to any other important platforms where you have an active presence.
▢ Try to get other third-party websites to link to your band website wherever possible
This could be press articles about you, or venues where you’re playing.
▢ Add your website domain to Google Search Console
▢ Submit your website XML sitemap to your Google Search Console
▢ Distribute your music as widely as possible using professional best practices
▢ Publish tour dates on established concert listing websites in addition to your own website
Use consistent information across all platforms.
▢ Create a Wikipedia entry for your band if possible
▢ Create a Wikidata.org entry for your band
▢ Create a MusicBrainz entry for your band
▢ Create videos for each of your songs and upload them to YouTube
Include complete descriptions for each video.
▢ Advanced option: Integrate or optimize the schema markup on your website
This markup is automatically included in your website code if you built a Bandzoogle website and use the relevant features.
- MusicGroup schema
- SameAs schema
- MusicAlbum schema
- MusicEvent schema
▢ Set up Google Analytics to measure visits to your website
Monitor traffic from search engines regularly.
If this checklist feels overwhelming, tackle what you think is achievable for you. With music website SEO, even just starting somewhere is a good first step. And if you’ve built a website with us, you’re already ahead of the game.
If you’d like to take your SEO further, check out our 5-part series breaking things down step by step. You’ll start here: SEO for musicians: it starts with the fan journey
We hope this checklist helps you start improving your music website’s SEO!
