Optimizing SEO for music and entertainment websites can be tough or easy, depending on where you are in your music career. It takes a different level of effort and difficulty to promote a website owned by an upcoming artist than for a professional. The former requires more effort.
For us to be on the same page and avoid wasting your precious time reading this, I guess your intentions for reading this blog article are:
- to gain some clue on how you can increase the visibility and ranking of your music and entertainment websites on search engines, and
- As an artist, both upcoming and professional, how can you use SEO to promote your new songs and gain organic visitors using your personal website? or
- You are an SEO expert looking for more tips to support your current SEO efforts for music and entertainment websites.
If your intent falls into any of the above-mentioned categories, then this blog post is for you.
This post is not about releasing or promoting your music on streaming platforms, social media, getting a music press, or leveraging the music community or forum. It is also not about doing SEO for any of those platforms.
This blog post is about looking at fundamental steps that can make optimizing SEO for music and entertainment websites productive, or how to easily promote music for organic reach through artists’ personal websites.
Having a personal website as a musician
Owning a personal website as a music artist is still very important today. Many think using social media, forums, the music press, and streaming platforms is all they need for their music promotion, thereby seeing personal websites as an old-fashioned idea.
Having your own website as a musician comes with so many benefits. These benefits include: giving you a central place for your fans to reach all your online presence from; helping you connect with fans through building email listings and sharing exclusive content; selling music directly to fans; promoting upcoming shows and events; and selling customized merchandise such as t-shirts and CDs.
Irrespective of these benefits, having your own website as a musician is not enough. You have to optimize it for SEO so that it reaches new fans organically.
SEO challenges for music and entertainment websites
There are three challenges when it comes to optimizing SEO for music websites. Two of these challenges are inherent to the current era of internet content: content explosion and increased demand for search results personalization experiences.
Content explosions make music and entertainment website owners face the challenge of standing out in the vast sea of information and websites out there.Though this challenge is not peculiar to music and entertainment websites alone, it remains a big challenge for musicians, especially upcoming artists.
The increase in demand for personalized and relevant content by search engine users is the second challenge that makes getting SEO right for websites very difficult.
For search engines like Google, search results sometimes vary between people based on personalization. Therefore, Google search results are tailored for the user based on their previous search and online activity.
For example, if you search for walkout songs and then search for “how,” Google might predict you want to search for “how long is a walkout song” or “how long should a walkout song be?” Google suggests such predictions to give you the best results based on your previous searches or to help you continue where you left off in your search.
You may as well get music at the top of your search results based on your previous activities outside of Google search. For example, getting “ain’t no rest for the wicked” by Cage the Elephant at the top of your search results for walkout songs because you have engaged with an ad about the song or played it on Youtube music consistently
The third challenge is searcher behavior. User preferences for search results are changing so fast. This makes it more difficult for website owners to keep up. The growing demand for personalized, relevant, and instantaneous search results has also shaped search engine development and its feature innovations. That has diverted a great deal of website traffic.
Before Optimizing SEO for music and entertainment websites
Optimizing SEO for music and entertainment websites becomes baseless if you don’t understand how people search for music on search engines and how search engines evaluate their search intent.
Before doing SEO for music websites, you have to look at how people search for information related to music and what motivates their search terms.
Brainstorming how you yourself search for music-related information online will give you a clue into how other people do the same.
Examples of some terms people use to search for music and entertainment on the search engine include:
- Terms that suit their mood, activity, or occasion. For example, search terms like playlists or songs for relaxation, playlists for weddings or songs for walkouts
- Using music genres and narrowing them with some modifiers like location, date, or superlatives For example, the best hip-hop music in 2023 or new American rap songs
- Searching using common phrases in the music lyrics. For example, using “baby calm down” to search for the Rema song “Calm Down”
- People can also use an artist name or their band name to search for their songs.
Secondly, you have to understand how search engines evaluate user intent using a combination of factors like keywords, search history, content analysis, and user feedback.
For example, if you search for “walkout songs for women,” search engines will use the keywords to check if you have previously searched for songs by female artists like Rihanna, Taylor Swift, or Beyonce and will likely return results from such artists.
If you are searching from a specific location or country, search engines are also more likely to return artists’ songs from such countries.
Different search engines handle queries in different manners and have different snippet features that enable them in their search results presentation. For example, the image below shows Bing and Google displays of search results for a similar query.
Google Search Result
Bing Search Result
Search engines combine these factors to provide you with the most relevant and helpful search results possible.
SEO for music and entertainment websites
After identifying common terms searchers use to search for information about music and entertainment and factors search engines use to determine relevant search results, it is now time for you to incorporate them into your music and entertainment website.
You can start optimizing your music and entertainment websites for SEO by doing the following:
- Creating a user-friendly website structure with easy-to-access website structure and navigation This is done by ensuring that the website has relevant page categories, a lower click depth to reach a page, and is mobile responsive.
- Publishing high-quality and engaging diverse content formats, including blog posts, artist profiles, event listings, interviews, reviews, and multimedia content like music videos, photos, and live performances. Also, include the identified relevant terms used by searchers in your page name, categories, and content titles or bodies.
- Build backlinks to your website by making submissions to well-known music blogs, and encourage social shares for your websites.
- Monitor your SEO performance using the Google search console and Google Analytics to identify new queries your website is ranking for and keep optimizing to make things better.
One good thing about optimizing SEO for websites is that with consistency and adequate monitoring, you will start seeing traffic growth to your website. SEO agency Virimark LLC is always here to help support you in your SEO journey.