This is an excerpt from the free eBook “A Complete Guide to SEO for Musicians” written by Wes Walls of Bandzoogle. Download the eBook free.
When we talk to musicians about music marketing, search engine optimization is a topic that comes up often.
And why not? It’s free, it’s known as a highly effective marketing channel for millions of businesses, and it works.
The downside is that it’s complex, time-consuming, slow to see results, and it’s known as a bit of a dark art.
SEO is not particularly easy to do well, and as a musician you just don’t have time to become an SEO rockstar. You have songs to write, tours to plan, rehearsals to organize.
A lot of the SEO advice out there for musicians skims the surface: optimize your title tags, get backlinks, create content, and such. This is all relevant and useful advice, but we need to address the critical strategic aspect that makes SEO for musicians a little bit different than SEO for everyone else.
So the big question, which is: “How can SEO actually help me as a musician?”
This is a question you need to have the answer to, in practical terms, before you start investing your time in your SEO. Just because certain SEO strategies work for millions of businesses, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll work for musicians.
Musicians need a unique SEO strategy with its own unique set of tactics. In this article we’ll define a strategic framework to start from.
The Fan Journey
It all starts with your fans.
For artists, SEO is all about using search engines to help create a positive experience for your fans.
As you build your fan base, your audience will move through some series of steps to eventually reach whatever goal they had in mind. Throughout those steps, they will have experiences online as they engage with your music.
Some of those experiences will involve search engines. So, what we need to do first is understand where search engines get involved.
To help us visualize let’s adapt a classic marketing framework, the customer journey, and apply it to the average music fan, as it relates to a typical band. We’ll call it the Fan Journey.
We made a fun colourful graph for you (yay!).
So, now… “At what point do search engines come into play?”
OK, let’s break it down by phase.
Discovery
In marketing, this step is usually called “Awareness” and it’s where SEO does its magic for most businesses.
Here’s an example: say you want to build a website for your band, so you go to Google and type in “band websites”. There, you’ll find Bandzoogle. Now you’re aware of our company. And that’s very important to us.
But, what if you’re a band that plays original music? How are search engines going to help you here?
Well, they’re not.
Nobody discovers new bands by searching on Google. Nobody types in “new band i’m going to love” and expects to actually find a new band they’re going to love. Nobody searches “indie band in toledo” to find new local music in Toledo.
For bands, the Discovery phase of the Fan Journey is probably the hardest – just getting your music in front of people who want to listen. Search engines are not likely to help you directly with this.
Exploration
Exploration happens after a fan discovers you, likes what they hear, and wants to hear more.
This is where search engines start to really matter for most bands.
Ask yourself: “What will most people do after they hear my song, and they really love it, but they don’t know my band yet?”
They’ll probably want to know what you look like, where you come from, what other people think of you, what your other music sounds like, where you’re playing next, etc.
One of the first things they might do is Google your band name… Or maybe the song name…. Or maybe some lyrics that got stuck in their head….
So this is where SEO first comes into play for you, in a big way. It’s your opportunity to show your new fans everything you’ve got. You want to make sure that when they search for your music, you’ve got a really pro selection of content for them to check out.
Your audience, at this stage of the Fan Journey, are really potential fans who want to get to know you. Help them out by making sure they can easily find things like:
- Your website, so they can learn about you
- Your social profiles, so they can see what kind of things you say
- Music to stream, so they can sample your sound and decide whether they like it
- Videos and images, so they can get a feel for what you look like
- Interviews and reviews, so they can get a sense for who you are and what others say about you
- Tour dates, so they can see that you’re active and whether you’re playing in their town
You want potential fans to be able to easily find all of that wonderful stuff you’ve poured your heart, soul and bank account into.
So the Exploration phase of the Fan Journey is where search engines can really help you the most, and it’s where strategically you should spend most of your SEO efforts.
Purchase
The Purchase phase of the Fan Journey is – no surprise – hugely important for any artist who wants to build a sustainable career. Like any business or entrepreneur, you have a bottom line. You need to make money to keep going.
Search engines can help you here.
The key is making it quick and easy for fans to spend their money on you, when they’re ready. As it happens, search engines are really useful when people want to find things online quickly and easily.
So pave the way for them. Heck, sprinkle a little trail of skittles if that’s what it takes!
Of course, this is about more than just search engines. You have to sprinkle skittles all over the place, like on your website and other profile pages. But sprinkle some on the search engines too.
So you want to make sure your fans can easily find:
- Tour date information and concert tickets
- Somewhere to buy your music online
- A store to buy physical music formats and merch
- Your profile on major streaming services to easily sync your music
For the Purchase phase of the Fan Journey, you can use search engines to help your fans find different ways to spend money on you, without having to do any digging around.
Retention
In today’s music industry attention spans are short, fans are fickle, and thousands of talented artists are constantly releasing great new music and content. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll keep the attention of your hard-won fans, even after they’ve downloaded your album or gone to your show.
Which makes fan Retention more important than ever.
As far as search engines go, though, there isn’t a lot that SEO can help you with here. Once your fan has gone to your concert and downloaded your album, most of your Retention is going to happen everywhere else but search engines.
Things like: signing fans up to your mailing list, or growing your audience on social media. Maybe fans follow you on Spotify. That sort of thing helps you with fan Retention.
As long as your fans can still find you when they do look for you, that’s all the search engines need to do at the Retention stage of the Fan Journey. So it won’t be a focus of your SEO strategy as a musician.
Advocacy
The Advocacy stage of the Fan Journey is where you’ve already won your fan over to the point where they become a super fan. He or she follows you, and you’ve created some sort of relationship with them. They feel invested in your success. They want to share your music with other people, to help build the movement. They’re the ideal, devoted fan.
Of course Advocacy is a very important Fan Journey stage for your band. But search engines probably won’t be especially useful to you here, because at this point your super fans don’t need Google to find you – they already know where you are.
The Takeaway: Get To Know Your Fan Journey
At this point you’re probably thinking “Great, this makes sense and all, but how do I actually start doing SEO?”
You should focus on the Engagement and Purchase steps of the Fan Journey. But look at the other steps too. Maybe there is something specific to your band where SEO can help with your Discovery, Retention or Advocacy strategies.
Hopefully you now have an understanding of where you need to start with your SEO.
Download “A Complete Guide to SEO for Musicians”
We did an immense amount of research and prepared a comprehensive (and free) SEO guide just for musicians.
It’s written in a way that’s easy to follow and actually use. There’s no fluff. Just pure, practical substance that you can sink your teeth into.
Here’s what you’ll find in the eBook:
- A strategic marketing framework to apply to your band
- Detailed technical advice with concrete examples
- Easy-to-follow, step-by-step advice and direction
- Illustrations and screenshots to help you absorb the ideas
- Specific to-do items and takeaways for your band
We hope you put this eBook to good use to improve your band’s presence in search engines!
Wes Walls is the Head of Growth Marketing at musician website & marketing platform Bandzoogle
This is a useful article because it implies the the element of Niche relevance. A lot of SEO work is the same from niche to niche (the fundamentals at least) but every niche is going to need to drill down on content and linking strategies that are pertinent to their own field. This has become increasingly more so with changes in the google algorithms in just the past 18 months alone. It makes sense as it all adds up to a better user experience at the end of the day, and that is what we want….. isn’t it?