SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a powerful tool for musicians to use search engines to promote their music. Because this is such a robust topic, we created an e-book with an extensive amount of information on SEO - here’s the link to that document:

[Free eBook] A Complete Guide to SEO for Musicians - 2nd Edition

The e-book contains over 100 pages of detailed information including:

  • A strategic framework for marketing music
  • Detailed technical advice, with concrete examples
  • Easily followed step-by-step instructions
  • Illustrations and screenshots to clarify each step
  • Specific To-Do items and takeaways for your band or solo music career

This is a great resource to maximize your presence online. If you’re short on time, use this list as a starting point:

  1. Build a band website: Bandzoogle is the way to go. Made for musicians by musicians!
  2. Update your site frequently: Search engines like Google strongly favor sites with fresh content, so those end up higher in search results. Regularly adding blog posts, images, music, and events helps your site to stay current in search engine indexes.
  3. Submit your sitemap: Google Search Console is a free service from Google that helps you monitor the appearance of your website in Google Search results. Bandzoogle makes it easy to verify your site and submit your sitemap to Google Search Console:
    • From the ‘Edit Content’ tab, click ‘Pages’
    • Select ‘Site-wide settings’ from below the list of pages
    • Click the ‘Sitemaps’ tab
    • Follow the prompts to verify and submit your sitemap to Google for indexing
  4. Use relevant keywords on your site: Brainstorm and research target keywords for you as an artist, or for your band. Make a list of the most relevant ones. Don’t use generic keywords, or ones that have nothing to do with your music or genre. Use them within the content of your website. Keywords need to be incorporated throughout your site content - don’t hide blocks of keywords, as this is disfavoured by Google.
  5. Use relevant content: Add content pages to your website for your target keywords (for example: if you want to rank for store-related keywords, make sure there’s a Store page on your website).
  6. Establish your Google accounts: Creating a Google Brand Account prompts Google to recognize your site as a brand. This joins your brand with your site content.
  7. Validate yourself on the web: Google looks at all the information on a particular thing that it can't find anywhere on the internet, and if it sees the same consistent, organized information in a few places, it can be more confident that it's accurate and authoritative. This will help get you ranked higher in search results. Here are a few places to provide more information to Google:
    • Use video: Create videos for each of your songs and upload them to YouTube. Then add them to the 'Video' feature in your website account. Videos typically rank high in search engine results.
    • Add your music to Google Play: Add the same music from your website to Google Play.
    • Create a Wikipedia entry for your band: The free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
    • Create a Wikidata.org entry for your band: Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others.
    • Create a MusicBrainz entry for your band: An open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.
  8. Link sharing: Create links from all of your social profiles and other pages to your website, and vice versa. Also try to get venues, industry folks, bloggers and other bands to share your website link on their website. Include your website address when you participate in forums or add blog comments.
  9. Set up Google Analytics: Measure visits to your website from search engines.

Want to work at your music website SEO at your own pace? We've got a Complete SEO Checklist for Musicians you can check out.

How Bandzoogle helps with SEO

Having a music website is a great start but if it isn’t optimized for search engines it may not be that helpful. All Bandzoogle websites are automatically optimized to give you the best chance with search engines. Here are the things we take care of for our members:

  • We automatically generate an XML sitemap.
  • We generate title tags, alt tags and meta descriptions.

  • We automatically add all of the relevant schema to your site code.

    Note: Schema markup is a type of "structured data" that helps Google understand the information on your page, including your band info, music albums and tracks, events, and more.

  • We encrypt your site with HTTPS so the data from your website visitors is safe and secure.

  • All of our templates are responsive and optimized for mobile devices.
  • We provide the tools to easily verify and submit your music website to Google.
  • We provide one free domain name with all website plans (including free annual renewals).
  • Automatic page interlinking so everything on your site works together in a way Google can easily navigate.
  • We provide clean, well-structured HTML to make it easy for Google to crawl.
  • We use super-fast, reliable premium Amazon AWS servers to host Bandzoogle websites. Faster-loading websites are ranked better in search results than slow ones.

Note: With the tips and tools above you should have success with Google ranking and SEO. Ultimately though, we here at Bandzoogle have no control over where your site ends up in the search engine results; and Google uses a complex algorithm to determine your PageRank.