13 reasons why Bandzoogle has the best SEO for musicians

For artists wanting to optimize a music website for SEO, we can show you why Bandzoogle is your best option for a website platform. Bandzoogle websites are packed with built-in search engine optimization features for musicians. Let’s look at them and see why they’ll help your website rank better in Google search:

#1: Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

You’ve probably heard why optimizing title tags and meta descriptions is important for your SEO. They’re an easy way to let Google know what your website is about, in simple terms.

Bandzoogle websites automatically generate these tags for you. For example, let's look at the website of Bandzoogle member Stiff Little Fingers:

On the band’s homepage there are two meta tags (which only search engines and other bots read) in the page HTML:

<title>Stiff Little Fingers - Home Base</title>

<meta name="description" content="Official site including news, a history of the band, discography, articles, shopping, tour dates, and links. " />

Google reads those tags, and uses them to display the text that shows up in search engines, like this:

Google search result for the Stiff Little Fingers website.

Bandzoogle generates that meta tag text automatically from the page content by default.

Some bands prefer to customize their tags though, and you can easily customize tags for each page on your site, through ‘Page Options.’ Scroll to the ‘SEO Options’ there, and add a custom title and description, like in this screenshot:

No matter how familiar you are with SEO best practices for musicians, we automatically make sure you have at least basic tags on each page. More advanced users have the customization tools they need at their fingertips.

Build a band website that's SEO-friendly. Bandzoogle is easy to use and offers built-in tools to optimize your website for search engines. Sign up free with Bandzoogle now.

#2: XML Sitemaps

For Google to index your pages–and include them in search engine results–it has to find them. The easier Google can find your website pages, the better it is for your band website SEO. Sitemaps are important for helping Google (and other search engines) crawl and index all of the pages of your website.

When you build a website on Bandzoogle, we automatically generate an XML sitemap for you. If you're interested (and you have a Bandzoogle site), you can find your sitemap by going to www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.

We also make it easy for you to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.The steps are built into your ‘Site-wide Settings’ options under ‘Sitemaps.’ You can also follow the steps here: Google Verification and Sitemap submission

Once you submit your sitemap to Google’s Search Console, you never have to think about your sitemap again. Bandzoogle will keep it updated automatically.

#3: HTTPS Encryption

When your website is encrypted with HTTPS, the data from your website visitors is secure and safe. Every Bandzoogle website uses secure HTTPS automatically - it’s all managed by our developer team.

When your site is secure, you get that nice little “Secure” icon next to your domain name URL in the browser, like the website of Bandzoogle member Little Spiral:

All Bandzoogle websites are secure.

Why does that matter for SEO? Well, Google cares so much about secure browsing that they reward websites that use HTTPS encryption with better visibility in search engines. So if you don’t have it, you’re at a disadvantage.

So, simply put, HTTPS = better SEO. It’s all automatic with Bandzoogle, so you don’t have to work on it.

#4: Fast Page Loading

The amount of time it takes to completely load a web page is important for your SEO. Faster-loading websites are ranked better in search results than slow ones.

The speed and reliability of our member websites is an obsession for us. Bandzoogle websites are optimized for speed in many ways, including:

• Super-fast and reliable premium Amazon AWS servers to host Bandzoogle websites.
• Amazon Cloudfront CDN to deliver content quickly to your site visitors.
• Optimized caching, code minification, and gzip compression for faster page loading.
• When you upload large files to Bandzoogle, like images and video, they are automatically optimized to reduce the file size while maintaining visual quality.

But, of course, you don’t need to worry about the technical details. All you need to know is that, as a Bandzoogle member you have a team of pro web developers on your side using only the best systems and practices.

#5: Mobile Optimization

More people search on Google using a mobile device than on desktop, which means the browsing experience for mobile users is a huge priority for Google. So, if your website is optimized for mobile browsing, Google will give you better visibility in search engines.

All Bandzoogle website templates are automatically optimized for mobile devices, using responsive web design. This means your website will automatically look great on any screen size.

Using the band website template of Avro as an example, you can design your page layout to look like this:

And Bandzoogle will make it look great on a mobile device as well:

Bandzoogle automatically creates an optimized layout for mobile devices.

Whatever screen size your fans are using to browse your music website, it will look great. We take care of it, and it’s great for your website SEO

#6. URL Redirects

If you’re thinking about moving your website to Bandzoogle, you may be wondering how that could impact your SEO. To make sure your website continues to rank well in search, we have a built-in redirect tool. This can help you ensure that all important links you had set up previously will continue to work and keep their authority. 

Link structures are an important element of organic SEO, so be sure to use the redirect path option if needed once your domain name is set up here.

#7: Custom Domain Name

A nice-looking domain name – one that includes your band name – will help you look better in search engines. Plus, if someone Googles your band name, your website is more likely to rank if it has a custom domain.

To use a custom domain name for your band website, choose an available domain once you’re on a plan here, and it’s yours as long as you remain a paying Bandzoogle member.

Of course, if you already own your domain name you can use that instead.

#8: Automatic Schema.org Markup for Musicians

If there’s one thing that makes Bandzoogle the best website builder for music SEO, this is it!

Schema markup is a type of structured data that's hidden in your site code. It helps Google understand and index the information on your page, including your band info, your music (albums and tracks), your events, and more. That schema helps you get a professional-looking Knowledge Panel appearing when someone Googles your band.

Here’s an example of a Knowledge Panel in Google for Bandzoogle members The Tea Party:

Schema markup helps you look more professional in search engines.

To help our members achieve a good-looking panel, Bandzoogle automatically adds all of the relevant schema for musicians to your site code. You don’t have to think about it - it just happens! If you want to get into the technical details, we wrote a detailed post about optimizing your schema that you can see here: How to optimize your band schema for SEO

All you have to do is use built-in Bandzoogle features on your website, like the events calendar, music player and ‘My Sites’ features. We do the rest for you, under the hood.

#9: Image Alt Tags

It’s important for musicians to make sure professional band images show up in Google searches. For that to happen, you need to use "alt tags" in the HTMLcode for your images, so that Google can interpret what the image is.

Bandzoogle automatically generates alt tags for the images on your website, including your album covers, photo gallery images, any image you add using the built-in ‘Image’ feature, and more. All you need to do is add a description in the ‘Alt text’ option of an image, or a caption in a gallery image.

That will help you get more images showing up in your search results, like for Bandzoogle member Taylor Austin Dye:

Alt tags help your images show up in search results.

#10: Automatic Page Interlinking

It’s really important for your SEO that all your website pages link to each other. That way, Google can crawl each of the pages and understand what’s on your site.

When you add pages and other content to your website, Bandzoogle automatically adds the right interlinking in the right places.For example, all of your key pages get added to your main website navigation menu, like this menu on the website of Bandzoogle member Kellie Loder:

Bandzoogle automatically interlinks the key pages of your website.

It might sound simple–and it is–but it's one more thing Bandzoogle does under the hood for your SEO, so you don’t have to think about it.

#11: Easy to Add and Edit Text

Text content is the meat-and-potatoes of SEO; it’s not the most exciting type of content compared to music, videos, and images. But the reality is that Google can't understand those other types of content the way that it can understand text. So, good ol' fashioned text content is what gets your website ranking in search engines.

Bandzoogle makes it super easy to add text content and blog posts (or news) to your website, with just a few clicks. And it’s just as easy to manage and update your content with our simple visual editor–you can add links, keywords, and whatever else you like, without having to know any HTML code.

#12: Clean HTML Page Structure

There are a few basics you need to take care of when building a well-structured page for SEO, like header tags and page descriptions. Clean, well-structured HTML is important for ranking better in Google search results. It not only helps Google understand the content on the pages, but Google also prefers cleanly-coded websites.

Bandzoogle takes care of all the under-the-hood HTML for you, so that it’s clean, organized, and SEO-friendly. All you have to do is add great content to your pages, and we do the rest. That includes regularly updating the code used in our features, to be sure you get the most out of your website.

#13: No-index Option for Pages

While music website SEO is an important way to get your band ranking well in search results, sometimes you might want to hide a page from coming up. This can be useful if you’ve got an exclusive album or promotion on a particular page.

Bandzoogle offers the option to ‘Hide from search engines’ with every page. So, if you’re looking to have a page or two not turning up in search, you can toggle that option and we’ll adjust the code to make it happen.

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Our goal is to help all musicians understand music SEO, so that you can really benefit from it. When it comes to SEO, Bandzoogle is the best website platform for musicians.