As a musician, you can benefit from using schema on your website to get certain information, like your music and events, to display nicely when people search for you in Google.
Schema is a kind of structured data markup in your website code that’s added to specific types of information on a web page, such as event listings. It’s hidden in the code where people won’t see it, but search engines will.
Google uses this structured data for their Knowledge Graph and to “enable certain special search results features and enhancements.” When you add this schema on your band website, you can help these special features and enhancements to appear in your band’s Google SERPs. Adding structured data doesn’t guarantee it will show up in search engines, but it does help enable it.
In other words, what schema can do is help you get a more complete band Knowledge Panel - with concert listings, discography and social profiles - and those nice tour event carousels, album carousels, rich cards for songs, and so on.
We’ll simplify schema for band websites in this post, and show you how to use it without much effort or technical know-how.
Before you get much further in this post, we suggest you check out Chapter 1 of this multi-post guide to get familiar with your SEO strategy and the Fan Journey and all of the other topics we’ve already covered. You may want to follow those steps first, including optimizing your band website for SEO and taking the initial steps for getting a Knowledge Panel.
Then you’ll be ready to get started with optimizing your band website schema.
Where to add your band schema
Your official band website is the most important place for you to have schema, plain and simple. If you use Bandzoogle, we generate most of the schema you need automatically so that you don’t have to think about it.
You can also use other platforms - like Bandcamp or Bandsintown - to generate schema for you in addition to your band website. Many of those platforms automatically add schema to their pages without you having to worry about it.
If you do use other platforms, make sure that Google knows that any profile pages you have - such as your Bandsintown page - officially belong to you. You can help this by linking to them from your band website and including them in your SameAs schema, which is explained below.
You should also ensure that any information about you that exists on multiple platforms - such as show listings on your website and also on Bandsintown - is identical across all platforms.
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MusicGroup Schema Markup
Adding MusicGroup schema to your website helps to tell Google what kind of entity - or thing - you are. A band - not a car manufacturer, a politician, or a town. The MusicGroup schema also applies to solo artists.
Let’s take a look at what this kind of schema markup might look like on a band website, using Bandzoogle member Wolfmother as an example:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context" : "http://schema.org",
"@type" : "MusicGroup",
"name" : "Wolfmother",
"url" : "https://wolfmother.com/",
"image" : "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Deichbrand2018-Wolfmother-39.jpg",
"sameAs" : [
"https://www.facebook.com/wolfmother",
"https://twitter.com/wolfmother",
"https://www.instagram.com/officialwolfmother",
"https://www.youtube.com/wolfmother"
]
}
</script>
This schema helps search engines understand that this website is for a music group called Wolfmother. It specifies what their official website URL is, and where to find an image of the band.
You can add this schema to the head tag of your website and customize it with your band information. It should either appear on your website homepage, or across all pages sitewide.
Once you’ve added the schema to your website, you can check that it works using the Schema Markup Validator tool. When you enter your website into the tool you should see something like this:
If the MusicGroup schema appears without errors, then you’ve successfully added this schema to your site, and you can move on.
The SameAs Schema Markup
You’ll notice that the schema in the example above also lists the band’s official social profiles using the SameAs markup. Adding this schema can help you get those social profile icons into your Knowledge Panel, and may also help enable other SERP features.
In addition to the social media profiles listed in the example above, you can also include any other important social profiles you want Google to know about. This means the URLs for your band’s Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, or Wikidata entry if you have them.
If you use Bandzoogle for your website, we generate this markup for you in some cases so that you don’t need to fuss with coding. You can also manually add custom schema to your head tag if you wish.
MusicAlbum Schema Markup
Now that you’ve given Google some basic information about your band, you can go a step further and add schema markup to the music on your website. We use MusicAlbum schema for that.
Here’s what the MusicAlbum schema looks like on an album page on Wolfmother’s Bandzoogle website, when viewed using the Schema Markup Validator tool:
This is what Google sees on your website when your music is marked up with schema.
As you can see, there is all sorts of structured information about this album and the tracks on it, including the album name, cover art image, song duration, and so on.
This markup is hard to add to your website on your own, unless you’re a developer. Instead, we suggest you use a platform that generates it for you. Bandzoogle will automatically include this schema on your website when you add your music using the built-in music features.
Most major music platforms like Bandcamp, Spotify and Soundcloud also add this kind of schema to music on their pages. So this schema will mostly take care of itself when you simply distribute your music.
But make sure the MusicAlbum schema is on your website as well. Google considers your official band website to be the most authoritative source of information about your music, so that’s the most important place for it.
The MusicAlbum schema will help Google display information in search results pages, for example like this.
How schema data ends up looking in the Knowledge Panel.
It can show up in other places as well.
So you can now add your music to your band website using a website platform that supports this schema, such as Bandzoogle.
If you already have a website, but you’re not on a platform that supports this schema, there may be music player widgets that can generate it for you.
And if you haven’t already, you can distribute your music to other major music platforms that use this schema too, like Bandcamp, Soundcloud or Spotify. Make sure the information you’re adding to the various platforms is consistent everywhere.
Event Schema Markup
You can add schema to event listings on your website to help get your tour date info to appear in Google SERPs.
Here’s what this schema looks like on a Bandzoogle website for the band Stiff Little Fingers, when viewed using the Schema Markup Validator tool:
An example of what Event schema looks like.
As you can see, there is structured information for the event date, venue name, the URL to purchase tickets, and more. This information will help enable various kinds of interactive features in Google search results for your events.
This markup is also hard to add to your website on your own, so we suggest you use a platform that generates it for you. Bandzoogle will automatically include this schema when you add events to your website using the built-in events feature.
Platforms like Bandsintown and Songkick also generate Event schema on their pages automatically. Although it’s best to have Event schema on your official website, it is beneficial when the same schema is found on other platforms as well. Just be sure that when you add your events to other platforms, in addition to your website, that the information is consistent everywhere, for each event.
So what you can do next is use a website provider that adds this schema automatically to your band website, add a tour calendar and include as much information about each show as you can.
And if you want to, add your tour dates to other platforms as well. That’s all you need to do to make this schema work for you.
The Takeaway: Add Schema to Your Website
Adding schema to your band website provides search engines with structured data that they can use to make your search engine results pages more appealing and useful for fans, which has value to you as a musician or band. And even though it’s a little technical, these simple shortcuts noted above should help make it easier.
Make sure you have followed the previous steps in this multi-part SEO series for musicians, because there are other things you need to cover first. But once you’ve done that and added schema to your website, you should start seeing improvements to your music SEO.
Let’s recap what you can do next:
- Add the MusicGroup and SameAs schema to the head section of your band website code.
- Add MusicAlbum schema to the music on your band website, or use Bandzoogle to generate it automatically.
- Add Event schema to the tour dates on your band website, or use Bandzoogle to generate it automatically.
- Add your music and events to other platforms if you like, making sure all your information is consistent across all platforms.
We hope you got plenty of useful, actionable SEO advice from this blog post series. Creating an SEO strategy for your band website can take some time, effort and plenty of follow through.
Once you’ve mapped out your Fan Journey and keywords, discovered your SERPs and optimized your website for SEO, you’ll be well on your way to tackling band schema. It will help to create an informative band knowledge panel in Google, and boost your position in the search results.
Read other articles in this series:
- Part 1 - SEO for Musicians: It Starts With The Fan Journey
- Part 2 - SEO Keyword Research for Musicians
- Part 3 - Music SEO: Know Your SERPs
- Part 4 - Optimizing Your Band Website for SEO
- Part 5 - How to Get a Band Knowledge Panel
- Part 6 - How to Optimize Your Band Schema for SEO
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