You’re a musician, not a marketing professional, and it feels kind of frustrating that you are expected to be, right? The good news is that you don’t have to be a professional in the business of getting visitors to the website that accompanies your music, because with some quick and easy tips, included here, you can find out all you need to know about this magic technique everyone keeps talking about, called SEO.
What is SEO? It stands for search engine optimization, and it’s a simple concept. You know when you type something into a search engine, for example Google? Well, SEO is the concept which decides where you appear in the SERP, or the search engine results page. And of course, you want to be up the top, rather than buried down in page 57 where you know no one will ever find you.
These are called organic search results, because these are sites that appear naturally depending on SEO, rather than having been paid for as ads, which you will also see at the top of the page. SEO doesn’t cost anything, and when done properly, it will get you towards the top of the list where you want to be. So, what do you need to do?
Set up analytics for your website
First thing’s first, you will need to set up an analytical tool, such as Google Analytics, which will measure your SEO quality, and also give you information about your traffic – that is, the users who visit your site. With this kind of data, you can further enhance your SEO, and really get an idea about who is visiting your site, and this helps you market accordingly in the future. Now you can start optimizing from an SEO perspective. Here’s what you need.
Great content
The number one ranking factor on search engines is the quality, and relevance, of your content. There used to be a tactic called keyword stuffing, where websites would cheat and just keep repeating the keywords, in poor quality content, and this would be enough to attract the attention of the search engine bots that crawl the web looking for relevant pages. Not anymore. That old tactic would actually work against you now. Instead, you need plenty of top-quality, relevant content in regards to what people might search for.
“If someone is looking for your genre of music, for example, not only should you produce content on your site that relates to that genre, but build content around that, such as a blog dedicated to the genre, or articles about other artists who perform that style. This massively assists in terms of SEO,” says Daisy Muelenstein, a music blogger at DraftBeyond and ResearchPapersUK.
Mobile-friendly
These days, more people run web searches on mobile devices than they do on traditional desktops. The result is that the search engines place greater priority on quality of mobile sites.
“Your standard website, if not built with a mobile device in mind, won’t look great or be particularly responsive when accessed via a mobile device. Everything from the way the content and images are laid out to the size and style of your fonts and the way your site is navigated all affect the suitability to mobile devices. And in short, poor performance here will seriously damage your SEO ranking,” warns Mohamed Mehmet, a web designer at Writinity and LastMinuteWriting.
Backlinks
This is another magic word that you may have heard about, but again you’re not quite sure how it relates to what you can do with your website. Simply, backlinks are links to your website that are featured on other sites. So, basically, the more backlinks that you can generate, and here’s the thing, the more backlinks you can get on quality, and relevant websites, the better it will be for your SERP positioning. Getting your website URL out there on music blogs and on well-regarded music sites and so on will have a hugely positive effect on where you appear in these rankings.
In summary
When it comes to SEO, you really don’t need to be a pro. Just following these tips will make a massive difference in terms of your website’s performance. And it will leave you free to do what you do best: make music.
Professional writer, marketing expert and tech enthusiast Ashley Halsey can be found contributing her insights and expertise at LuckyAssignments and GumEssays.