Industry news & advice blog

If you haven't yet read Part 1 of our SEO For Musicians blog then get up to speed!

"How do I do this on my website?"

Firstly, you need to find out what search terms are available for your given band or artist. We’ll use the local version of the DJ in Kent as an example to assist in the explanation of the strategy.
 

Google have a great tool which is used to find out the average number of searches per month that are made for any specific phrase. So for example, I typed in a few phrases off the top of my head that Kent DJs would most likely want to appear for and these showed up as follows:


 

As you can see in the image, the number of local monthly searches is the highest for the phrases 'mobile disco kent', 'wedding dj kent' and 'dj kent'. These 3 phrases cover basically every DJ in Kent and should be the types of phrases that Kent DJs should be targeting in order to get relevant traffic to their website that will be beneficial to them in terms of bookings and gigs.

People typing the phrase 'wedding dj kent' into Google are more than likely looking to hire a wedding DJ in Kent! This is all the more reason to optimise for this phrase and steer the majority of traffic (in this case 170 people every month!) to your website. That equates to approximately 5 or 6 people every day and if you can get an average of 5 or 6 new people to your site every day, the chances are that you may secure a couple of gigs from this one phrase alone.
 

Once you have the keyword phrase that you're looking to target, you need to incorporate it into your web page. The content contained within the page needs to be changed to incorporate this keyword (including the page title and URL – very important). So, for instance, a perfectly optimised page for the term 'wedding dj kent' would be something like this:
 

This image has been doctored from an image made by Rand Fishkin in which the original talked about chocolate donuts as opposed to wedding DJ's in Kent. I thought I'd make it easier to understand by keeping it relevant to DJ's in Kent rather than donuts.

As you can see in the image, the idea is to seamlessly integrate the keywords into the content without making it unreadable. The content still needs to read well but should incorporate the keyword phrase and all the possible alterations of the phrase as shown in the image.
 

This will give the search engines an idea about what the content is trying to say and will rank it for that phrase accordingly.
 

Keyword optimisation is only a small chunk of the SEO pie, but considering that the keyword difficulty tool is showing that the phrase ‘wedding dj kent’ is manageable to rank for, it should be enough to get your page near to the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
 

If this doesn't seem to be enough and your web page is appearing on page 2 or greater, you may need to get professional help, as it is a hugely complex and laborious task to rank well in a competitive market. At Brandshank we offer a range of services namely building web presences exclusively for the music industry and management of social media and digital marketing channels.

In a Nutshell
So in order to ensure your band, artist, record label or musician's website has the best chance of succeeding in the digital era, it is advised that the site be optimised for the band name, local and surrounding areas, be genre specific and optimised for lyrics. If you manage to optimise for all these things then the exposure and traffic that heads to your site will be in greater numbers, really focussed, will be your relevant target market and will help your follower and fan lists go through the roof!