SEO Tips for Musicians (Including Bands, Solo Artists, Session Musicians, Studios & Labels), Based on an Audit I Did for a Recording Artist

By Ethan Lazuk

Let’s hit the high notes with SEO! 🎵

In this guide, I’ll provide general advice and also go into specific detail about three areas of SEO for musicians, focusing on your website and knowledge panel.

This isn’t generic SEO advice. It’s based on a real audit and strategy that I did for an international recording artist. I then made that info a bit more universal for the whole industry.

I focused on tips for recording artists (like bands and solo performers), but also included advice for session musicians, studios, and labels.

⚠️ Fair warning, this will be a little more detailed than other SEO guides you’ll find made for musicians.

You see, I’m an independent SEO consultant who lives and breathes this stuff. I’m also an obsessed music listener. 🎧

That’s why I also offer free SEO guidance for musicians. However, I felt it’d be easiest to create a guide for everyone to use! 🎸

Something to remember before we start: as musicians, you’ll often need to approach SEO differently than most businesses or even other artists.

I’ll explain more, but essentially, don’t think of your website so much in terms of keyword rankings or even traffic, but rather more as the central hub for your online presence — the center of your universe. 🌌

It connects the dots between your socials 📱, ticket sales 🎫, merch 🧢, and more, but it may not always be the final destination for your audience.

Ultimately, your goal is to promote your music (or studio services, etc.), — SEO is one piece of a holistic digital marketing puzzle. 🧩

While this guide is detailed, it’s also easy to follow. It’ll start with high-level tips and then get into specifics. I’ll end with links to related resources.

If you’re a complete SEO novice, never fear! I got you. 😉

Also, if you have questions along the way, feel free to connect with me.

Ready to take a little trip? Let’s-a go …

First off, why should you care about this guide’s contents?

In short, SEO is about growing your visibility online organically with your target audience.

It’s meant to help achieve your goals, whether they be song streams, ticket or merch sales, or just getting more eyes at shows or ears listening to your music. 🎶

Our goal with SEO is to help your fans have an easier time finding your content online while also building your visibility as a recording or performing artist (or session musician, studio, or label).

This can include helping search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo make sense of your information, like in order to create a Google knowledge panel.

As I mentioned, you’re not so much worried about ranking for this or that keyword as a musician, but rather getting visibility for your name and music along your audiences’ search journeys.

They might be using search engines like Google and Bing or AI chatbots and answer engines, like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Meta AI.

By following this guide, you’ll learn how to create a general framework of fundamental SEO initiatives for your goals as a musician or as a company in the music industry.

This guide was designed to be read from start to finish (or, at least, skimmed).

However, since long like a classic Pink Floyd song …

I’ll give you a few SEO takeaways to start 🔥

These are specific to musician’s SEO strategies:

• Your website should be the center of your brand’s online presence: Create a single website that connects the dots between all your information and provides a place for fans to learn about (or hear) your music, tour dates, and social content.
• Have essential pages on your website: A single-page website is fine, but ideally, you’ll want multiple pages for individual topics, like one for your music, videos, and tour dates, but your homepage is the center of the action.
• Create website content in your own voice and style: Avoid keyword stuffing or trying to appease Google’s ranking systems; your content should reflect your brand and be made with your audience in mind (but still be understandable for search engines).
• Remember, SEO is bigger than your website: A great website is one piece of a larger puzzle, because as a musician, your knowledge panel is almost like your global website, and that means connecting your social media and other online profiles together through links and structured data. (We’ll discuss!) 😉
• Keep your information organized: Rather than multiple websites or pages with duplicate information, ensure your online presence is tidy; clean up any old content, websites, or other random pages floating around; also, ensure your website is mobile-friendly for users and accessible to crawlers (search engines).
• Your SEO strategy will be unique to you: This is a key point … musicians generally have unique SEO needs from other businesses, and each other; generic SEO advice might help in some areas, but ultimately, your goals should dictate your strategy. (We’ll discuss!) 😉

In case you’d prefer a video summary of these tips, you’re in luck! I made one (with a choice TOOL song included):

Why a TOOL song? 🌀 Well, last year, I was a top 0.05% listener of TOOL on Spotify.

As I explained in one of my SEO news recaps, that probably doesn’t mean ha, except to illustrate that if I’m awake, I probably have on headphones listening to music while doing SEO.

SEO + music = a natural marriage for me. And so I decided to put together this guide for you!

As to my SEO philosophy …

I find Rick Rubin’s opinions insightful on many topics, particularly when he said, “The audience comes last.”

Creating for yourself is the best thing you can do for others, and I believe that applies to SEO, as well. 🧿

Ok! Now that we’ve set the stage, let’s dim the lights and get this show on the road! 🔊

Why do musicians need to approach SEO differently than most other businesses or artists?

While it’s true that SEO has fundamentals — technical website foundations, helpful content, and authority building (backlinks, etc.) — your goals as an artist don’t always start or end with your website. It’s a piece of the journey.

If you’re a studio, label, or session musician, you’ll be a little more focused on promoting your services, as I’ll explain below.

But no matter your situation, a few things are always true:

First, SEO isn’t about manipulating search ranking signals. Stuffing in keywords or buying backlinks won’t help you in the long run (or likely the short run either). Our goal is to earn visibility organically by building brand trust through quality content.

Rather than basing your SEO decisions on trying to satisfy Google or any other search engine, focus on your brand voice and audience’s needs.

There are technical aspects of SEO that we follow to help search engines crawl, index, and understand your website’s content to show it in search results.

However, that’s part of a holistic strategy, where helpful content is the most foundational part, and your brand is at the center.

If you’re a performing musician (band, solo artist, etc.), your website should help fans and listeners find your music, merch, shows, or other information easier.

Ultimately, your goal is to share your music with the world and be rewarded for that.

Your website should help encourage song streams or ticket and merch sales, but you’ll also have more creative content to reflect your branding or provide fan entertainment.

Therefore, your SEO strategy is as much about your website as it is about supporting your social media, video, and streaming platform profiles to build a knowledge panel and total brand presence.

Stay true to yourself and avoid watering down your brand with keyword-stuffed website content that sounds corny.

Not only are those spam tactics a turn-off for your audience, but they don’t really help your rankings anyway.

Nerdy moment: Search engines understand the meanings of words at a deeper level (something called semantic search based on entities and vector embeddings).

In practical terms: Focus on your users and brand and write naturally.

In summary: As a musician building a following, your SEO strategy will focus on connecting the dots between your website, socials, press mentions, reviews, and streaming profiles to reach your new and existing audience in more places online.

Your goals from SEO will be things like:

• Building a knowledge panel (based on your entity in Google’s knowledge graph).
• Promoting your most popular socials in search results.
• Making your showtimes and ticket sales easy to find.
• Ensuring your fans can hear your music or get information about you, no matter how they search online, including with AI-based experiences (ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.).

In addition to your website, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify, Linktree, Bandsintown, SoundCloud, and others can all help you share your music with the world online.

However, search engines like Google have tremendous reach, and they play a foundational role in how people consume information. It’s worth taking the time to make sure your SEO strategy is on point.

If you’re a record label, recording studio, or session musician, your goals will focus more on your services and brand trust.

You want to help other artists find out about what you offer using your website and overall brand presence online.

In addition to building your brand, you’ll want to promote your services and examples of your work in a way that’s easy for people (and search engines) to understand.

Your SEO strategy begins with understanding who your audience is and then finding ways to appear along their search journey.

If you have an established brand that people know to search for already, your goal is to solidify and grow that visibility, building trust and reviews.

On the other hand, if you’re just starting out, your SEO focus will be more on establishing your brand (building a name) while explaining your services or the artists on your label.

In summary: Focus on website content that explains your brand and services in a way that’s clear and relevant to your audience’s needs and goals (think about how people who’d hire you would search online), such as pages for different offerings.

We’ll now delve into three specific SEO tips for musicians.

We’ll review three general tips for musicians with specific examples and details.

As I mentioned, the following SEO tips are based on general takeaways from an actual strategy that I built for an artist.

No, it wasn’t the Queen of Rap herself 👑, but I did use Nicki Minaj’s website in a few examples, both to protect the confidentiality of the artist I worked with, and also because her team does a nice job with digital marketing.

Just remember, your SEO strategy should be specific to your situation.

Feel free to contact me if you have questions along the way.

Here’s what I look like, so you’ll know this isn’t AI content. 😆

I was limited on Nicki Minaj-related photos, although I happened to walk by her concert one night:

I’ve got plenty of TOOL photos, though. 🪬

Without further ado, let’s get to our first tip, establishing the foundations of your SEO strategy …

1. Choose one website to be the central home for your brand 🌞

Musical artists tend to evolve over the years. That can include creating different websites, online merch stores, tour pages, and other landing pages for songs or albums.

Maybe you built an old SquareSpace website or a free WordPress site years ago that’s sitting there untouched. Maybe you currently manage several websites. Maybe you’ve even changed your stage name as an artist.

In addition, you may have other webpages besides your main website with links to socials and streaming pages, like a Linktree page, a profile page with your record label, or another website your friend made years ago.

Maybe you’ve also been featured with other artists and you’re mentioned on their websites or pages.

And if you sell merch online, you probably have a Shopify or Bandcamp store that’s on its own domain (like a subdomain), or maybe you sell merch in multiple places.

In short, you likely have a galaxy of places representing you as an artist online. The center of your solar system should be a single website.

Step one of your SEO strategy is to choose the website that will be the focus of your brand as a musical artist.

In terms of structure, your website shouldn’t be a single landing page typically, but rather a full website with multiple pages.

It will have show listings, contact information (for you or your representatives), links to your socials and merch, as well as pages for your music and videos and maybe a fan area.

It will also have structured data to help build your entity and Google knowledge panel.

We’ll go over this in more detail below, so don’t worry!

As for a domain name, your website should include your preferred artist name, like yourname.com, yournameband.com, or yournameofficial.com.

Even if your Instagram page or Deezer profile is the most important page to show up in Google’s search results, you’ll still want your website to be the home base for your branding purposes and creating a knowledge panel.

We’ve mentioned knowledge panels a few times, so far. But what are they?

For a musician, your knowledge panel is like your de facto global website. It helps listeners and fans navigate to your website, socials, music, and other news or media about you.

Here’s an example of Nicki Minaj’s knowledge panel, which has multiple sections:

The above is called a brand SERP (search engine results page for your brand), which returns results for Nicki’s name and history as an artist.

Note: Some musicians can rank for searches of their names directly, while others may need to add “+ music” or “+ band” to the end of the search. (Google shows the person it thinks people most want to find.)

You can see in Nicki’s brand SERP above that the first organic result isn’t her website. It’s her Instagram page.

That’s an example of why you want to use your website for larger branding goals, like telling your story and connecting the dots between your show dates, socials, music, merch, and more.

On the other hand, you can see in the search below for the band TOOL, their website is the most important page in their brand SERP:

It depends on your goals, and what users (fans) are looking for predominately.

But either way …

1.1. Your website’s homepage is your key page

Your website should have a homepage that contains all of the key information your audience needs, or at least has links to other pages where they can find information.

A homepage can reference tour dates, media and press, videos, socials, merch, how to follow you for updates, a fan page, plus a way to contact you or your management team for press inquiries.

The specifics depend on what matters most for your goals and the audience’s needs.

You can put this information on your homepage directly, like listing your tour dates, or create individual pages and link to them.

You can see how Nicki Minaj’s homepage strikes a nice balance. It has key details for music, tour dates, socials, and fan information but then links to related pages and other websites or social profiles to learn more:

Your social feeds can be embedded on your website, but ultimately they should lead to the social platforms themselves because that’s the better experience.

Why would you want to lead fans away from your website?

As a musician, your goal usually isn’t keeping people on your website.

You can provide music, merch, or other information and entertainment for them on your site, but you also want to show them where to find your music to buy or stream, search for tickets, shop merch, or engage with your social content or other fans.

Sending users to Instagram, Ticketmaster, or Spotify isn’t a bad thing if it’s your music they’re going there to explore.

You can also have social follow buttons or a form to collect email addresses on your website and then send a newsletter with updates to your fans.

1.2. What pages does your website need?

It depends on your goals, but you’ll likely want pages for your music, videos, tour dates, and maybe a fan page.

Here’s the menu for Nicki Minaj’s site, which is pretty standard in the music industry:

If you’re just building your name as an artist, an about page could also be helpful. Similarly, if you’re a session musician or run a studio, you’ll want to have information about your services.

You can also have a blog to share news updates, such as upcoming album releases or highlights of press coverage. Just make sure these pages have content that’s high-quality, relevant to your audience, and worth putting online.

You want to avoid having hundreds of outdated website pages with concert dates or collaborations from five years ago, as this isn’t a good look and doesn’t provide a lot of value.

As for smaller or time-sensitive announcements, it’s usually better to share those on your social accounts, or you can add a temporary banner to your website for news.

However, details about your past shows and the venues you’ve played can be relevant to your fans. Visual content also tends to do well for artists, like photos or videos.

Ultimately, you want to have website pages that serve a uniquely valuable purpose and that you or your team can easily manage, update, or remove. Avoid creating too much unhelpful content that can be a headache to improve or remove later.

For example, Nicki’s website has good hygiene, as we call it, with mostly relevant pages.

Being the SEO nerd I am, I found this page that’s indexable (Google can find it) but has no purpose:

That can probably be nixed without a 301 redirect (when one page gets redirected to another page).

On that point, if you remove a page but think users would want to visit an alternate page instead — like maybe you had a page with a single music video but moved it to a page with all of your videos — you can use a 301 redirect.

If a page has no value, you can delete it and leave it as a 404 page.

Having 404 pages isn’t bad for SEO. It’s only bad if users expect to find something that’s no longer there.

One way to improve 404 pages is to add related links to help users find other pages. Nicki’s website’s 404 page only has a home button:

That’s an opportunity to add some helpful links and maybe clever branding. 😉

1.3. Managing your online merch sales

You can sell merch on your website if it has an online store function, like Shopify or WooCommerce (in WordPress).

Many artists use another ecommerce service that’s on a different domain or subdomain.

For example, if we click the “Shop” link on Nicki’s website, it takes us to shop.nickiminajofficial.com. That’s called a subdomain.

If your website and merch store are two different websites like this, you’ll generally want to link them together for a seamless navigational experience. You don’t want users to get trapped in either place.

Usually, a link in the menu between the websites is enough. This can also help Google and other search engines know the websites are connected.

Nicki’s main website and store don’t have links between them:

That’s an opportunity.

However, given her level of fame, the merch site might be its own destination separate from her main website.

A search for “Nicki Minaj merch” even triggers Google shopping filters:

In the screenshot above, we can also see her main site appears in the search results, so Google has likely made a connection.

Her main site’s menu also has UTMs (tracking parameters for analytics) on the “Shop” link:

• campaign=nav
• medium=referral
• source=nickiminajofficial.com

Her marketing team is likely tracking that data in Google Analytics. (We’ll touch on GA4 shortly.)

1.4. Pay attention to image or music file sizes, scripts, and the mobile experience

This section covers topics like site speed and images. It’s a little on the technical side, but important for your user’s experience and Google’s impressions of your site’s helpfulness.

Large image files are often the first culprit of a slow website for musicians. Those beautifully designed studio images that came straight from the photographer are perfect for magazines or posters, for example, but they can slow your website down big time.

The same is true for adding images to your site directly from your smartphone, like selfies you’ve taken backstage at shows. It’s potentially great website content, but it shouldn’t slow users down.

Switching gears to look at Ariana Grande’s website for a moment, we can see how images are slowing the homepage’s load time when we run it through a speed test with Google PageSpeed Insights:

To improve the loading of images, you can use a free resource like TinyPNG for lossless compression of files (smaller size while maintaining quality). It’s also helpful to convert images to a faster-loading format, like WebP instead of PNG.

For other web performance issues, you can run diagnostics with PageSpeed Insights, for example. But you’ll likely want to work with a developer on this part.

For example, Nicki’s homepage does well with images, but it’s partly weighted down by a lot of scripts (JavaScript):

Try not to focus too much on these individual metrics or even passing Core Web Vitals. Instead, concentrate on roadblocks that impact your users directly.

Ultimately, it’s happy website users — not scores in SEO tools — that result in better organic performance, overall.

Mobile-friendliness is another important detail, because many of your site’s visitors will be searching on their phones. Test how your website looks and functions on mobile devices.

It’s easy to design a beautiful site for desktop but then on mobile things stack weirdly or don’t show correctly. I’ve seen this happen many times. Mobile design should come first.

Site performance issues can also arise when you embed YouTube videos or Spotify song players. These generally work well, but if done incorrectly, these can cause a page to get stuck loading.

It’s also good to check that videos or embedded song players are up-to-date, as sometimes the API or other backend technology changes, which can leave your website with an unavailable video.

By all means, be visually creative if that’s your style. Just be sure the site is reasonably fast and usable across devices to ensure user satisfaction.

1.5. Make your content for people first

In my own website’s keyword-ranking data, I can see people are searching for topics like “keywords for artists”:

That’s not how I’d recommend musicians approach their content for SEO.

For starters, search engines like Google don’t rely on keywords as much these days. They’re a lot smarter and can understand the deeper meaning of words. This is called semantic search. (It’s also largely the basis for the knowledge panel we saw earlier.)

Writing spammy text like, “I’m the world’s best rapper, lyricist, freestyler, MC, and hip-hop artist” isn’t necessary. Google understands any one of these terms relates to the others.

This means you should write website content for your audience first, not for search engines.

What is it you want your listeners to understand about your music and how would you describe it to them in your own voice?

At the same time, if your content is super confusing, like abstract poetry, that might be too far in the other direction. (Unless that’s what you’re going for and you’re a big enough artist to accomplish that because people will search for you anyway.)

For most artists, I’d suggest striking a balance between being yourself artistically and being helpful and clear with your site’s content.

Here’s a nice example from a page on Nicki’s site, which I think strikes a nice balance between creativity and clarity:

It’s clearly in her tone of voice and style, yet Google also shows that page to us pretty easily:

When in doubt, ask someone else to read the content and give their opinion. If the content struggles to rank in Google over time for logical searches, consider making adjustments for clarity.

Another detail is to make sure the content on each page is unique to your website.

You can add quotes and excerpts from other pages, like press clippings, but don’t copy information from another page.

Search engines typically only show one version of duplicate content (called the canonical version).

Another thing I noticed about the Barbz page in the search results above is its one-word title. Page titles can be a chance for branding.

We’ll discuss that next. 🙂

1.6. Use SEO plugins or settings to optimize title tags and schema

Title tags are the labels that show for your pages in search results. They should say what the page is about and typically include your stage or brand name.

Here’s an example from Nicki’s video page:

You can see “Videos | Nicki Minaj” is pretty short. Don’t worry if SEO tools tell you a title is too short or long. Google won’t care. Focus instead on how it appears in search results for users.

In the case of Nicki’s site, she doesn’t need to pack in tons of keywords like “Videos | Music Videos | Recording Videos | Concert Videos.” Her fans already understand.

You don’t need to stuff in keywords to title tags either, but you’ll need to be as descriptive as makes sense for a fan or anyone else to understand a page’s purpose.

You can use this free tool to preview your title tags.

As for schema, this is a little more technical, but important to discuss for entities and your knowledge panel.

Basically, schema is structured data (usually JSON-LD) that your users won’t see, but it helps search engines (and AI chatbots, by the way) understand your content better.

It can help Google connect all of the dots between your social profiles and other websites for a knowledge panel, for example.

You can use Person schema with sameAs markup to mention all of your social and online profiles.

If your page lists concert dates, you can also use MusicEvent schema.

You can see that Nicki’s homepage uses Organization schema instead of Person schema, which could be updated:

However, her site correctly uses MusicEvent schema:

You can also see how the event link at the bottom goes to Bandsintown for ticket sales and show information.

That’s a good example of how we’re not necessarily trying to use SEO to keep people on your website.

We’re trying to make your website as helpful as possible to serve the purposes it needs to, like promoting your band and helping your audience find information about you.

If you want a hand with the schema part (or anything else so far), feel free to contact me, and we’ll get it taken care of. 🙂

2. Clean up your old websites and fix any technical SEO issues 🧹

In order to show your website in search results, and use the content and schema to build a knowledge panel, Google needs to be able to crawl, understand, and index your pages.

2.1. Avoid common indexing issues

Some musicians’ websites do things like put text in images with no alt text or rely on JavaScript actions initiated by users to return content. These are technical issues that can prevent Google from seeing your content.

If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, Wix, SquareSpace, or Shopify, you’ll probably be ok for most indexing concerns.

However, if you have a custom website with a lot of interactive elements, it may require a technical SEO review, especially if you’re searching for your content on Google and not finding it.

One trick is you can search for an excerpt of a page’s content using quotation marks. This does a phrase-match search. You can also add “site:yoursite.com” to search only your website.

If your content still doesn’t appear, you may have indexing issues.

2.2. Ensure proper redirection of old websites

As for cleaning up your old websites, you might have used a different website domain in the past that still exists or was redirected elsewhere.

A redirect is where users click on one website link but get taken to a different page or domain.

When you have old website pages or domains lying around the internet, you want to prevent SEO issues by either adding a noindex meta tag to them or more often taking them down and using 301 redirects to send users (and Google’s crawler) to a proper destination.

We can see on a website like Ariana Grande’s that her shopping link uses a JavaScript redirect:

Although Google can likely follow that, it’d be better to use a 301 instead, and also update that link to prevent the redirect entirely.

In the case of the artist I was helping, their old website had a 302 redirect to their current website. However, the old website also had the majority of authoritative backlinks pointing to it.

This is a bit of a technical point, and, in theory, it should work out eventually, but a 302 redirect is technically a temporary redirect and in this case, it could theoretically have withheld some backlink value (helpful for rankings) from transferring, at least for a time.

2.3. Consider multilingual audiences

Depending on where your music is popular, you might have audiences searching for your name and website in different languages. This was the case for the artist I was helping.

We had to make decisions about which languages their website should have content for, and then we used hreflang and site architecture choices to help search engines like Google show the correct language and country versions.

Again, these types of decisions depend on your audience. If a single English website is good enough for most of their needs, it’s probably easier to stick with that.

2.4. Update old links and interlink your website and socials

Artists tend to release new music or update references on their websites and associated pages, like on Linktree, Bandsintown, or Bandcamp.

This can lead to old links that need to be updated or replaced.

Sometimes, links to Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube, and other media streaming players can also have issues for unexpected reasons, so it’s worth testing them from time to time.

Make sure all of the links across your website and related pages point to the correct destinations, and include links to your social profiles and streaming players, like Nicki Minaj’s website does in its footer:

Also, ensure the links on your social profiles point to your main website.

Since we’re making your website the hub of your brand, music, merch, and knowledge panel efforts, we want that to be the main place your listeners go to find out about you.

Many artists create a Linktree page or a similar landing page and link it from their socials.

If you have a goal in mind, like Nicki Minaj does here on X (Twitter):

Where she links to a landing page for her latest album:

That’s one thing.

But if you’re trying to build your online presence and knowledge panel, linking to your website from your social bios is a better option.

Note that I’ve debated this with some artists, as they think fans find it easier to hear their music by going to a Linktree page. I see that point, but you can always include links to stream your music on your homepage. 😉

Additionally, platforms like YouTube will let you include multiple links, so take advantage of that opportunity:

The more you interlink your website and social profiles, the stronger you connect the dots for Google.

Google is also showing social media content in its search results quite a bit these days.

3. Add ways to track your data 📈

You want to keep track of which pages on your website get traffic and from which channels (direct, social, email, etc.).

For organic traffic related to SEO, you’ll also want to monitor which keywords those pages appear for in Google Search, and at which positions (rankings).

The first step is to verify Google Search Console.

This allows you to monitor clicks and keyword rankings, as well as page indexing, Discover traffic, and other metrics for your website’s organic performance. You can also submit an XML sitemap (file listing your pages for search engines to crawl).

GSC can be installed using an SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath or by adding the designated meta tag to the <head> section of your site’s homepage.

I’m not a fan of fixating on keyword rankings because I believe there’s a lot of context that gets missed, like with today’s AI Overviews.

Something else I’ve learned working with artists is that SERPs (result pages) for musical topics can be personalized for different users, especially based on location.

It’s helpful to manually check the search results for topics you care about (on mobile and desktop) and even change your location preferences in Google or use a location-spoofer tool to get a sense of how different users around the world see your brand SERP.

There are likewise alternative sources of organic visibility not tied to rankings, like Discover, Perspectives, or People also view.

That doesn’t mean keyword rankings aren’t important, just that they’re one piece of a much larger SEO puzzle.

For a more holistic view of your site’s performance online, you can set up Google Analytics (GA4).

This free analytics platform will let you monitor how people get to your site and where they spend time, showing if visitors came from Google, email, socials, etc.

You can also create a Looker Studio dashboard with custom reports to focus on metrics you care most about, even adding other sources of data.

Third-party SEO tools can be helpful for approximating your organic traffic and rankings:

But the best data is always your own first-party data that you can verify.

Closing thoughts and related resources 🤔

I hope you’ve found these tips helpful for your SEO strategy!

As a reminder, this hasn’t been a comprehensive SEO guide, but rather specific tips relevant to musicians based on issues I encountered during a real audit for a recording artist.

Here are related marketing resources to check out:

• Music Marketing Strategies for Artists – Careers in Music
• Music Marketing: A Simple (But Complete) Guide – Ahrefs
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide – Google Search Central
• How To Make It In The Music Industry (17 Tips) – Sundown Sessions Studio

Your SEO strategy should be based on your specific needs.

In terms of key takeaways, I’d say to remember that Google’s systems are smart and want to satisfy users above all, so your best option is to optimize your website with your audience in mind, while always staying true to your authentic voice.

You don’t need to randomly insert keywords or build spammy backlinks to do well at SEO. In fact, these can do more harm than good.

If you’re a musical artist like a band or solo performer, you’ll want to focus on your brand, music, showtimes, and merch.

If you’re a session musician or run a recording studio, you’ll want to focus on building your brand while also promoting your services. (I’ll add more details about this here in the future or create another post. In the meantime, feel free to contact me with questions.)

As you look for marketing advice, keep in mind that generic SEO guides might not be relevant to what you need to do as a musician.

For inspiration, I’d suggest checking out the websites and strategies of other musical artists who you admire or are in a similar position as you, just be sure to follow your own path.

The list of webpages I suggested earlier (videos, music, tour, etc.) is fairly standard across the music industry, for example, but there are many ways to create a website and make it your own.

Lastly, keep in mind that as a musician, your website isn’t always the first or last destination users will visit in search results. It might play a supporting role in your overall brand presence online, along with your socials, music streaming profiles, and other audio and video media or press.

Adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. 😉

How to get in touch with me if you need a hand! 🤝

I’m happy to answer any questions you have or work with you. Just get in touch!

Here’s my page about free SEO consulting for musicians. I offer that with no strings attached, time allowing.

I’ll also keep this post updated and make improvements over time, so check back, or take a look at related posts below.

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing! 🙂

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