So, you just created a website so your fans can learn more about you and your music, but you don’t know how to get fans to your website without paying for ads. As a musician with a website, you should practice different SEO (search engine optimization) techniques to make the website experience better for your fans and help you to gain new ones in the process. This is something many artists go through because they’ve never explored the world of SEO. SEO is all about generating organic traffic to your website, which can be done through optimizing your website and will improve your rankings in the SERP (search engine results page).
We’ve put together 5 SEO tips for musicians that can help you climb up the search rankings and gain more exposure.
1. Keyword Research SEO for artists is all about branded keywords. Branded keywords can include your stage name, album names, song names, lyrics, music style, performance dates, interviews and more. For example, there is a high search volume around Coldplay’s branded keywords. Even if no one is discovering these keywords in organic search, it doesn’t mean there’s not an opportunity. You can create original content around these search terms to better serve what your fans are searching for to enhance the fan experience. A good amount of keywords to strive for is between five and 10. The Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool are good tools to use to get started. The keywords you choose for this will be used within your META tags. 
2. META Tags META tags describe a page’s content and are only found within the page’s HTML. The keywords you discovered in the previous step could be plugged into your META tags. META tags also include a relevant title and description for your page and are shown when people enter a query into Google. This usually determines whether or not people will click on your link, so it is vital to be descriptive. 
3. Link Building Building up your backlink profile is very important when it comes to SEO. Your backlink profile contains every link that someone has ever shared of yours. Authoritative links are a must when it comes to a good backlink profile. These are links that have a high domain authority and are linking to your website. Exchanging links with high-authority websites, such as industry websites and relatable blogs, can be a part of your link-building strategy. Google uses backlinks to improve your search visibility. Anchor text is another major factor when it comes to link building. Making sure the link has keyword-rich anchor text is a great way to get a page ranking for a targeted keyword. According to MOZ, anchor text is the visible characters and words that hyperlinks display when linking to another document or location on the web. Here’s an example:
Follow and no follow links are important to look out for also. For SEO purposes, all links pointing back to your website have to be “follow” links to share the SEO juice. Follow links also boost your page rank and help your page move up within the SERP. A no follow link is a link that does not boost your page rank or help your page’s ranking in the SERPs; search engines do not count no follow links. You should be creating link opportunities through your content to build a great backlink profile. Link building can help increase your exposure among fans, and you can use social networks to build up your backlink profile. You can also use this as an opportunity to create relationships with other musicians and industry stars.
4. Fresh Content Creating new and unique content is key when it comes to SEO. Updating your site as often as possible will signal Google to crawl your site more. As an artist you have the advantage to create unique content that is only yours, but you have to put it into words because Google can’t interpret audio, video, and images. Creating content about upcoming shows, album releases and new merch can all drive traffic to your website, and putting together a content calendar can help you to manage everything from blog posts to social media posts.
5. Analytics Monitoring the traffic your website receives is very important. Knowing which pages get the most and least amount of traffic can help you better optimize your site. There are plenty of free analytics tools out there that can help you analyze your site. Now that you have the basic SEO tips, you can start optimizing your website, create unique content, and expose your music to new fans.