Complete SEO Checklist For Musicians

June 12, 2017
Bandzoogle in Advice, Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing, SEO, artists websites, band marketing, checklist

This post was written by Wes Walls and originally appeared on the Bandzoogle Blog.

It’s not easy figuring out how to start optimizing your band’s presence in search engines. So we took all of our SEO advice and broke it down into one handy checklist.

For details on how to do each of the things on the list, you can refer to our “Complete Guide to SEO for Musicians“ eBook.

Without further ado, here’s your checklist for optimizing your band for SEO:

• ▢ Brainstorm and research your target keywords. Make a list. (Your “Master Band Keyword List”)
• ▢ Build a band website if you don’t have one yet.
• ▢ Link to your website from all of your social profiles and other pages. And vice versa.
• ▢ Add your website to Google Search Console.
• ▢ Submit your website XML sitemap to Google Search Console.
• ▢ Optimize your website content, including:
  • ▢ Title tags and meta descriptions
  • ▢ Make sure pages have text content
  • ▢ H1/h2/h2 header tags
  • ▢ Image alt text
  • ▢ Descriptive URLs
• ▢ Add content pages to your website for your target keywords (for example: if you want to rank for store-related keywords, make sure there’s a store page on your website)
• ▢ Try to get other websites to link back to your band website when possible, such as when you get press.
• ▢ Establish your Google accounts
  • ▢ Create a Google Brand account
  • ▢ Manage your Brand Account
  • ▢ Add your music to Google Play (optional)
• ▢ Create a Wikipedia entry for your band.
• ▢ Create a Wikidata.org entry for your band.
• ▢ Create a MusicBrainz entry for your band.
• ▢ Integrate or optimize the schema markup on your website:
  • ▢ MusicGroup schema 
  • ▢ SameAs schema
  • ▢ MusicAlbum schema
  • ▢ MusicEvent schema
• ▢ Create videos for each of your songs, and upload to YouTube.
• ▢ Optimize your YouTube videos for SEO.
• ▢ Set up Google Analytics to measure visits to your website from search engines.

If this checklist is making your forehead sweat, just check out the eBook. Everything is explained clearly in detail, and in a way that’s easy to follow. We hope this helps you start working on your music SEO!

Wes Walls is the Head of Growth Marketing at musician website & marketing platform Bandzoogle

Article originally appeared on Music Think Tank (https://www.musicthinktank.com/).