Discoverability can make or break an artist, and being able to be easily found online is one of the best ways to retain fans and even attract new ones. For the professional artist, your website is the home base of your digital operations, acting as a switchboard to all the ways your fans can engage with your content.
A website can be a great way to track relationships with fans and drive listens and sales. In this guide, I'll give you four tips for helping people find your website in search and across the internet.
1. You Don't Say Your Band's Name
This is the simplest mistake I see bands making. Bands will have a digital image of their band's logo across the top of their page and NEVER MENTION their band's name anywhere else on their website.
Search engines like Google are fundamentally text based. Search engines work by scraping and analyzing the raw code of your website. So if you don't put your band's name anywhere in text, search engines have no way of knowing what your website is for.
When I'm working with clients, I will Google their band's name and go to the first organic result, regardless of whether or not it is the band's website, and do a search for how many times their name comes up on the page. Then I make sure my client's bio (or home page if they don't want to have a bio page) has that many instances of their band's name, plus one.
When optimizing your site, you'll also want to think about other keywords you may want to rank for in search in addition to your band's name, like your genre or any catch phrases you may have. Try to use your keywords, particularly your band's name, prominently in all headers.
2. You aren't linking your web properties
Google was fundamentally built for research purposes, so anything you can do to operate akin to a well researched informational website will help you rank in search. A great example of a website that Google likes is Wikipedia.
On Wikipedia we find a number of things. First, we find numerous links to other pages on Wikipedia, indicating to Google that the website is easy to navigate from one page to the next. Having a comprehensive home page with links to all of your other pages enhances your standing with Google in this regard.
Second, we find numerous links to external resources, which on a site like Wikipedia signifies credibility and therefore authority. You can beef up your website in this regard by linking to your external web properties like your social media pages, music listening pages, store, etc. This is a good thing to put in the footer of your website.
Third, there are numerous properties across the web that link to Wikipedia, which also boosts its authority in the eyes of Google. You can approximate this by linking your website across your own external web properties such as your social media pages, your Spotify about page, your Bandcamp and Soundcloud pages, etc.
3. You don't use alt text in your images
Alt text is text associated with an image that describes what the image is. This is an accessibility feature of HTML that assists people with vision impairments when they are surfing the web.
In addition to enhancing your site's accessibility, it also boosts your domain authority with Google. Google commits itself to an accessible web, and so wants to prioritize websites that provide descriptive alt text to visitors.
Further, because, as we said above, Google's indexing tools are essentially text based, Google will use your alt text to categorize your images and understand what your page is about.
Alt text is a great place for keywords. That said, make sure your alt text isn't just a bunch of random keywords. Google does have advanced text analysis and rudimentary image recognition, so it will be able to tell if your alt text isn't descriptive or comprehensible.
4. You don't give people anything to do on your website
Too many bands think of their website as a piece of digital art to express their band's creativity. And while a website is certainly a creative endeavor, you spend money on keeping it live and possibly on third party integrations and content writing. With how much you spend on your site, it should make money for you.
You need to think of your website less as an outlet of self-expression and more as a tool of music marketing. Every fan needs to go through the process of discovery, exploration, interaction, and finally purchase, and your website should be helping them through those stages.
Each page on your website should be focused on taking fans from one of these phases to the next. Marketers often refer to this as a funnel or buyer journey. Be deliberate about what you link on each page, taking into account why a visitor would end up on that page and what the next step in their buyer journey is, whether it's listening to your music, signing up for your mailing list, or buying your merch.
Building out coherent marketing funnels will increase traffic on your website and to your other web properties. Google will see these boosts in traffic and enhance your search rankings accordingly.
Boost Your Search Rankings with Jester of No Court
The accessibility of your band's presence online can be the catalyst that turns a casual listener into a committed fan. Being able to easily find your tour schedule, web store, mailing list, etc. enables listeners to engage with your band, allowing them to feel like a part of a community that centers around you.
If you find yourself having difficulty with building out your band's web presence or if it's simply more work than you want to commit, I provide marketing services for bands at rates you won't find at an agency. Shoot me a message if you want to get started or learn more.