This is an article ‘How To Perform Effective SEO In Music Marketing’ by Marc Primo Warren
In today’s thriving creator market, obscure musicians are growing their followers, communities, and true fans with efficient SEO and SEM tactics on various social media and creator platforms. With over 50 million independent content creators, curators, and community builders, it’s not easy to cut a slice of this $104.2 billion market. The hard truth is that many factors come into play when making a content creator career, much more a music career online.
There are several questions you have to ask yourself first before you launch your career as an online independent artist:
Where do you find your true fans who will listen to, download, or purchase your tracks and albums?
Which platform should you go into to tap the right niche markets?
Let’s answer some of today’s creator artists’ most pressing questions about music marketing.
How do you market music online?
Music marketing via social media channels does not rely solely on effective distribution to your fans as traditional producers do. If you want to be successful in the online music business, you need to consider your product, promotion, platform, and price, along with what search engine optimization (SEO) strategies can push each facet to broader audiences.
Typically, a content creator shares his tracks with his followers via a social media platform like YouTube and tries to accumulate at least 1,000 subscribers and over four hours of viewing before he can monetize every succeeding view and ad placement. However, the problem with this setup is that the reliance on ad revenue by the more prominent platforms significantly limits the earning capacity of today’s online music artists from the middle class of the creator economy.
In other words, folks with less than 1,000 followers or subscribers but hundreds of authentic and genuine fans don’t have a chance against the mega-influencers and celebrities cutting up the most significant slice of profit from prominent social media platforms.
This unfortunate fact is why most online artists need an excellent strategy to market their music and other user-generated content (UGC) online. There's a need for middle-class creators to avoid barriers from big-name streaming and eCommerce platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok.
Here’s a basic walkthrough on how you can jumpstart your online music career on your platform with the help of SEO:
Everything starts from being authentic and creative
Most online fans today define the term ‘content creators’ as people who produce raw and organic content as passion projects, including song tracks and albums. Many online music artists today come from Generation Z and a diverse group of storytellers that develop unbiased content and showcase their creativity.
With today’s technologies, music composers can now publish via Web3 blogs or digitized score sheets for download and earn by combining community and fandom. The problem is that there is a current deficiency in platforms that support these artists who want to grow their true fan base online without giving into the demands of ad revenue and high platform standards.
Once musicians and artists have enough material to share, the next step would be to create their platform and apply SEO marketing to increase their site traffic, time spent, and downloads.
Apply the basics
Finding the best possible low-competition keywords for your tracks and other content remains essential in the music marketing industry. Try looking for typical search terms that listeners type in their search bars to find your songs, genres, and artists, then list down the keywords you get from your website's metadata and content. These days, you can now include synonyms for long tail keywords to expand the range of possible search terms that fans may look for on Google.
After you’ve developed the proper copies and blogs using the keywords, you can proceed to create a Google artist website to enable the platform’s ranking algorithms to prioritize your site among legitimate artists. Adding metadata with the right keywords can significantly improve your site traffic.
Fans can learn more about your type of genre via meta descriptions, while title tags help search engines determine a search’s top results. For your headers, draft copies that effectively support your visitors in identifying the various sections of your site. For best results, it is always recommended to push your content using multiple analyzing tools such as Google Analytics and Spotify for Artists. Make sure you update your website’s content regularly to give Google crawlers more value for your unique content when determining your website’s rank.
Boost your fan engagement
Building a community of true fans can be challenging in its initial stages, but most fans may be looking for fresh ways to engage with the artists they follow. Developing your content and optimizing your keywords can significantly help increase your fan engagement.
When trying to spark engagement, the best thing to do is update your website with the most recent and pertinent brand-related content. Support this with the blog that can allow you to interact with your primary and lookalike audiences regarding your song lyrics or musical arrangements. Keeping them interested and being authentic about how you produce your tracks will keep them interested in what you offer them.
Try making new pages for each song or album launch for best results and anticipate search entries that can cover all your music or event-related searches that visitors can find within your website.
Helping new audiences find you online through performing keywords, optimized websites, and well-managed content are all essential if you want to engage true fans of your work. These true fans can help you make your music production venture more sustainable in the long term.
Other great ways to engage new audiences are through backlinks. This tactic comprises phrases used in SEO that can boost your site's ranks, guest posts on more popular music blogs or musician’s sites, or by requesting a few mentions from social media influencers and YouTubers for proper link building.
Hiring a digital marketing company is advantageous since they can promote your website through their extensive network. Your rankings will rise significantly if you are mentioned in other people's press releases, blogs, and social media posts than simply relying on a small network.
Lastly, ensure that you secure the proper trademarks, registrations, and copyrights for your tracks and albums. If necessary, consult a lawyer, a representative from a record label, or other online musicians and ask about legal guidelines you need to observe in order to sell online.