**Guest post written by Wes Walls of Bandzoogle.

"Once you have created a music website, you can take your online presence a step further by optimizing your band's ranking in search engines. This is called SEO for musicians, and it makes it easier for your fans to find the information about you that they want.

Whether you want to discover the best SEO keywords for musicians, or just start making your songs, social profiles and events show up in Google, this checklist will help you to get started.

Here's your checklist for optimizing your band SEO:

▢ Brainstorm, research, and make a list of the keywords you want to rank for. The list may be short - just your band name with some variations.

+Online Marketing Strategies For Musicians

▢ Build a band website on an SEO-friendly platform.

▢ Add all relevant content to your website that you have available, organized on separate pages, such as:

▢ Your artist bio

+7 Tips For Writing A Bitchin' Bio

▢ Your music with song lyrics

▢ Your videos and images

▢ Your gig calendar

▢ Things you are selling, such as merch

+25 Creative Band Merch Ideas

▢ Anything else you want fans to be able to find easily.

▢ Set up a custom domain name for your website with HTTPS.

▢ Optimize your website content for search engines:

▢ Add a custom title tag and meta description for each page of your site

▢ Make sure every page has some text content

▢ Organize h1/h2/h2 header tags on each page

▢ Add alt text to images where possible

▢ Make sure each page of your site has a nice descriptive URL

▢ Add content pages to your website for any target keywords that you want to rank for (for example: if you want to rank for store-related keywords, make sure there’s a store page on your website).

▢ Link to your website from all of your social profiles and any other platforms you use, anywhere that you can. For example:

+Back to Basic: Why Create Smart Links For Your Music

▢ Instagram bio

▢ Facebook page

▢ YouTube video descriptions

▢ Twitter profile

▢ TikTok bio

▢ Bandsintown artist page

+The 10 best blogs for musicians and bands

▢ Bandcamp artist page

▢ Add links on your website pointing to all of your socials and other important platforms where you have an active presence.

▢ Try to get other third party websites to link to your band website wherever possible, such as from press articles about you.

▢ Add your website domain to Google Search Console.

▢ Submit your website XML sitemap to your Google Search Console.

▢ Distribute your music as widely as possible using professional best practices.

+5 THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT DIGITAL DISTRIBUTORS

▢ Publish tour dates on established concert listing websites in addition to your own website, using consistent information across all platforms.

▢ Create a Wikipedia entry for your band if possible.

▢ Create a Wikidata.org entry for your band.

▢ Create a MusicBrainz entry for your band.

▢ Create videos for each of your songs and upload them to YouTube, with complete descriptions for each video.

+How to Grow YouTube Viewership and Monetize Opportunities

▢ Integrate or optimize the schema markup on your website (advanced):

▢ MusicGroup schema

▢ SameAs schema

▢ MusicAlbum schema

▢ MusicEvent schema

▢ Set up Google Analytics to measure visits to your website from search engines.

If this checklist feels overwhelming, tackle what you think is achievable for you. With music website SEO, even just starting somewhere is a good first step.

If you want more info on how to take these points further, we created an exhaustive 6-part guide to SEO for musicians. It starts with this post about SEO strategy for musicians. You can also check out our SEO and Google Listing for your Website help article.

We hope this checklist helps you start improving your music website’s SEO!

Build a band website that's SEO-friendly. Bandzoogle is easy to use and offers built-in tools to optimize your website for search engines. Sign up free with Bandzoogle now."

Related Blog Posts:

+How to Create a Wikipedia Page for Your Band

+Inbound Marketing and SEO for Bands and Musicians

+50 Ways to Promote Your Music and Grow Your Fanbase