Show Up On Google: Top Squarespace SEO Tips For Musical Artists
Musical artists can benefit from an optimized online presence to boost their careers. If you’re a musician who already uses Squarespace for your site, you’re likely familiar with the platform’s features available for managing music online, including:
Intuitive designer page templates
Social media connectivity
Music files playlist
Events calendars
Sophisticated audio player
Commerce tools to sell merchandise
Creating a website with all the right features is a must, but it’s not enough. You need to also give your site some SEO love to show up on Google.
Here are five tips to help with search engine optimization for your musician site. If you need help understanding or implementing any of these recommendations, Launch Happy’s SEO experts can help.
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SEO Tip #1: Add Great Content To Your Site
Some musicians’ sites are skimpy on content. This does your fans and your Squarespace SEO a disservice. In terms of search engines finding your site and including it on people’s Google searches, here’s how having a healthy quantity of different types of content helps.
Audio Files
Your fans want to hear samples of your music, which you can provide via audio files. With visitors lingering on your page to explore, click on, and listen to your music samples, dwell time increases, and this is a good thing, SEO-wise.
Dwell time is a measure of how long a visitor spends interacting with a page found through searches – a measure that reflects the quality of the user’s experience, which is something that Google algorithms take into account when deciding where to place sites on search results.
To get a better ranking, include many high-quality audio files on a page to keep visitors dwelling on your music.
Videos
Videos can also improve dwell time while offering your visitors a convenient way to learn more about you, your band or ensemble, the music you create, your process of composing music, where you’ll be touring, and more. Videos can improve your organic page ranking because they keep visitors engaged with your page longer, much like audio files do.
Written Content
Here’s where you can boost your Squarespace SEO organically. Search engine crawlers scan website text to find specific phrases, terms, names, and keywords. Your written content should include names people associate with you and your music, as well as keywords that can help people find you through searches.
Quality Images
People are drawn to good visuals. With quality images populating your site, visitors may stay longer, scrolling down your written content to read more while seeing the images you’ve added along the way. Again, the longer a person remains engaged with your site, the better your chances of moving up to higher, more visible positions in search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO Tip #2: Optimize Your Page Tags
Each page of your website has the opportunity for you or your web developer to create a unique title tag and meta description associated with that page. These tags are bits of HTML code that show up when your page appears in searches. Optimizing this information can boost your chances of ranking well in searches.
Half the battle is finding where to add your tags and meta data; We’ve created a free guide you can follow to find where to add tags to your Squarespace site for improved SEO.
SEO Tip #3: Link To And From Other Websites
Internal links are important SEO-boosting elements. When you link to other pages within your site, you help visitors navigate to areas they might be interested in exploring.
When you link to other websites, you’re seen as providing additional value to your visitors, which is positive in terms of SEO. You can link to articles written about your music, for example, or to sites that are promoting your upcoming appearances.
In addition, network within the online music community to have other websites link back to yours. This is called backlinking. Promoting each other’s music is a powerful way to improve SEO for musicians who collaborate with each other, helping each of you gain more online visibility.
SEO Tip #4: Edit Your Knowledge Panel
When you do a Google search on a term or name and a block of information appears on the right side of your screen, that block is called a knowledge panel.
When a Google knowledge panel appears for you as a musician, or for a musical group you’re a part of, you can contribute to that info by providing feedback and suggesting changes. This is your opportunity to boost SEO for musicians in your group (including, of course, yourself).
Google offers instructions on how to recommend a change to your knowledge panel. To be super clear, Google has reserved the right to have the final say in what will appear on a knowledge panel. Because of this, it is not possible to mandate a change at this time. If anything is unclear, turn to Launch Happy for assistance.
SEO Tip #5: Use Squarespace For Blogging
Finally, don’t overlook the value in the blogging function. It serves as a connection between you and your fans, and it also provides excellent opportunities to improve your Squarespace SEO organically.
Launch Happy has created a free SEO guide to blogging in 2021 that we encourage you to read. It covers the value of using Squarespace for blogging, how to get started, how often you should blog to maximize your site’s SEO, and the basics of optimizing your blog for search purposes.
In fact, we offer a wide selection of free guides designed to help improve SEO for musicians, artists, writers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, and others trying to establish themselves in their respective fields. Browse through our guides to learn more about Squarespace SEO today.