SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves discovering the key search terms (keywords) that people actually enter into search engines when looking for your kind of music. Many musicians figure out likely keywords but then completely miss the vital step of analyzing those keywords in terms of the competition.
Let’s take an example of this. Let’s say your musical genre is New Age – what most New Age musicians do is put “new age” in the keywords section of the code of their web page (called the Keyword Meta Tag) in the hope that people looking for New Age music will find them. But without doing a competitive analysis they completely miss the fact that, while 4,000 people a day do search using “new age”, there are also 28 million sites that use that term on them so the chances of being found using that keyword phrase are pretty much nil.
By using competitive analysis software tools they would find that 5,000 people a day search for “new age music” while 1.3 million sites use that term so there is a lot less competition if they use that keyword phrase. However, where the gold lies is in finding out that thousands a day are searching on such keywords as “calm music”, “yoga music”, “relaxation music” with competition as little as 40,000 sites.
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