The Power of Persuasion: ABCs of Leveraging Personas for Search Success [#CZLNY]

During his session at ClickZ Live New York, Grant Simmons of Homes.com chatted about the value of personas in achieving search success.

The Scientific Secrets of Shareable Content: What Buzzfeed, Malcolm Gladwell & #TheDress Have in Common

Have you ever wondered why, in spite of your best intentions, you just can’t resist a clickbait headline on Buzzfeed?

What was it about #TheDress that got everyone up in arms? And what is it about Malcolm Gladwell that makes his work so interesting?

Is it possible to replicate this kind of remarkability, or is it entirely unpredictable?

The truth is there is compelling science behind the success of shareable content. The stuff that gets people talking isn’t quite as random as you ...

The post The Scientific Secrets of Shareable Content: What Buzzfeed, Malcolm Gladwell & #TheDress Have in Common appeared first on Social.

5 Best WordPress Appointment and Booking Plugins

Do you want to allow your customers to make an appointment directly from your WordPress site? Whether you are a dentist, hair salon, consultant, or manage a hotel, being able to book an appointment is essential for business. In this article, we will show you… Read More »

To leave a comment please visit 5 Best WordPress Appointment and Booking Plugins on WPBeginner.

Backlink Bummers: 5 Clues to Off-Site SEO Trouble

If a client’s website isn’t ranking as well as it should be after 90 to 120 days of work, the issue could be the backlinks.

Spam Score: Moz's New Metric to Measure Penalization Risk

Posted by randfish

Today, I'm very excited to announce that Moz's Spam Score, an R&D project we've worked on for nearly a year, is finally going live. In this post, you can learn more about how we're calculating spam score, what it means, and how you can potentially use it in your SEO work.

How does Spam Score work?

Over the last year, our data science team, led by Dr. Matt Peters, examined a great number of potential factors that predicted that a site might be penalized or banned by Google. We found strong correlations with 17 unique factors we call "spam flags," and turned them into a score.

Almost every subdomain in Mozscape (our web index) now has a Spam Score attached to it, and this score is viewable inside Open Site Explorer (and soon, the MozBar and other tools). The score is simple; it just records the quantity of spam flags the subdomain triggers. Our correlations showed that no particular flag was more likely than others to mean a domain was penalized/banned in Google, but firing many flags had a very strong correlation (you can see the math below).

Spam Score currently operates only on the subdomain level—we don't have it for pages or root domains. It's been my experience and the experience of many other SEOs in the field that a great deal of link spam is tied to the subdomain-level. There are plenty of exceptions—manipulative links can and do live on plenty of high-quality sites—but as we've tested, we found that subdomain-level Spam Score was the best solution we could create at web scale. It does a solid job with the most obvious, nastiest spam, and a decent job highlighting risk in other areas, too.

How to access Spam Score

Right now, you can find Spam Score inside Open Site Explorer, both in the top metrics (just below domain/page authority) and in its own tab labeled "Spam Analysis." Spam Score is only available for Pro subscribers right now, though in the future, we may make the score in the metrics section available to everyone.

The current Spam Analysis page includes a list of subdomains or pages linking to your site. You can toggle the target to look at all links to a given subdomain on your site, given pages, or the entire root domain. You can further toggle source tier to look at the Spam Score for incoming linking pages or subdomains (but in the case of pages, we're still showing the Spam Score for the subdomain on which that page is hosted).

You can click on any Spam Score row and see the details about which flags were triggered. We'll bring you to a page like this:

Back on the original Spam Analysis page, at the very bottom of the rows, you'll find an option to export a disavow file, which is compatible with Google Webmaster Tools. You can choose to filter the file to contain only those sites with a given spam flag count or higher:

Disavow exports usually take less than 3 hours to finish. We can send you an email when it's ready, too.

WARNING: Please do not export this file and simply upload it to Google! You can really, really hurt your site's ranking and there may be no way to recover. Instead, carefully sort through the links therein and make sure you really do want to disavow what's in there. You can easily remove/edit the file to take out links you feel are not spam. When Moz's Cyrus Shepard disavowed every link to his own site, it took more than a year for his rankings to return!

We've actually made the file not-wholly-ready for upload to Google in order to be sure folks aren't too cavalier with this particular step. You'll need to open it up and make some edits (specifically to lines at the top of the file) in order to ready it for Webmaster Tools

In the near future, we hope to have Spam Score in the Mozbar as well, which might look like this:

Sweet, right? :-)

Potential use cases for Spam Analysis

This list probably isn't exhaustive, but these are a few of the ways we've been playing around with the data:

1. Checking for spammy links to your own site: Almost every site has at least a few bad links pointing to it, but it's been hard to know how much or how many potentially harmful links you might have until now. Run a quick spam analysis and see if there's enough there to cause concern.
2. Evaluating potential links: This is a big one where we think Spam Score can be helpful. It's not going to catch every potentially bad link, and you should certainly still use your brain for evaluation too, but as you're scanning a list of link opportunities or surfing to various sites, having the ability to see if they fire a lot of flags is a great warning sign.
3. Link cleanup: Link cleanup projects can be messy, involved, precarious, and massively tedious. Spam Score might not catch everything, but sorting links by it can be hugely helpful in identifying potentially nasty stuff, and filtering out the more probably clean links.
4. Disavow Files: Again, because Spam Score won't perfectly catch everything, you will likely need to do some additional work here (especially if the site you're working on has done some link buying on more generally trustworthy domains), but it can save you a heap of time evaluating and listing the worst and most obvious junk.

Over time, we're also excited about using Spam Score to help improve the PA and DA calculations (it's not currently in there), as well as adding it to other tools and data sources. We'd love your feedback and insight about where you'd most want to see Spam Score get involved.

Details about Spam Score's calculation

This section comes courtesy of Moz's head of data science, Dr. Matt Peters, who created the metric and deserves (at least in my humble opinion) a big round of applause. - Rand

Definition of "spam"

Before diving into the details of the individual spam flags and their calculation, it's important to first describe our data gathering process and "spam" definition.

For our purposes, we followed Google's definition of spam and gathered labels for a large number of sites as follows.

• First, we randomly selected a large number of subdomains from the Mozscape index stratified by mozRank.
• Then we crawled the subdomains and threw out any that didn't return a "200 OK" (redirects, errors, etc).
• Finally, we collected the top 10 de-personalized, geo-agnostic Google-US search results using the full subdomain name as the keyword and checked whether any of those results matched the original keyword. If they did not, we called the subdomain "spam," otherwise we called it "ham."

We performed the most recent data collection in November 2014 (after the Penguin 3.0 update) for about 500,000 subdomains.

Relationship between number of flags and spam

The overall Spam Score is currently an aggregate of 17 different "flags." You can think of each flag a potential "warning sign" that signals that a site may be spammy. The overall likelihood of spam increases as a site accumulates more and more flags, so that the total number of flags is a strong predictor of spam. Accordingly, the flags are designed to be used together—no single flag, or even a few flags, is cause for concern (and indeed most sites will trigger at least a few flags).

The following table shows the relationship between the number of flags and percent of sites with those flags that we found Google had penalized or banned:

ABOVE: The overall probability of spam vs. the number of spam flags. Data collected in Nov. 2014 for approximately 500K subdomains. The table also highlights the three overall danger levels: low/green (< 10%) moderate/yellow (10-50%) and high/red (>50%)

The overall spam percent averaged across a large number of sites increases in lock step with the number of flags; however there are outliers in every category. For example, there are a small number of sites with very few flags that are tagged as spam by Google and conversely a small number of sites with many flags that are not spam.

Spam flag details

The individual spam flags capture a wide range of spam signals link profiles, anchor text, on page signals and properties of the domain name. At a high level the process to determine the spam flags for each subdomain is:

• Collect link metrics from Mozscape (mozRank, mozTrust, number of linking domains, etc).
• Collect anchor text metrics from Mozscape (top anchor text phrases sorted by number of links)
• Collect the top five pages by Page Authority on the subdomain from Mozscape
• Crawl the top five pages plus the home page and process to extract on page signals
• Provide the output for Mozscape to include in the next index release cycle

Since the spam flags are incorporated into in the Mozscape index, fresh data is released with each new index. Right now, we crawl and process the spam flags for each subdomains every two - three months although this may change in the future.

Link flags

The following table lists the link and anchor text related flags with the the odds ratio for each flag. For each flag, we can compute two percents: the percent of sites with that flag that are penalized by Google and the percent of sites with that flag that were not penalized. The odds ratio is the ratio of these percents and gives the increase in likelihood that a site is spam if it has the flag. For example, the first row says that a site with this flag is 12.4 times more likely to be spam than one without the flag.

ABOVE: Description and odds ratio of link and anchor text related spam flags. In addition to a description, it lists the odds ratio for each flag which gives the overall increase in spam likelihood if the flag is present).

Working down the table, the flags are:

• Low mozTrust to mozRank ratio: Sites with low mozTrust compared to mozRank are likely to be spam.
• Large site with few links: Large sites with many pages tend to also have many links and large sites without a corresponding large number of links are likely to be spam.
• Site link diversity is low: If a large percentage of links to a site are from a few domains it is likely to be spam.
• Ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains/domains (two separate flags): Sites with a large number of followed links relative to nofollowed are likely to be spam.
• Small proportion of branded links (anchor text): Organically occurring links tend to contain a disproportionate amount of banded keywords. If a site does not have a lot of branded anchor text, it's a signal the links are not organic.

On-page flags

Similar to the link flags, the following table lists the on page and domain name related flags:

ABOVE: Description and odds ratio of on page and domain name related spam flags. In addition to a description, it lists the odds ratio for each flag which gives the overall increase in spam likelihood if the flag is present).

• Thin content: If a site has a relatively small ratio of content to navigation chrome it's likely to be spam.
• Site mark-up is abnormally small: Non-spam sites tend to invest in rich user experiences with CSS, Javascript and extensive mark-up. Accordingly, a large ratio of text to mark-up is a spam signal.
• Large number of external links: A site with a large number of external links may look spammy.
• Low number of internal links: Real sites tend to link heavily to themselves via internal navigation and a relative lack of internal links is a spam signal.
• Anchor text-heavy page: Sites with a lot of anchor text are more likely to be spam then those with more content and less links.
• External links in navigation: Spam sites may hide external links in the sidebar or footer.
• No contact info: Real sites prominently display their social and other contact information.
• Low number of pages found: A site with only one or a few pages is more likely to be spam than one with many pages.
• TLD correlated with spam domains: Certain TLDs are more spammy than others (e.g. pw).
• Domain name length: A long subdomain name like "bycheapviagra.freeshipping.onlinepharmacy.com" may indicate keyword stuffing.
• Domain name contains numerals: domain names with numerals may be automatically generated and therefore spam.

If you'd like some more details on the technical aspects of the spam score, check out the video of Matt's 2012 MozCon talk about Algorithmic Spam Detection or the slides (many of the details have evolved, but the overall ideas are the same):

We'd love your feedback

As with all metrics, Spam Score won't be perfect. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for improving the score as well as what you'd like to see from it's in-product application in the future. Feel free to leave comments on this post, or to email Matt (matt at moz dot com) and me (rand at moz dot com) privately with any suggestions.

Good luck cleaning up and preventing link spam!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

‘What Should I Post on Facebook?’ 12 Facebook Tactics Working Right Now

If you feel challenged by Facebook marketing these days, you should know you’re not alone.

In an increasingly crowded news feed, Facebook’s algorithm updates can make it tough for brands to get much notice.

In fact, brands are now responding to plunging organic reach on Facebook by posting more content to Instagram than they are to Facebook, according to a report by research firm L2.

But don’t despair; there’s plenty of life left in Facebook yet. We’ve been scouring the web to find out what’s working on Facebook ...

The post ‘What Should I Post on Facebook?’ 12 Facebook Tactics Working Right Now appeared first on Social.

5 Trends to Watch in the Mobile-First Search Era

In this forward-thinking mobile world, let’s look ahead to the five key mobile trends to watch.

43 Beautiful Free WordPress Blog Themes

Are you looking for beautiful free WordPress themes? One of the best thing about WordPress is the large collection of beautiful free WordPress blog themes available. In this article, we hand-picked a list of top 43 most beautiful free WordPress themes for your blog. 1.… Read More »

To leave a comment please visit 43 Beautiful Free WordPress Blog Themes on WPBeginner.

Natural Links – What Are They, Really?

Good links are always a subject of some contention among SEOs. They’re often referred to as real, organic, or "natural," but the question is how can we get links that matter?

Music SEO - 7 Lessons in Brand Optimization for 2015

Posted by evolvingSEO

Bands, music, and SEO - A different paradigm

For B2B or ecommerce, people often discover your brand with commercial queries like "dining room lamps" or an informational search like "how to fix a dishwasher".

Then they look around your site, your social profiles, get retargeted—before ever making a purchase—but in many cases that journey started with an non-branded organic search. Search is certainly not the only discovery channel. But important enough that investment in non-branded keywords is essential.

A (very simplified) illustration of this discovery path might look something like this:

The above is NOT the case for musicians and bands though. When's the last time you discovered a band with a search engine? Probably never.

For bands and musicians, the discovery path is flipped around. THIS is probably more realistic:

The search engine is more about reducing friction on the path to becoming a die-hard fan. I don't think many people are discovering their new favorite band like this:

But you HAVE probably tried to learn more about bands and musicians after the initial discovery with searches like this:

(No, I am not a Lumineers fan—just so there's no confusion ;) )

I don't think many musicians, bands, record labels or managers are looking at this aspect of search. Sure, you can hope that users and Google "just figure it out." Or you can be proactive and create the best fan experience possible.

---

SEO for bands = The branded keyword experience

So the REAL opportunity in keywords for bands and musicians is the fan experience here:

It's their "branded" terms (or what I like to call "PropWords"—proprietary keywords):

• band name
• musician names
• album names
• song names
• lyrics
• performance dates
• interviews
• etc...

For example, there's a TON of volume around Lupe Fiasco's branded terms—and this is only the tip of the iceberg:

Just because no one's discovering Lupe Fiasco in organic search, doesn't mean there's no opportunity. It's just not in the normal places you'd look for B2B or eCommerce opportunity.

So that's the lens through which the rest of this post should be seen through. SEO for bands is primarily about the fan experience searching their branded terms.

---

Search result opportunities for bands

1. Event listings

1.1 Optimize your own site for general tour searches

As a band, it's important to keep fans and potential fans in your ecosystem. You should keep fans on your properties (website, social etc) as much as possible—so as not to give up extra traffic to third party sites. Being visible for your own event searches is a critical way to keep them there.

Let's use on of my new favorite bands, Sylvan Esso. Here's an example of what Google typically shows for a tour search—for the query "sylvan esso tour dates":

I imagine for this query, fans are trying to get a list of all tour dates. So what is Google doing now? They are providing the list front and center.

You notice that Sylvan Esso only has one result—everything else goes to a third party site. This is already a lost opportunity to drive more fans to their site.

They could optimize for clicks by aligning the likely user intent with their appearance in the SERP. Using the SEO Mofo SERP tool, I came up with:

This listing may perform better because:

• It aligns with most likely user intent (browse all dates/location & purchase)
• The URL is more informative
• It promises something exclusive (as long as they deliver—maybe with a group discount, a meet and greet etc).

This is the start to funneling fans through your website instead of a third party.

1.2 Create pages for individual shows (with caution)

Some fans may opt to click a tour date Google has provided. What does Google do next?

Google then returns a page like this—with a TON of stuff:

This SERP is packed! It includes:

• A date carousel
• A large AdWords ad
• A map card
• Knowledge Graph card
• Top result has 4 site-links
• 7 more normal organic results, some with date snippets and extra links

Here's the kicker. There's only one tiny little link to sylvanesso.com—in the map card. And it goes to their homepage. They have a pretty poor shot at driving users to their website here.

Let's look at a result for a specific Dave Matthews Band tour date:

They're doing it a little better. Few observations with this one:

• Their link in the map goes to their tour page
• The #1 organic listing goes to their website—because they have a specific page for that exact show.
• The amount of stuff in this SERP is still immense. The first organic result is way below the fold.
• The "with caution" part is that—you don't want to just create individual pages for every show, without trying to add something of value to them—like information about the venue, past show pictures from that venue, etc. These pages can get quite "thin" and this isn't a good thing either.

1.3 Tag your site to get official ticket links

Finally, the biggest change in Google is the addition of official ticketing agents. To use one of their examples, let's look at Google's example of "ariana grande tour" (and no, definitely not a secret Ariana Grande fan—although some of the production is decent):

Not only do the tour dates show up at the top, but check out this preferred ticketing link showing prominently in the Map Card:

Google first announced this capability about a year ago. And they have recently expanded this for comedians and concert venues as well. Here is Google's official developer documentation on event markup for performers: https://developers.google.com/structured-data/events/performers I want to note, they are giving preferential treatment to official artist websites:

You have three options to specify event info:

1. HTML—code it directly into your page
2. Plugins or Widgets
3. New "Delegation" Markup—indicate Google to source it from another webpage

2. Make an app (or several) and index them

For those not aware, App Indexing is getting pretty real. I think this is a major opportunity for bands and musicians. Let's look at mobile search volume for a few albums that have come out recently:

According to my small sample, at least 44% of album name searches are on a mobile device (not even including tablets). Recent claims are that Android has almost 50% of the smartphone market share. For Alicia Keys, that would mean about 18,500 searches a month for "girl on fire" on an Android.

Are you seeing the opportunity? No? Well, Bjork did:

She had an app developed just for her new album, Biophillia. Now, Android users searching Google for this album will be able to purchase and experience the "multimedia exploration" in this app.

If I was a label, I'd be experimenting with making apps for all albums by artists—filling them with an exclusive experience—and seeing what happens.

Google put together their 4-steps to appiness—and easy to follow guide to get your Android app indexed in Google search.

3. Get a Knowledge Graph result

I know we've look at musicians who have already reached a threshold of popularity. They are likely to have a Knowledge Graph result already.

But what if you're an up and coming musician? You may not have a Knowledge Graph result—but perhaps with a little nudge you can get one. For example, a friend of mine (and old bandmate) Lost Midas is now a solo electrofusion producer and songwriter. He is signed to an independent label and even just performed at SXSW—but unfortunately Google does not show a Knowledge Graph result:

What could someone like him do to get in the Knowledge Graph?

One thing I found interesting was Google's suggestions for how performers specifically can get in the Knowledge Graph. It's buried at the bottom of the event listings page:

3.1 Get listed in Wikipedia

This is easier said than done. Be sure to read their inclusion criteria for music.

If you feel the band or musician is notable enough to get into Wikipedia, you can then start the process here. That is the official page to add an article request for bands and musicians. Please note, Wikipedia does not want you to list yourself.

As Google states above— be sure the official homepage is recorded correctly. I take this to mean—list the exact ("canonical") version of your homepage URL. The one you would verify in Webmaster Tools.

You may also find this article on how someone claimed to sneak through Wiki's notability test interesting (although I can't officially say how good that method is).

3.2 Get listed in MusicBrainz

The other site Google recommends getting listed in is MusicBrainz.org. I don't have much experience with this site, but you can go here to learn about making contributions.

3.3 Upload audio to Archive.org

Note, this is just my hunch. But if Google is using Wikipedia and MusicBrainz to inform their Knowledge Graph results—perhaps they use Archive.org. Why not? It's one of the most authoritative sources on the web.

With Archive.org you can upload entire concerts to their site:

3.4 Create and verify a Google Plus page

Right, I know. "No one uses Google Plus." "Google Plus is dying." Perhaps there are elements of truth there. But I'd be surprised if having a Google Plus page verified with your website doesn't somehow impact Knowledge Graph listings.

My friend does not have a Google Plus listing currently:

For those needing to create and verify a Google Plus page:

1. Go here and choose "Brand" to create a page. (Note, you are not creating a personal page. This is a mistake I see many organizations making).
2. And then link your website to your brand page by following those instructions.

4. Customize your Knowledge Graph

Once you have a Knowledge Graph listing—that's just the beginning! Google recently added ways to control what appears there.

4.1 Specify your logo

For bands (and all organizations really) branding is an essential element of success. Google now gives you the opportunity to directly control the logo users see in your Knowledge Graph result:

As you can see above, the jazz group The Bad Plus has a random picture from an article showing—when perhaps there is a better photo they would prefer. This may be especially important from a consistency of branding standpoint.

4.2 Specify your social profiles

In addition, you can also directly control what social media links show in the knowledge graph. As I've mentioned, getting users to follow you on social is a key goal for bands in terms of audience development. Your audience is everything. And for bands, most search activity is going to come from their brand name. Why not make it easier for them to discover your social profiles?

For example, the amazing "Livetronica" Band (live electronica music) The New Deal could get all of their social links to show in their Knowledge Box:

As you can see they are missing a huge opportunity to get more fans to their Instagram, Twitter and Soundcloud profiles. There's at least 1,700 searches a month for "the new deal music" and "the new deal band".

5. Have a crawlable and indexable site

For some reason, I have noticed sites in the music industry tend to be pretty inferior. This could be due to labels using poor frameworks, or the band/artist needing to just get a website up the quickest, cheapest and easiest way possible. This can cause some issues though.

Let's check out my friend's site again. He's currently on the Flavors.me platform. It looks like there's several "pages" to the user, but to Google his website is just all one page:

As mentioned, this is a common yet often overlooked issue with music websites I see. In fact, despite Bjork getting it right by having an app—her website has the same issue:

Her website (which actually does looks like an impressive creative endeavor) is built with hashes # in the URLs. Which makes the individual pages uncrawlable.

This shows up as an issue if I try to find her mailing list in Google:

The first result goes to her record label's page. That's fine right? Well, not really because she has her own mailing list:

Because of how the website is built though, that page is basically invisible to Google—and users can not easily find it from a search.

The absence of Bjork's mailing list in search results is a critical oversight. For an artist, your mailing list is one of your strongest assets.

5. Leverage your own YouTube channel

As it's often said, YouTube is the second largest search engine. And there's no doubt music queries make up a huge percentage of their overall search volume.

5.1 Create a YouTube channel

I'm sad to have to say this, but many bands don't seem to even have a YouTube page of their own. Again, they are missing a massive opportunity to funnel fans searching for their content to their YouTube account—where they can grow subscribers, promote music and cross-promote other channels.

For example, that band The New Deal does not have their own YouTube channel:

Their live performances are a core selling point. This drives a ton of activity around their band in YouTube (people looking for concert footage). If they added some of their own on their own channel, they could capture a lot of this activity and engage with the fans.

5.2 Add video content fans are looking for

Having a channel is great, but fans are often looking for specific pieces of content. It's really nice to have lots of fans that upload this content for you for fun, but capturing some of this activity is important.

For example, another new band I have been liking a lot - Made In Heights—could be doing this:

Fans are looking for live performances, and the only ones there now are all fan uploads.

You can use YouTube search suggest to find other things fans are searching for. I don't see it mentioned often, but KeywordTool.io allows you to get YouTube search suggestions:

This can quickly give you ideas of what content to add to your band page in YouTube:

The above screenshot shows the most common searches around "Made In Heights". They mostly look like song names. If I were that band, I'd make sure they have video or content for every one of those songs.

You can use YouTube directly of course to find search suggestions off of the band name. For example, there are a lot of lyric searches. This makes sense. People want to listen to the song while reading the lyrics:

Wow! Yet, what happens when we look in YouTube for "made in heights lyrics"?

Never mind the band not having any lyric results—NO one has any lyric results. This is definitely an opportunity to provide content that doesn't exist within YouTube.

5.3 Create playlists

Playlists are also overlooked in YouTube. They have many benefits:

• Make your content easier to discover by organizing it.
• Keep viewers on your content, in your channel
• I've heard it rumored that creation of playlists can help you rank better in YouTube search only if your channel helps YouTube keep viewers... inside YouTube. Playlists can do this.
• You can organize videos from any account into your playlists.
• You can also rank in Google search with playlists (more on that below)

I started using playlists on my YouTube music channel (where I mainly post covers and tutorials of hip-hop songs on piano)—and at least anecdotally—have seen my view count rise faster than usual:

(I sure did use the word "content" a lot in that screenshot!)

Many popular artists in YouTube don't have any playlists though—for example Flying Lotus:

You can also curate playlists of videos about your band no matter who uploaded it. For example, let's say you're Drake (OK, maybe Drake's record label or social media manager). You could curate playlists of the best Drake interviews, no matter who uploaded them:

Then when fans search, they may discover the playlist on Drake's channel which could earn subscriptions and also get them watching their chosen interviews.

Speaking of Drake—remember when I mentioned you could rank in Google search with YouTube playlists? Take a look at this:

That's a random fan playlist ranking #1 for "drake playlist"—which gets 1,600 searches a month. That's not an outlying case though. I barely had to look further for another example:

"john legend playlist" gets 720 searches a month—and two fan playlists rank at the top.

6. Contribute to Medium.com

While the idea of "guest posting" is saturated in many industries, I don't see this being done a whole lot in the music industry. That's why I was impressed when I noticed a DJ named A-Trak posted this compelling article about rap in 2014:

A few months later, this article has earned:

• 254 recommendations on Medium
• 1,480 Facebook shares
• 470 tweets
• 336 Google +1's
• Including shares by Fred Wilson (380,000+ followers) and pianist Chilly Gonzales (40,000+ followers and high relevance)

It even ranks #2 for [rap in 2014]:

Although not super high volume, it potentially ranks for a lot of long tail—and will bring in consistent brand discovery from a relevant audience.

6. Provide exclusive content about your lyrics

The SEO world is no stranger to lyric searches. Just last year, Rap Genius (now just "Genius") was caught up in a Google penalty. And back on December 19, Glenn Gabe was the first to notice Google displaying full lyrics in search results:

Glenn Gabe's screenshot from December 19, 2014 of Google displaying lyrics in search.

Glenn also recently published a pretty in depth study about lyrics in the SERPs I highly recommend you check out.

In his article, Glenn astutely points out that when you add the word "meaning" to your lyrics search—the lyrics box goes away—which I found to be true looking at Sylvan Esso "Coffee" lyrics:

As a band you could release exclusive content about your lyrics such as:

• A photo of where they were originally written (on a napkin while on tour etc)
• The story about how/why they were written
• An explanation about their style (rhyme patterns, metaphors, references to history etc.)
• Share old/original versions of the lyrics or a certain line and the process of revisions

Fans and music publications could also create exclusive content about the lyrics. They could interview the band about their meaning—or publish their own in-depth interpretation of the meaning.

I also want to point out—there can be a lot of search volume for a single line of a song lyric, if the song and artist are popular enough. Check out the volume for this one line by Drake:

That's 1,000 searches a month (certainly skewed all towards February, when the album came out) for "runnin' through the 6 with my woes".

And I want to point out, 65% of those searches are being done on mobile phones

Check out search volume for Adele lyrics from years ago now:

"But I set fire to the rain" and "watched it pour as I touched your face" both get decent volume and have a good share of mobile share.

Yet there is only one result in this SERP explaining the meaning to this line:

There's definitely value to be found by:

• finding lines from lyrics with search volume
• creating content to satisfy the user intent

Both the artists AND third party publishers have an opportunity here. Genius.com is really the only true player in this space right now!

7. Optimize for real name searches

Remember my friend "Lost Midas"? This is obviously not his real name. It's Jason Trikakis. Not a hugely common name. So a search for it should return his website #1 right?

Wrong. You can't always rely on Google to "figure it out." The problem here stems back to the fact his website is not very search-friendly. His name is on the website but very hard for Google to find.

Solution in this case would be:

• Ultimately to be on a better web platform.
• But also adding his name into the title of the page (if possible on Flavors.me) would certainly be a step in the right direction :)

Also—remember Sylvan Esso? What if one were to be searching around for "Nick Sanborn" who makes up 1/2 of the Sylvan Esso duo?

Now, I'd never argue something from sylvanesso.com should appear at the top. But there's nothing from their domain on the first page. As a fan, I'd probably enjoy at least one result from one of their own domains.

Here's a few ideas for them:

• Create a bio page on their own site
• Have a personal website which can then get people to the band website etc

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There's SO much more I could have mentioned in terms of marketing music these days. When I played in bands it was the days of MySpace :) I don't even think YouTube was out yet.

There are so many opportunities out there now with social media, platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp. I left a LOT out of this post.

If you have any questions at all, please ask in the comments below! And I also love to chat about music!

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