Getting your music in as many places as possible has quite a few benefits: more exposure, easy discoverability, more sales, etc. But an often overlooked benefit of distributing your music to the many popular music stores and services like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Spotify, is increased rankings in search engines.
There are a few different reasons for this.
Increased visibility
When your band gets listed on 95+ sites through CD Baby distribution, that’s over 95 pages extolling the virtues of your band on the internet. That’s 95+ pages added to the Google directory, and that’s 95+ new pages that will come up when someone searches for your band.
Increased citations
Google looks at mentions of a business, brand, or band as an indication of it’s relevance to certain searches. In other words, the more times your band name is mentioned in a musical context on various sites, the easier it is for Google to identify and present appropriate pages for relevant searches.
Schema markup
Music websites like Google Play and CD Baby use a special code markup that let’s search engines know what any given page is about. There is a special schema markup for music artists. Getting listed on sites with schema markup means Google and Bing can tell your band is . . . well . . . a band (and not a kitchen utensil or a cleaning product). This way your band pages will rank for music-related queries and not kitchen-related ones.
Reputation control
You know that really bad review you got back in 2003 that still shows up on the first page of Google search results? Getting listed on multiple high profile sites like iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify can mean that your bad review gets pushed off the front page. Phew!
What are your thoughts on digital distribution and search engine visibility? Let us know in the comments below.
Get worldwide distribution with CD Baby and rank better today!