With the number of digital projects we’ve been working on, our fingers are sore from endless hours of SEO meta-tagging. Everyone realizes the importance of SEO, yet despite the in-depth focus that marketers put into it, there are often some obvious oversights that go unnoticed. Take for instance, the music landscape, where the single most important asset an artist can have, now, more than ever – is a name.
From an SEO standpoint, one would think that choosing common, non-unique words would lead to tenth-page banishment on Google, which is often the case for new artists. However, if you can make your band page rank in search engines as a #1 result with a simple name like “GIRLS”, your accomplishments are all the more impressive.
What any digital marketing team behind an artist could hope for, however, is an SEO-friendly gem. A term like “Lady Gaga” was probably never entered into a search engine prior to the release of “Just Dance” – and by that point, it was a guarantee you were going to find the Gaga you were looking for.
To create a name that can navigate the metadata quagmire of the Internet requires some creativity. It’s about finding an alternative way around things. Instead of making your moniker, The Weekend, try chopping out the last “e”. By these standards, The Weeknd has become a unique, and skyrocketing Internet sensation. By doing so, The Weeknd frontman Abel Tesfaye, was not only able to carve out his own unique corner of cyberspace, but to dominate the common term as well. (Typing, “the weekend” into Google, now returns the artist’s website as the top result).
Part of the reason an artist could achieve a presence like that, has to do with the introduction of Google’s “Panda” algorithm change. Panda aims to lower the rank of “low-quality” sites, in place of high quality content. “Quality” standards were established by a series of artificially intelligent tests, applied to thousands of websites that measured design, trustworthiness, speed, and likeliness to make a return visit.
While the launch of Panda has been followed by debate amongst webmasters, it seems that the algorithm must be doing something right. The Weeknd is driving traffic, a band named GIRLS can turn a top-result ranking (as can a band name CANT), and The Gorillaz have never been mistaken for the gorillas. We therefore put the onus of quality of the artists themselves. The final test of this point will be whether the buzzworthy Lana Del Rey can successfully erase all Google evidence of a first-attempt career launch under her birth name, Lizzy Grant. Perhaps then, we will discover the true power of a name.
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