Top Five:
Proven Tactics to Rank #1 on Google for Your Music Studio
Jonathan Roberts
MTNA Business Digest, Volume 4, Issue 1
October 2024
Search engine optimization (SEO) has brought new students every week for about the past three years to my music school, South Shore Piano School in Quincy, Massachusetts. And so, I have become passionate about the opportunity it presents for our careers, our profession and our prospective students.
Here’s the exciting news: as much as SEO sounds like a medical exam or something for tech wizards, it’s easy for anyone to get started! It will give you a huge advantage in your area because you’re attracting students who are already interested in lessons!
The simplest definition of search engine optimization (SEO) is: The things that you do on and off your website to rank as high as you can on Google for specific keywords. And it presents an incredible opportunity for music teachers everywhere.
Here are the top five tactics you can use today to begin working your way up the Google ranks.
- Optimize your homepage for a specific keyword. A keyword is the word or phrase prospective students type into Google to look for you. And so, you want to be sure your homepage is optimized for the most popular keyword.
For example, if you are a piano teacher, the ideal keyword would probably be “piano lessons.” Here is a short (but not exhaustive) list of things you can do to optimize your homepage so that Google knows how to index your website properly.
- Include the target keyword in your H1 header at the top of the page.
- Aim for approximately 2% “keyword density” (for every 100 words on your website, include the keyword twice).
- Add two outbound links to “authority websites” (like mtna.org!).
- Write an SEO title and meta descriptions, using your target keyword. You’ll do this in your website editing software to control how your website displays in a Google search.
- Begin accumulating backlinks. A “backlink” is SEO speak for a website that links back to your website. This tells Google that your website is trustworthy and deserves to work its way up the rankings.
Two important things, though! First, in an ideal world, you want the websites linking to your homepage to be high-quality websites that are well-established; steer clear of very new or questionable websites.
Second, you can’t game the system by linking to a friend’s website and having them link to you. Google is too smart for that and will cancel both links.
You can begin accumulating backlinks by:
- Finding existing references to you that are already on the internet and asking those websites to link to your website.
- When you have gigs, asking for a backlink to your website on the event page.
- Guest blogging on an established website.
- Building citation links—which is so effective, it’s #3!
- Build citation links. Citation links are backlinks to your website that come through directories like Yelp, yellowpages.com and more. They are the easiest to get because you can create them yourself.
This takes a lot of time, so an effective way to gain up to 100 citation links quickly (and make sure they’re done correctly) is to use a reputable SEO service like Loganix. For a fee, they will get you set up on dozens of directories in a matter of days, saving you an incredible amount of time and boosting your SEO quickly.
- Set up your Google Business Profile. If you don’t have a Google Business Profile set up, do this as soon as you’re finished reading this article!
It’s completely free, and in a matter of days it will pull your studio up on the maps listings when someone searches for your target keyword.
- Accumulate Google reviews. This is the single-most direct way you can influence your Google search rankings. Reviews indicate people have had a good experience with you, which indicates trustworthiness, which helps your rankings.
In your Google Business Profile, you can find a link you can save for easy sharing with students and families.
Once your Google review count begins to grow, you will notice that more inquiries come in because a high Google review count naturally pops off the page in a Google search.
For a more comprehensive SEO to-do list, please check out my handout from my SEO presentation at the 2024 MTNA Conference in Atlanta. Another excellent read is Three Months to No. 1 by Will Coombe (incidentally, the author’s wife is a piano teacher!).
It takes some time and practice, but with enough diligence, you will build a top-ranking website for your local community and always have a steady stream of new, excited students knocking at your door.
Jonathan Roberts is the owner of the South Shore Piano School in Quincy, Massachusetts. He serves as the immediate past president of the Massachusetts MTA and an examiner for the Royal Conservatory of Music.