What Working In SEO Taught Me About Getting Music Heard

I work full-time in SEO and make club music in my spare time. For a long time I kept the two completely separate, mostly because "SEO guy" is not a thing anyone wants to be known as in a Sydney club.

But the overlap turns out to be substantial, and it explains something that took me years to work out about my own music.

Demand comes first, always

The first thing you learn doing search work is that you do not create demand. You find it and you position yourself in front of it. Nobody in SEO sits down and tries to make people want a thing. They find out what people already want and make sure their client is the answer.

Most music promotion advice has this backwards. It is all about pushing — post more, be consistent, engage with your community — which is the equivalent of shouting in a room where nobody arrived looking for anything.

The most successful thing I have ever released succeeded entirely because demand already existed. It was a remake of an unreleased track people were actively hunting for. I did not build an audience for it. I stepped in front of one.

That is a slightly deflating lesson but it is a useful one, because it means the question changes. Instead of "how do I get people to care about my track", the question becomes "what are people already looking for that I could credibly make".

What you call things matters more than you think

In search, the words on the page are how you get found. In music, producers routinely give tracks names that no human being would ever type, then tag them with the three broadest genres available, then wonder why nothing surfaces.

A few things that are genuinely worth doing:

• Include the artist name in edits and remixes. If someone is searching, they are searching the original artist's name. This is the single highest-leverage thing on the list.
• Tag specifically, not broadly. "Techno" is a category with millions of entries and you will never surface in it. The narrower descriptor is the one that finds you a listener.
• Write a real description. Two sentences about what the track is and where it came from. It costs nothing and it is indexable text.
• Be consistent with your name everywhere. If your SoundCloud, Instagram and TikTok handles are different, you are splitting the small amount of search demand you have across three places.

None of this is exciting. All of it is the difference between being findable and not.

The long tail applies to music

In search, you almost never win the big broad terms. What you win is hundreds of tiny specific ones, and together they add up to more than the big one would have.

The music version of this is that a very small, very specific audience is worth more than a large vague one. Two hundred people who specifically want the exact thing you make will turn up to a show. Twenty thousand people who followed you for one viral track will not.

I know this from experience, because I have the twenty thousand version and it does very little.

Own the thing you can own

The other lesson search work hammers into you is the difference between rented and owned. Rankings can vanish overnight when an algorithm changes. Anyone whose entire business depends on one traffic source eventually learns this the hard way.

Followers are rented. SoundCloud, Instagram and TikTok all decide who sees your posts, and none of them are optimising for your career. An email list is one of the few things in music you actually own, and it is worth starting one long before you feel you have enough people to justify it.

I was slow to do this and it cost me the entire audience from the track that did well. There is no way to go back and collect them.

Where the comparison stops

I should be careful not to push this too far. Search is a solved-ish problem with measurable inputs. Music is not. You cannot optimise your way into someone caring about a record, and plenty of technically well-marketed music goes nowhere because the music is not good enough.

The tactics only decide whether the right people get the chance to hear it. Whether they stay is entirely down to the track.

But given how many good tracks never get heard at all, being findable is not a bad place to start.