Top 10 Best Practices for Getting Your Choir Found Online

Annelise Larson

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​It has never been more important to have a strong digital presence for your choir, but just being online is not enough. You need to follow the search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to help the search engines find you more easily. Here are 10 basic SEO tips to help you get started:

Paul Daly Photography

1. Be responsive. In other words, your website needs to look good on every screen size, especially for people searching using a mobile device. Make sure whatever website template, theme or design you use is responsive and mobile friendly. Test how mobile friendly you site is with this tool.
2. Load fast. People have no patience and search engines do not want to send them to sites that take too long to load. Test how fast your website loads with this tool.​
3. Be professional. Your site can’t have broken links or spelling mistakes. Search engines don’t want these kinds of errors on the sites they send searchers to. You can check your site for broken links using this tool and make sure to use your spell checker before you put anything up on your site.
4. Be secure. Google wants to encourage the overall security of the internet. Since the last update in spring 2020, it has become even more important to have an HTTPS site instead of just an HTTP site. Check with your website host to make sure your website has the appropriate security protocols.
5. Learn the language of your audience. People use language to search and there are tools like Google Trendsor Wordtracker that can give you some insight into this relevant language. 
6. Use this language strategically. Do not spam or use unnaturally but using these keywords in places like titles and headings and keeping it human friendly can effectively help you build a bridge between your choir and your audience through the mechanism of search.
7. Be focused and specific. You also want to make sure each page of your site or piece of content is about only one event or one person or one topic. This will increase your chances of it being returned for a specific search query.
8. Leverage Google My Business. Tied to Google Maps and often appearing as an information box on the right hand side of a page of search results, a Google My Business listing allows you to control descriptions, business details, images and even events that get extra visibility in search results.
9. Leverage Wikidata. Much easier to get into than Wikipedia, Wikidata is a public database that you should make sure your choir is in. Check out the listing for the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square as an example. 
10. Leverage structured data. Probably the most advanced SEO technique, but more and more of a requirement, using structured data markup (following the standards at Schema.org for music group) for your choir will help increase your prominence in search results. If your site is a Wordpress site there are some plugins you can use to add relevant structured data. 

​Working with digital strategist Annelise Larson, Choral Canada is pleased to provide a short blog series on digital strategies for choirs. This blog series is made possible by CAPACOA’s Linked Digital Future Initiative. 

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​Annelise Larson is a digital strategist who works with creative industry stakeholders to use the digital opportunity to find, grow & engage audiences & work toward sustainable business models. Her podcast STORY+AUDIENCE with writer Jill Golick can be found on all major podcasting platforms. She has recently launched a new digital marketing online course and is a Digital Transformation Coach with CAPACOA's Linked Digital Future Initiative. 

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