SEO Hell: How Viral Songs Get Lost in Search

Imagine your song is finally going viral. The videos are blowing up on TikTok and Reels, people are looking for your music, and there's a problem. They can't find your song on YouTube or Spotify, the two most common places fans go to listen to songs they find on Short Form Video apps.

Here's why. Right now, there is so much chaos going on with search AI, fraudsters, and this world is just crowded. You have massive artists getting hundreds of millions of views and still running into what we call SEO nightmares, where someone goes to look up their viral song or profile, and the fans can't find them. Then, when people in the music business look at them and consider working with them, they see this artist getting a ton of attention but no streams, so they assume what I would, which is that no one likes their song. Sometimes that isn't the case. They're just in what we call SEO hell.

Today, I'm going to teach you all the ways musicians end up in SEO hell and how to make sure it doesn't happen to you.

The Citizen Problem

A lot of you have never heard of any of this, but there's a reason SEO for songs and artists is fast becoming one of the fastest-growing parts of music. Let me walk you through one of my favorite stories from this world.

On the members feed and newsletter a while back, we covered an artist who blew up on social, getting hundreds of millions of views on their short-form videos. The streams on Spotify were seriously lacking. When I looked, I noticed something. On TikTok and Reels, they go by Citizen the Artist, but on Spotify, they're just Citizen.

Citizen the Artist makes kind of bland pop. Meanwhile, there's been an emo hardcore band named Citizen who can headline 3,000-seat venues across America for a decade and a half, and they're quite active. Citizen the Artist seemed not to care and just called themselves Citizen on the DSPs. God knows why.

This created a nightmare for both artists. I talked to the band's management and yeah, it confuses them too. So now you have Citizen the band's fans getting bland pop songs when they search for them, and Citizen the Artist's fans finding hardcore screaming when they search for their softboy pop jams. No one wins.

There's a solution for this. Obviously, Citizen the Artist could have just called themselves that on the DSPs, as they do on the SFV apps. But SEO saves this. If you know anything about SEO, you know that Yoast is what you should be using if you want to do SEO easily and don't want to understand much more than typing in a few things to make sure your potential fans find what they're looking for.

Their free product, Yoast SEO, is what artists use to make sure fans searching for viral lyrics or merch designs find them, and to come up in search and chatbots when results aren't landing on Google or the various LLMs. This is why I'm thrilled to have them sponsor this. They've helped me, and so many of my clients get through this trouble, and I was excited to work with them. Let me run through how.

Obscurity

That Citizen story is the nightmare I see once a month. The problem I see on a near-weekly basis is, let's be honest, many of you are faced with an unpleasant reality. It's hard to find an original or new artist name. So you're misspelling preexisting words, or even more troublesome, naming yourselves after preexisting cities, places, brands, or puns on famous people's names. All of this makes it very hard for you to come up in a search on Google.

So when one friend turns to another and says they need to check out your banging new song, it can be a disaster in your funnel when you don't come up. The friend looking it up says, "Yeah, I found it," puts their phone back in their pocket, and pretends they did, but really has given up because it was too much effort. As this happens repeatedly, you wonder why you're growing so slowly. If you just do a little SEO work with Yoast, all of this could be fixed, and that friend of the person who's your fan could be listening to your song right now.

Yoast lets you tag things like music artist, band, music, song, and genre names, so as fans search for you, it's more likely they find you during that search.

When the Lyric Isn't the Title

This happens with songs, too. Just as common, your song is called something like "My Journey Through the Vast and Long Plagues to Find My Love," and the lyric your song is going viral for on TikTok is "Party Party, Keg to the Dome, I drank so much I ended up in Rome." Great stuff there. When a fan goes to search for that, they're not finding your song.

With Yoast, a simple entry into their SEO tool noting that the song that says "keg to the dome, ended up in Rome, is actually called your super long song title helps it so the fan actually find it. Your content shows up more clearly in search results and can be picked up and understood by AI systems, and that means fans find your song, become a fan, buy your merch, come to your shows, and start a years-long relationship with you. Isn't that nice? If you don't do that work, that may never happen. Which is why SEO is important.

SEO in a Chatbot World

In a world where everyone's talking to chatbots, things get even more confusing. We don't just deal with Google search anymore. People are searching for things in Claude, Gemini, and the world's worst therapist, ChatGPT. So your songs need to be in those, too. When you do SEO with Yoast, it helps AI systems better understand and interpret your content, so when they're looking for your viral song, that potential fan finds it. It makes this work super fast and easy without you having to get concerned about this scary stuff.

Enjoying this? Forward it to a music friend you’d like to be closer to and start a discussion!

Merch

If your merch isn't showing up in search, Yoast has an amazing integration with Shopify. I've used it to get higher up on search results than the bootleg merch out there or others with similar merch.

For example, if your shirt is a parody of a Xanax ad from the 90s that people are really going to love, when someone types in "punk Xanax shirt," you want your shirt to come up. Yoast can help you with just that through the Shopify integration, so your merch store is right where they go.

Especially in a world where you'll often have to compete with big box stores, you want people to buy direct from you. Coming up high on search so you get the sale, the full cut of the sale, and own your customer is super crucial.

AI Imitators

Then there's the problem of all the AI imitators. To get into another dark part of the internet, we now have a ton of AI scammers making soundalikes of popular songs who will try to come up as your song goes viral. Search engines can tell when people look for something and find the wrong thing, and these AI scammers are lazy and bad so that often happens, but you can knock them down in search by having your song optimized using Yoast.

The Product

Let's talk about Yoast itself. All you need to do is install it on your site. On WordPress, it's easily findable in the plugin library, and the same with Shopify. Yoast has this amazing traffic light system that easily guides you through it, where you can know whether you're good to go with your SEO, since their tool really understands if you're putting in the right things.

I also need to tell you about Yoast SEO AI+, which is what really helps you know if you're doing the right things. A lot of you are probably wondering how you'd even know if any of this is working. This is the tool that gives you clear insights into how you're doing in search, as well as whether you're coming up in chat searches. Since search is always changing, it makes sure you stay up on the changes with easy answers on how to keep your search performance going. You can even see what people are feeling about you, including the sentiment of what they're saying about you online, as well as your competitors. It provides clear, actionable answers along with directions on what you can do to optimize your performance.

For those of you with deep catalogs who want to go deep into the SEO world and optimize the whole thing, they have tons of scalable products like Yoast SEO Premium, Yoast WooCommerce SEO, and Yoast SEO AI+. That can really help generate AI content that helps search engines understand your content and improves your chances of being discovered.

Try It

To try Yoast for free today, and use code MUSFORMATION15 for 15% off Yoast's latest products, as well as supporting this newsletter.