Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche Part 2

Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche Part 2
by Carla Lynne Hall

In Part 1 of “Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche”, we learned about a bluegrass musician from South Carolina participating in the Thirty Day Challenge. During the Thirty Day Challenge TV Show on Day 12, “Mr. Bluegrass” (as I’ll call him here) asked Ed Dale if he could try the niche “bluegrass south carolina”. Ed thought it was fine, but a few enterprising Challengers in the internet TV show’s found the search numbers too low. So what does Mr. Bluegrass do now?

After last night’s internet show ended, I immediately started a case study to find a way for Mr. Bluegrass to get better search numbers. In addition, I worked out a SEO strategy that can be used by musicians and other creative types. This strategy will be featured in a future article here (or maybe even a video if I’m really cooking!), but for now, I just want to send a helpful lifeline to a fellow musician in South Carolina.

For the sake of simplicity, and future visitors to this blog post, I am using Google search numbers for my research. If you’re a lucky participant of the Thirty Day Challenge, the Market Samurai research tool will provide even more results.

First, let’s start with Mr. Bluegrass’ original choice of niche: “bluegrass south carolina”

Remember, according to the Thirty Day Challenge guidelines, a keyword can be a market when it gets 2400-3000 searches per month, and has less than 30,000 competing webpages.

If you do the Google search first, you’ll see that there are only six competing pages on the exact phrase. Having only six competing pages sounds great, right? But then I went to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and found that there were an average of 390 searches on Google per month. While 390 searches a month on “bluegrass south carolina” is good, a keyword with 2400-3000 searches a month would be better. How do we find a compatible keyword niche for Mr. Bluegrass?

For today’s strategy, I simply entered a musical category for my Google search, and drilled my way down til I found possibly compatible sub-niches. While “bluegrass music” gets 60,500 Google searches each month, which is too large for our purposes, there are attractive sub-niches. I have listed my favorite bluegrass sub-niches below (along with suggestions):

“bluegrass gospel music”
3600 average monthly searches/816 competing websites
If Mr. Bluegrass plays in a bluegrass gospel band, that would be perfect, as he can blog about his band and others ’til the cows come home. Otherwise, he could just start a blog on his favorite bluegrass gospel bands.

“country bluegrass music”
2400 average monthly searches/ 899 competing websites
This is a good generic sounding keyword that can be used. Remember, it doesn’t matter that you or I may never refer to bluegrass music as “country bluegrass music”. What’s important is that a large group of people are using that term in search engines each month, so it’s valid.

“bluegrass music festivals”
1600 average monthly searches/816 competing websites
Since Mr. Bluegrass would be interested in this topic anyway, he could start a blog about bluegrass festivals around the US, being sure to also include stories about his own band, and their experiences.

“Bill Monroe music”
1600 average monthly searches/13,500 competing websites
Bill Monroe is a famous bluegrass musician, and bluegrass fans would enjoy visiting a tribute blog.

Interestingly enough, “bluegrass north carolina” also came up in this search:
1900 average monthly searches/1520 competing websites
According to these numbers, people think more about North Carolina when they think of bluegrass music. Perhaps Mr. Bluegrass could create a North Carolina vs South Carolina bluegrass blog: Who can fiddle the fastest? Whose band has been around longer?

Using the Thirty Day Challenge guidelines, Mr. Bluegrass can add two of the larger keyword niches to his original choice, and be on his way to dominating the online bluegrass world!

6 Responses to “Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche Part 2”

1. Tom Landini Says:
   August 13th, 2008 at 7:19 pm

   I’m also in the 30DC and I love what you’re doing with the case study. But I’m a bit confused on this post. Are you suggesting the South Carolina guy put up more blogs on these specific topics, or that he just add these additional keyword phases to his existing blog?

2. admin Says:
   August 13th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

   Thanks, Tom! I’m only suggesting additional keywords that can be used in one blog. One idea is that the bluegrass musician can use one of the larger keyword phrases in his domain name, and the sub-keywords could be used as blog categories.

3. Tom Landini Says:
   August 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am

   Thanks for the clarification Carla. Sounds like a great idea.

4. Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche Part 1 | Rock Star Life Lessons by Carla Lynne Hall Says:
   August 15th, 2008 at 9:50 am

   […] Thirty Day Challenge for Musicians: Finding Your SEO Keyword Niche Part 2 […]

5. Thirty Day Challenge Wrap Up | Rock Star Life Lessons by Carla Lynne Hall Says:
   September 8th, 2008 at 11:03 am

   […] Tom Landini: Thanks for the clarification Carla. Sounds like a great idea. Tagsed dale house concert Indie Music market samurai music management music publicity podcamp nyc 2.0 Thirty Day ChallengeCalendar […]

6. Shaun Smith Says:
   June 24th, 2009 at 12:59 pm

   Thanks you for your help! I’ll recommend this site to others.

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