Case Study: Musician Website Design

Executive Summary

The artist is an Australian bass music producer and DJ who has been turning heads for many years now with a series of rock and metal world releases and collabs, including with acclaimed artists such as Northlane, Silverstein, Crystal Lake, Thy Art is Muder and countless others. 

His distinct brand of hard-hitting guitars welded to heavy-duty bass has endeared him globally, racking up 75 million streams and a formidable live reputation. Yet while his profile has continued to soar, his website had not been updated since around 2017, was built on a platform not ideal for musicians and contained minimal SEO that would help fans find, and learn more about the artist.

Fred & Augustus was brought in to work alongside the artist's management and associated teams to broadly support artist marketing, and one of the first projects we started with was a complete website overhaul.

Challenges

The existing artist site was a basic, three-page website, that contained only a home page, a shop redirect, a tour page, and a newsletter subscribe form. While Google Analytics and Meta pixels were installed, there was little other content to keep fans on the site. Furthermore, there was no movement, no video and no listen features, and no about page - all which would help tell the artist’s unique story to fans. 

In addition, the artist's name not only competed with a known-brand name for search results presence, but his knowledge panel was not claimed, and as a result, what Google knew about him was muddled. We wanted to ensure we cleared those issues up as doing so would make it far easier - and more enjoyable - for fans to find answers to their queries about the artist in their online searches.

Solution

We knew we wanted a website experience that reflected the artist's position and profile, while also encouraging fans to further explore his artist story (whether by listening to music, watching music videos, learning more about tour dates, or purchasing merch). We also wanted this interaction to be enticing, and engaging while aligning closely with the artist's branding, ensuring that the experience on-site closely matched that of email, social media, and advertising. 

Our solution was a multi-page site that fully explores everything the artist has to share with fans. Navigation was expanded to include Tour, Shop, Listen, Watch, Story, and Contact, and social icons were also expanded to include all primary platforms. Movement was added to the homepage in the form of a hype video loop, and the main information we knew fans would want was also included as featured snippets on the home page. The snippets included small grabs of the most newsworthy info from Upcoming Shows, Shop, News, Listen & Watch, and were designed to encourage flow throughout the site to the primary pages for those Navigation items. We also moved the artist's newsletter subscriber database to Mailchimp and created an automated Welcome Series flow, so now when fans come to the site and sign up for his newsletter they are immediately welcomed to the family.

While we did not “build” the site (this was done by a designer on the artist's team), Fred & Augustus was responsible for the ideation of the full site wireframe (including navigation expansion), content creation, project management of the build (including pixel management and implementation of all on-page SEO). 

When it came to the website SEO we took a two-prong approach. The first was paying careful attention to the on-page SEO. We carefully formulated all URLs and ensured that H1’s, H2’s, and body copy were keyword focused. We also added Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions to the back end of each page to improve the information served to fans (and hopefully therefore their click-through rate too). Additionally, we worked with an external developer to implement music schema at all levels of the website; the artist Knowledge panel was claimed, and schema was coded that told Google exactly what we wanted it to know about the artist. Now when you search for the artist's name (name-only search), a box pops up at the top of the page that asks if you want to switch out of the information for the corporate brand into his search profile. When you do, information about his songs, music videos, merchandise, and catalog is displayed alongside images of the artist, his knowledge panel is claimed and shares information that we populated it with, and his website is the first result returned under this information.

Key Results

  • Site traffic increased by 240.4%
  • Organic search traffic to the site up by 128.95%
  • 106% increase in clicks from Google Search
  • Average time on site per visitor increased by 88.23%
  • Newsletter database organically grew by 4.5%
Using Format