SEO for Internet Radio: Increase Traffic to your Station's Website

Search engine optimisation or SEO is about helping search engines understand your station’s content, so your station’s website appears as high as possible in the list of results the search engine (which will very likely will be Google) provides to a given user.

Most people don’t navigate beyond the first page of results when browsing the internet. The higher your website ranks, the greater chance a prospective listener will visit your website, which in turn increases the likelihood they will join your station’s audience.

There are plenty of search engines out there, but none are as popular as Google Search. It dominates the search market, accounting for around 83% of desktop searches and 95% of mobile searches. In fact, Google Search processes around 8.55 billion searches a day.

In this blog post we’ll discuss the various ways you can optimise your station’s website to appear in the coveted position of being on the first page of a Google Search result.

How Google Search works

Before we continue discussing optimisation strategies for your station’s website. It may be useful for your understanding to give you a brief explainer of how Google Search works.

The search engine functions in three stages:

1. Crawling: Google downloads text, images, and videos from pages it found on the internet with automated programs called crawlers.

2. Indexing: Google analyzes the text, images, and video files on the page, and stores the information in the Google index, which is a large database.

3. Serving search results: When a user searches on Google, Google returns information that it believes to be most relevant to the user's query.

It's the third stage that you want to focus on. You want to make adjustments to your station’s website, such that you increase the chances that Google considers it the most relevant to a given user’s query.

With that said, let’s dive into it!

Organise your site

Whether your an existing internet radio station editing your website or a new station creating your website for the first time, consider organising your website in a logical manner. This helps Google’s search algorithms to better understand your website, particularly how your pages relate to the rest of your site. But having it organised in a logical way can be beneficial to users as well.

Use descriptive URLs

The first component to explain here is choosing a good domain name, ideally your domain should match the name of your station. So for instance, if your station is called Radio Clique, your domain name could look something like this

https://www.radioclique.com or https://www.radio-clique.com

Not only does this look more professional, but it can useful to users when viewing search results which contain your station’s URL. You can buy your own domain from places such as GoDaddy.

The next component to consider is breadcrumbs. These are the parts of your URL which come after your domain and generally represent individual pages on your website. Breadcrumbs are displayed to users as part of search results. So again, you want these to be structured in a way that are useful to users. Try to avoid random identifiers in your URL. As an example, if you have a section of your website, which contains bios on your station’s artists or residents. Then the page for an artist called DJ Barns should be structured something like this:

https://www.radioclique.com/artists/dj-barns

and not like this:

https://www.radioclique.com/2/161803

Make it mobile-friendly

These days, if you take a person at random, it's more likely they own a mobile phone than they own a computer. So your website should reflect this reality, which is to say it should be mobile-friendly and be responsive to the type of device a user is browsing with. Not only will the listener have a better user experience, but for various reasons, Google ranks websites higher that are mobile friendly.

Reduce duplicate content

If a website shows the same content under different URLs, then Google considers this duplicate content. When displaying search results, Google will only choose a single URL (what is known as the canonical URL) to show the user.

If we continue the example from the previous section, two pages that contain the same information about DJ Barns can be a confusing user experience (for example, people might wonder which is the right page, and whether there's a difference between the two). So try to ensure that each piece of content on your site is only accessible through one individual URL.

Make your site interesting and useful

Of all the suggestions we’ll give in this blog post, making your station’s website compelling and beneficial to (prospective) listeners is the recommendation Google states will influence your website’s presence in their search results the most. Clearly the terms ‘compelling’ and ‘beneficial’ are subjective. But generally Google will consider content that matches those terms if it shares some of these common attributes:

• The text is easy-to-read and well organised,
• The content is unique,
• The content is up-to-date, and
• The content is helpful, reliable and people-first.

Expect your future listeners' search terms

Make sure that you consider the search terms your future listeners might employ to discover your station’s website. Even if two prospective listeners have the same intent to find a certain type of radio station, there’s no guarantee they will each use the same search terms when browsing. So try to anticipate and account for this when designing your station’s website.

Avoid distracting advertisements

While advertisements are a staple of the internet and obviously they are intended to be viewed by your listeners, you can over do it. So if you run ads on your site, make sure they're not too distracting or over utilised such that they prevent listeners from viewing your content.

Link to relevant resources

The vast majority of new pages discovered each day by Google are through links. Therefore utilising links and structuring them properly is crucial to aid Google discovering your station’s website.

Promote your station’s website

This is likely the one suggestion you’re already doing, even if you know nothing about SEO prior to reading this blog post. But what you might not be aware of is the symbiotic relationship between SEO and promoting your website outside of SEO. When listeners discover your website through means outside of web browsing, that obviously increases your listenership. But it will also increase the likelihood Google ranks your site higher, which in turn should further increase your station’s audience.

There are many non-SEO ways to promote your station’s website, but some methods include:

• Social media promotion
• Community engagement
• Advertisement, and
• Word of mouth.

Don’t focus on these things

SEO has been evolving ever since browsing the internet became commonplace. So what was once considered best practice may no longer be the case due to changes in Google’s search algorithms as well as wider internet changes.

So the following is a non-exhaustive list of the aspects of SEO, Google recommends you don’t focus on when optimising your station’s website:

• Meta keywords: Google Search doesn’t utilise the keywords meta tag when determining a website’s relevancy.
• Keyword stuffing: don’t excessively stuff the same keywords (or variations of it) across your website. It violates Google’s spam policies and it's not the best user experience either.
• Keywords in your domain name or URL path: As mentioned previously your domain name should match as close as possible to your station’s name. Including specific keywords in your domain name for the purposes of ranking higher in search has no practical effect.
• Minimum or maximum content length: there’s no minimum or maximum word count for content within your station’s website that is desirable from an SEO perspective. The actual content itself is more important, so ensure you write naturally and attempt to minimise repetition.
• Duplicate content penalty: though inefficient, your station’s website won’t suffer negatively if you have content which is accessible through multiple URLs. Duplicating other site’s content however is ill-advised and is another violation of Google’s spam policies.
• Content generated by AI: with the prevalence of AI these days, particularly chatbots like ChatGPT. It’s tempting to use them to generate content for your station’s website. However, it is generally believed that content obviously created by these chatbots is being down ranked by Google. This isn’t a recommendation to avoid AI entirely when optimising your website. However, you should use it judiciously i.e. use it for research or creating an outline for the content you wish to create, but don’t have AI exclusively write the final product.

Next steps we recommend

Here are the next steps we recommend in your station’s journey to fully optimise your website from an SEO perspective:

• Get started with Google Search Console: this tool allows you to monitor and further optimise how your station’s website perform’s on Google Search. Learn how to set up your account and what reports to check out first.
• Keeping up to date with SEO best practices: As mentioned previously, SEO is forever evolving. Google makes constant changes to its search algorithms (some of which are kept private). Keep on top of the public announcements by Google here.
• Maintain your station website's SEO over time: not only do you have to account for the previous step, but Google ranks higher sites which are being constantly updated with new content. Learn more about managing your site's presence in the long term.