How to improve SEO of Amazon Music
I recently saw this SEO opening at Amazon Music and it made me interested in learning, understanding SEO in the Music industry.
Also, got me thinking, are there any quick findings that I could suggest which will help improve SEO for Amazon Music?
- Add schema type MusicRecording
I tried searching songs and observed that Google shows “Available on” feature, listing down the Apps where I can play them. What caught my attention was Amazon Music didn’t make it to this Available on Google feature. Repeated searching for a lot of songs and couldn’t find Amazon at all in this section of Google results!
If you are searching in mobile, the feature is called “Listen”.
Usually, Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP) features like these are created using Schema.
With this in mind, I loaded these URLs in Google’s Rich Results test. Here is an example for the Gaana.com page of Shape of You song.
The Rich results test detected only schema types — Breadcrumbs and Logos.
On further analysis, while checking the source code, I was able to understand that all these websites were using a particular schema type called MusicRecording. But this schema is not getting detected as a rich result feature by Google’s tool. Below is the source code of the same Gaana.com page, you can see the MusicRecording schema.
In the list of apps above, except YouTube Music, everyone else is using this Schema. Thanks to Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat) for helping me with this analysis. Feel free to read our discussions on Twitter around this topic.
So, maybe, by adding this MusicRecording schema, Amazon Music will also start appearing in the Available on Google SERP feature.
2. Add self-referring canonical, Custom SEO Title, Meta description on Landing Pages of each song
Below is Google search results for Taylor Swift’s Blank Space Song from the Album 1989.
Gaana, Spotify, Wynk took me directly to their music player. Gaana and Wynk let me play the song while Spotify on clicking the play button showed a popup to Sign up to listen for Free.
Amazon result was pointing to their product page of the song instead of the Music player. See the below screenshot.
I could do three things here:
a) Play a sample of the song which is of 30 seconds duration
b) Buy the song for 1.29 USD (This is almost equal to Spotify’s one month subscription price in India!)
c) Listen Now — Clicking this will open the Music Player.
I personally think the Music Player which is at Music.Amazon.com should have been the ideal landing page in Google for this song, and not the Amazon.com product page. The song link is here.
Even before seeing what is there on the song page, I was shown a popup to Sign in. I think it’s best if this was done the Spotify way, where they let me see what the landing page had, on clicking the play button they showed me a pop up to signup.
Now, the Blank Space song in Music.Amazon.com is here. If you look at the SEO metadata — title, meta description, canonical, then you will see it’s not about that particular song but the album. The song is defined using the URL query parameter. The canonical should have also referenced this parameter.
On websites/apps like Spotify, the landing page of each song carries the Title Tag and Meta description of that particular song. Also, each song URL is having a self-referring canonical rather than pointing to the Album URL.
A Google Site command search for the song doesn’t list that song at all.
Music.Amazon.com should also carry self-referring canonical tag, title, meta description with the Song name rather than the Album name with each Song URL.
Below is a templated title tag format I will use in the individual song pages; improve this based on the results over a period of time.
Title: Play <Song Name> Song by <Artist> from <Album Name>, Listen, Download on Amazon Music
Meta Description: Play <Song Name> on Amazon Music. A song by <Artist> from Album <Album Name>. Released on <Year of release>. Listen to all songs in high quality.
3. Why are Amazon.com URLs carrying albums/songs?
As I am not working for Amazon and I don’t have any knowledge of why this is done the way it is, and hence I am not sure if the below is the right strategy.
I think these Amazon.com product pages that carry music which can be played via music.amazon.com should stop appearing for song searches in Google.
The ideal situation according to me is when Google starts showing music.amazon.com in their search results and Users end up going there rather than amazon.com. Following point 2 explained above can help solve this problem to an extent.
To summarise, on the Music.Amazon.com song pages:
- Add MusicRecording schema type — This will help show up in the “Available on” or “Listen to” playable music features in Google.
2) Self-referring canonical on Song pages — This will help Google to index each song page. Right now, all songs are canonicalised to their parent Album, hence individual song pages are not in Google’s index but only the Album.
3) Custom Title, Meta description for Song pages — This will help Google to rank song pages once it is in the index, drive traffic to song pages.
This is how I will prepare for the interview :)
Let me know if you find any issues with my approach via comments.
If you are into SEO or Digital Marketing, make it a habit to analyse other websites and see how it’s SEO’d. This will help you copy some of those ideas into your website, experiment and learn.
Thanks for reading! A clap would definitely make me write more of these articles :)
