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Your choir doesn’t show up on Google. Here’s the fix

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Your choir doesn’t show up on Google. Here’s the fix.

A DIY SEO checklist you can test today, even without a developer

Most choirs assume they need “better keywords.” In reality, Google visibility usually breaks for three practical reasons: your pages are not getting indexed, your site is unclear about what you offer, or your site sends weak trust signals. This guide gives you a step-by-step audit you can run right now, plus fixes you can implement yourself or share with your team.

FOUNDATION

Visibility is not “SEO magic.” It is a pipeline.

Think of Google like a three-step pipeline: discover your pages, understand what they are about, then trust them enough to show them to people. If any step breaks, rankings drop.

The choir version of SEO

  • Discover: Google must be able to crawl your Concerts, Auditions, Donate, and Contact pages.
  • Understand: each page needs a clear topic, a clear location, and a clear next action.
  • Trust: your site needs real signals: fast load, mobile-friendly layout, clean structure, and consistent organization info.

Credible baseline: Google Search Central SEO Starter Guide and Search Console documentation are the “source of truth” for fundamentals.

DIAGNOSIS

First, confirm Google can index you.

Before you rewrite titles or “do SEO,” run this truth test: Is Google indexing your core pages at all? A surprising number of choir sites fail here because of accidental “noindex,” broken redirects, blocked crawls, or thin pages.

DIY indexing checks you can do in 10 minutes

  1. Google search operator: search site:yourdomain.com auditions and site:yourdomain.com concerts. If nothing shows up, you likely have an indexing problem.
  2. URL Inspection: use Google Search Console URL Inspection to test a specific page and see whether it is indexed and why it might not be.
  3. Page indexing report: in Search Console, review excluded pages and look for patterns like “noindex,” “blocked by robots.txt,” “duplicate,” or “soft 404.”

Official docs to validate this: URL Inspection tool and Page indexing report inside Google Search Console.

TESTS

Run these 5 tests. Save the results. Share them.

These tests give you measurable signals. They are also the fastest way to align a choir board, staff, and developer around the same reality. You do not need to “know SEO” to run them.

Test 1: Speed and mobile experience

  • PageSpeed Insights: run your homepage and a concert page. Save mobile results. Most traffic is mobile.
  • Lighthouse: run an audit in Chrome and record the SEO, Performance, and Accessibility scores.

Note: Google retired the Mobile-Friendly Test. Lighthouse is the modern replacement for practical diagnostics.

Test 2: Structured data for events and organization

If you want concerts to appear clearly in search results, your site should be machine-readable. The fastest check is the Rich Results Test.

  • Run your concert page through Rich Results Test and confirm structured data errors are zero.
  • Run your homepage and confirm your organization signals are present.

Official tool: Google Rich Results Test and Search Console enhancement reports.

Test 3: Titles and headings

  • Check your browser tab title: does it say “Home” or your choir name only? That wastes your best keyword slot.
  • Check your page H1: does your concert page clearly say the concert name plus date and city?

Rule of thumb: the title explains “what this page is,” the H1 explains “what the visitor is looking at.”

Test 4: Crawl blockers you can spot without code

  1. robots.txt: visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for aggressive “Disallow” rules.
  2. noindex: view page source and search for noindex. If present on core pages, Google may skip them.
  3. canonicals: in page source, look for rel=”canonical”. If it points to the wrong URL, your page may not rank.

These issues are common because they are “invisible.” The site looks fine to humans but fails for crawlers.

Test 5: Season architecture and internal links

Most choir sites bury critical pages behind posters, PDFs, or Instagram links. That blocks both users and search engines.

  • Find your auditions page in 2 clicks: if you cannot, Google struggles too.
  • Link your season pages: homepage and “Concerts” should link to each concert page directly, not only to a PDF.
FIXES

High impact fixes you can implement without touching code

The “choir SEO” quick wins

  • Put your city everywhere it matters: footer, Contact page, About page, and concert pages. Consistency beats cleverness.
  • Create one page per concert: do not rely on a poster image or a PDF as the main source of information.
  • Rewrite titles for clarity: “Spring Concert” is weak. “Spring Concert in Boston, May 18” is understandable.
  • Add a visible “Concerts” hub: a single season page linking to every concert page.
  • Add a visible “Auditions” hub: requirements, dates, and a simple form. Make it easy to share.
  • Fix your images: compress large hero images and use descriptive alt text where it helps comprehension.
  • Make your Contact page complete: map, address or service area, email, and rehearsal venue when appropriate.

If you want a foundational checklist, Google’s SEO Starter Guide is the strongest baseline reference.

AVOID

Mistakes that quietly destroy choir SEO

  • Publishing concerts as images only: Google cannot “read” your poster. Users cannot copy details. Everyone loses.
  • One single page for an entire season: you lose long-tail searches for each concert, venue, and date.
  • Changing URLs every year: you break links, lose authority, and reset your momentum.
  • Accidental noindex: a single checkbox in WordPress can hide your site from search engines.
  • Slow mobile pages: a site can look beautiful and still fail the mobile experience that users actually live in.
QUICK START

Run a “Visibility Audit” in 7 days

  1. Pick 5 URLs: Home, Concerts hub, one Concert page, Auditions, Donate.
  2. Run URL Inspection on each page and record “Indexed or not indexed.”
  3. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile for each page and save screenshots.
  4. Run Lighthouse once and record SEO and Performance scores.
  5. Run Rich Results Test on your concert page and fix errors.
  6. Rewrite titles for clarity: what, where, when.
  7. Repeat in 30 days and track improvement inside Search Console.

Official tools to use: Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, and Rich Results Test.

RESOURCES

If you want to verify every claim, start here

  • Google SEO Starter Guide: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
  • Google Search Console: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
  • URL Inspection tool: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289
  • Page indexing report: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203
  • PageSpeed Insights: https://pagespeed.web.dev/
  • Lighthouse overview: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/overview
  • Rich Results Test: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

Two books we recommend for deeper strategy: The Art of SEO (Enge, Spencer, Fishkin, Stricchiola) and Product-Led SEO (Eli Schwartz). They are helpful when you want principles instead of hacks.

NEXT STEP

Get a clear choir SEO plan, customized to your site

If you want, you can do everything in this post yourself. The hard part is not running the tests. The hard part is turning results into a prioritized, choir-specific action plan that improves rankings and conversions without breaking your site. That is exactly what Choir Web Design does.

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