Context
Pianocoda is a site offering free piano sheet music downloads. The project is currently in a phase of visual redesign and consolidation of a new editorial strategy.
The niche—piano sheet music in English—is highly competitive, so I decided to create a differentiating approach: categorizing pieces by difficulty level based on each student’s proficiency.
Goal
Create a platform where users can easily find new piano music by style, composer, or difficulty level, especially aimed at self-taught students.
Implementation
Site architecture
The idea was to use posts to host individual downloadable sheet music files, with each piece categorized by composer, genre, and level.
In addition to the PDF, I added an audio file so users could preview how the piece sounds before downloading it.
This structure makes it easy to update pillar pages. For example, when I upload a Grade 1 piece from the Baroque period composed by Bach, all three corresponding pages update automatically with the new score.
This categorization also allows users to filter sheet music and quickly find pieces they like.
Off-page SEO
CBeing part of this niche myself made the next steps more intuitive.
Once the site had a minimal viable library of sheet music and category pages, I started a link-building process on relevant high-authority platforms in the sheet-music space such as:
- musescore.org
- musescore.com
- imslp.org
- pianoworld.com
I also created a YouTube channel with video renderings of the scores to drive early-stage traffic to the site.
As the site grew and the content became genuinely useful, educational websites and apps for music teachers naturally began linking to it. Many of these links are not public, but Google Analytics records this referral traffic.
Results
Ranked keywords
Some of the most relevant keywords ranked as of early May 2024:
Google Analytics
Over the last few months, monthly traffic has stabilized at around 50,000 visits and roughly 150,000 page views.
Search Console
Organic traffic has grown slowly but consistently since the site’s launch in late summer 2022.
