Alternative Ground — a Moroccan music label, found by the people who actually listen

Context

Alternative Ground is an independent Moroccan music label and events platform: a roster of local artists, a recurring event series, a feed that lives on Instagram and SoundCloud. Before us, the label existed entirely on social — strong on the ground, invisible everywhere else. Type "alternative music label Morocco" into Google and the first page was empty.

The brief was direct: a real site, and a real position in search. Not a Linktree. Not another agency template. A public face that matches the energy of the rooms the label fills.

The stakes

A music label's website has a strange job. It is not a shop — most of the value lives on streaming platforms. It is not a portfolio — the work is sound, not images. What it has to be is the canonical page of the label: the place a journalist lands on after a show, the page that comes up when a promoter googles a name, the home that survives when a social platform changes its algorithm or disappears entirely.

Three things had to be true at the same time:

1. A site that reads as a label, not as a marketing site for a brand. Editorial weight, dark mode by default, music up front, gallery and events at one click each.
2. Organic visibility on the queries that bring actual listeners — alternative music Morocco, label Maroc, the names of artists on the roster.
3. An infrastructure the team can maintain: new release, new event, new gallery drop, without a redesign and without a ticket to an agency.

Our approach

Site

Single-page-feel with anchored sections — home, Alternativeground (about the label), music, events, gallery, join. Hero is the room: a still from a recent night, the label mark in white, nothing else. Vertical rail of social icons on the left edge — SoundCloud, Instagram, Bandcamp — because that's where the listening happens, and the site exists to point there as much as to hold its own.

The music section pulls embedded SoundCloud players for the latest releases and mixes; events list dated cards with venue, lineup, ticket link; gallery is a tight grid pulled from the photographer pool that follows the nights. The join section is a single form for artists submitting to the label and for fans who want to be told when tickets drop.

Built on Next.js 14 with App Router, deployed on Vercel. Images served via next/image with WebP/AVIF so the photo-heavy gallery loads even on a phone in a venue car park.

SEO

A label is not a local business and not a national one — it is a scene. Search behaviour reflects that: people search by artist name, by event name, by genre + city ("alternative Casablanca", "indie Rabat"), and by the label name itself. We wrote the site to win those queries through structure, not through volume:

• Artist pages as canonical biographical pages, linked from every release and event they appear on.
• Event pages that stay live after the event, with the lineup, the venue, the date — which is what people search for when they're trying to remember "that night last spring."
• Editorial copy in the about section, written in French and English, where a label of this kind would normally have one line and a logo.
• Structured data for music groups, events, and creative work — so Google knows this is a label, an artist roster and a calendar, not another blog.

No keyword stuffing. No backlink schemes. The position is held by the content itself.

Results

• Live on alternativeground.ma — the canonical home of the label.
• First-page Google positions on the core queries (alternative ground, alternative music Morocco, label and artist names) within weeks of launch.
• Press and promoter inbound: journalists and bookers landing directly on the site instead of finding a Linktree.
• A platform the team owns: events go up the day they're announced, releases the day they drop, with no agency dependency.

Takeaway

A music label is a brand that lives on other people's platforms. The site's job is to be the one page that doesn't disappear when an algorithm changes — the canonical answer to "who is this label, what do they put out, where are they playing next."

For Alternative Ground, that meant a site that reads as a room, not as a marketing funnel — and an SEO position built on the structure of the label itself, not on tricks.