Many businesses organize various local events. Be it a conference, a social event or a charity event, you’ve invested tons of effort to plan it and you want it to be seen by the right audience. This is where SEO shines.
To help you boost the exposure of your event online, I’ve listed these practical SEO tips.
So, let’s dive in!
Segment Your Target Audience
Before you start promoting your event, you need to segment your target audience. Once you determine who you want to attend the event, it will be easier for you to plan a solid event marketing strategy. Most importantly, this will help you choose the right promotion channels and focus on those tactics that work for your target audience.
Set Clear Goals and Choose the Right KPIs
In event marketing, setting specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely goals is your priority. These goals will keep you on track and remind you which results you want to achieve during your campaign.
Of course, just setting a bunch of goals is not enough. You need to link them with the right KPIs so you can track your progress. These metrics depend on the type of your event, your target audience and the goals you’ve set. Here are a few examples:
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The event check-in.
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Ticket sales.
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Social media mentions.
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Social media engagement.
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Hashtag reach.
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The cost to revenue ratio.
Equip Yourself With the Right Tools and Start Tracking the Performance of Your Event On Time
It’s important to document your KPIs ahead of time, as you will want to measure the performance of your event throughout its different stages. This is why you need to equip yourself with the right tools. Tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs will help you audit your content and check your backlinks, shares, rankings and traffic effortlessly. With Google Alerts, you will stay on top of all brand mentions and significant keywords. There are also numerous social media monitoring tools that will help you measure user engagement and your event reach on these channels.
The only problem with monitoring your event performance is that there are too many tools to use. To focus on those aspects of your campaign that matter, consider integrating these tools using an SEO reporting tool. This helps you create customizable SEO dashboards and automate your KPI tracking and report creation processes.
Create a Nicely Optimized Event Page
Google uses your event information to assess your relevance. They’ve recently changed the way relevant events appear in the SERPs. They now add these events to the callout box placed at the top of the search results.
This awesome option gives you greater exposure. Most importantly, a searcher will be able to find out about the type, location, date or time of your event from the callout box. Given that only those people that are really interested in your event will click on your link, it’s not surprising that you will be able to generate more qualified leads and boost conversions.
This sounds great, but how do you get Google to notice your event? Above all, how to prove that you’re relevant to your target audience? To do so, you need to optimize your landing page properly. Here are a few elements every powerful landing page should have:
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The exact location and directions.
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Date and time.
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The detailed information about the event and schedule.
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A catchy and strong title.
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An informative meta description, optimized for your major keywords organically.
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A short, well-optimized URL that tells both your visitor and Google what your page is about.
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Clear ticketing information.
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Contact information.
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Social sharing buttons.
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A high-quality image related to the event.
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An authentic and attention-grabbing CTA.
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A responsive sign-up form that won’t drive people away.
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Frequently asked questions.
Use Schema
Schema.org helps you contextualize your content and make it more understandable for search engines. Because it helps you position your event page as highly relevant, it can even help you appear in the rich snippets in the SERPs. Schema also lets you make your event more specific by choosing its subtype, such as DeliveryEvent, MusicEvent, SocialEvent, SaleEvent and so on.
Additionally, there are numerous tools you can utilize when generating and testing Schema. For example, Google’s Data Highlighter helps you tag the information about your event, while with Google's Structured Data Testing Tool, you will be able to measure the performance of Schema for your event.
Choose the Right Promotion Channels
Now that your perfect event page is up and running, you need to promote it to wider audiences. Along from optimizing it for search engines, you should promote it across different online channels.
Before you start off, it’s always a good idea to do your research and try to find social media influencers relevant to your niche who may be interested in promoting your event. You could also use tools like Ahrefs, Moz or SEMrush to conduct a thorough competitor analysis and see where they promote their events.
The next step is, of course, selecting the right promotion channels. Here are a few ideas you may find valuable.
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Leverage Facebook events.
Instead of creating dedicated landing pages, many companies choose to promote their events via Facebook events. This is not an optimal solution, as you may miss out the opportunity to drive loads of qualified traffic to your site. Still, combining SEO and Facebook events may help you reach different audience segments, boost their engagement, and maximize the visibility of your event.
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Contribute to an online community.
Extensive online communities like Quora, Reddit, Facebook groups or community forums are all amazing places to connect with your target audience. Sure, you don’t want to promote your event right off the bat. Search for your keywords to find relevant conversations and take some time to create relationships with your target audience. Leave insightful comments and tips to position yourself as a helpful online resource. This will boost your brand awareness and make your event promotion more effective.
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Write killer content.
Targeting the right keywords and optimizing your content for them is important, but it’s not enough for Google to understand your authority and relevancy. To get the search engine to rank your event higher than your competitors, you need to write quality, local content around your keywords. Write about the event you’re planning, as well as other relevant events in your niche. However, make sure your content is not overly promotional. In addition to your content promotion, cover different industry-specific topics that may be interesting to your users.
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Connect with the local press.
When organizing a local event, reaching out to the national newspapers and magazines won’t necessarily deliver the desired results. Connecting with the local press, on the other hand, may get you noticed by the right audiences and boost your attendance. You can ask them to cover your local event in their related section or even pitch your PR article and ask them whether they would like to publish it.
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Boost visibility with paid search.
SEO is the least intrusive way to promote your event. However, it takes time to bring the desired results to the table. Namely, it takes days or even weeks for Google to index your event page. If you’re organizing time-sensitive events and need to promote them as fast as possible, then paid ads may be the right addition to your event marketing toolbox. Apart from increasing the exposure of your event on Google or social networks, PPC also provides you with amazing targeting opportunities that will help you generate qualified leads.
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Utilize email promotions.
The good-old email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to spread the word about your event. If you already have a solid mailing list, make sure you start building your email marketing campaign ahead of time. For starters, create an email calendar that will help you determine how many emails you will send and when. Make sure you have a solid plan in place, outlining: the number of emails you will send during the campaign, powerful subject lines, engaging body copy, strong CTAs and when and how you will send the last email reminder about the event.
Over to You
Regardless of your niche, target audience and type of the event, SEO is the foundation of any successful event marketing campaign. It gives you the opportunity to increase your online visibility and put yourself in front of the right audiences. Above all, it lets you track your performance, identify the practices that work for you and optimize your future campaigns even better.
Hopefully, these tips will help you get the most out of your event promotion!
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