A Comprehensive SEO Guide for Event Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guideline

Search engine optimization (SEO) remains a core channel to market virtual or physical events like conferences and workshops for any modern-age business. Organizations create great landing pages, social posts, blogs, and videos about their event to gain popularity, but how exactly do they get these content marketing assets to relevant audiences online?

The most straightforward answer is developing a strategic SEO plan for your event marketing campaigns. 

Making your valuable event landing pages, videos, blogs, and social posts discoverable through organic means requires a sound SEO strategy. 

For event planners and marketing teams, SEO may seem highly complex, so we put together a simplified SEO guide for event marketing in 2023. 

Let’s delve into some effective SEO strategies to boost the visibility and promotion of your event:

1. Enhance Your Website with Event Schema Markup:

Our first SEO marketing strategy for events is the development of an event schema. What is an event schema? In layman’s terms, professionals describe the event schema as structured data that explain to search engines like Google that a particular landing page is related to an event. 

Also referred to as structure data for an event, the event schema displays your event website in search results (aka. Rich results) to more relevant users encouraging them to engage with your event landing pages. The event schema generally includes details like:

• What the event is about
• Event speakers and organizers 
• Attendees and audiences 
• Time & date of event 
• Location 
• Category of event, e.g., food, business, education, etc. 

Schema.org details all the essential structured data included in an event schema markup. In addition, experts describe two ways to add an event schema to their website landing pages. 

The first method is adding the event to a third-party website that allows event schema markups. These event aggregation websites will enable you to publish details of your event, and their automatic event schema feature implements it across their web pages to appear in rich results on search engines.

The second SEO method to promote your event is adding an event-specific schema via your CMS or manually implementing it through HTML on your website. CMS like WordPress offers plugins to implement structured markup schemas for events on your website. All you are required to do is fill out essential details, and you are good to go.

SEO professionals explain that schemas can be implemented as in-line microdata or JSON-LD. There are also some excellent resources and tools that you can use to implement schema markup for your event, including: 

• Google Schema Markup Guide 
• Schema Markup Generator by MERKLE 

Here is an excellent example of how a great event schema markup adds more context to your website search results:

2. Maximize Your Event’s Success: Utilize Ticketing Marketplaces and Sites:

Our third SEO tip for event organizers is to leverage ticketing marketplaces & websites to engage audiences. Wells Yu, an experienced SEO, discussed that Google allows users to purchase tickets from those websites that qualify through its event ticket seller certification. Google’s official guide provides all the essential criteria for event ticket sellers.

Popular websites that are certified to sell tickets for events include:

• Eventbrite
• StubHub
• LiveNation
• Ticketmaster
• VividSeats
• Songkick
• TicketFly
• Gametime.co

Yu establishes that listing your event on these websites is a great idea as they provide a vast audience reach and provide users with multiple sources to buy tickets.

Example:

3. Elevate Your Event Pages: Simple Tips for Optimization

Great overall website SEO is the lifeblood of your event pages since Google considers the overall optimization of your website, according to Nunify. Promoting virtual events can be complex, but generally, there are several SEO factors for event websites to rank higher and achieve a position in rich results; here are three effective ones that we have identified. 

Validate your event page for SEO

The quickest way to optimize your event pages to appear higher in search results is to validate the markup schema through Google’s Rich Results Test. The test validates the rich result types on the page, identifying errors and providing suggestions for your structure data. 

You can get descriptive details about individual factors to make improvements immediately. 

Add social proof

Social proof is an essential aspect of adding authority to your events. Widespread research has identified that almost 94% of people depend on reviews when researching businesses they don’t know about, while 87% check for reviews of local businesses online. 

Social proofs like Google reviews, social media reviews, influencer reviews, and expert reviews are considered fresh content by search engines, increasing the chance to boost your event’s SEO rankings. 

You can also check out our exclusive blog on organic ways to enhance event marketing on Linkedin for more insight on adding social proof. 

Social media event marketing is already a core part of the overall event marketing strategy. Hence allowing your audiences to create conversations and engaging with them regularly can generate the proof of social traction that search engines are looking for. 

Since the content comes directly from audiences, it becomes even more critical. As more people discuss your event on social platforms, it makes it easier for search engines to rank it higher and easily discoverable. Since Google considers user interactions in its ranking, social proof is an excellent tactic to boost your event page searchability.

Mobile-friendly & responsive

Google introduced its mobile-first indexing feature in 2019, making it crucial for websites to be enhanced for mobile device screens. This includes both the responsiveness and speed of the website on mobile devices.   

Remember that this is one of the most critical SEO factors for an event website since users leave pages with bad response times and disorganized UI. In addition, your event website & landing pages must be fully optimized to ensure they can be accessed across various mobile devices. 

Remember that being mobile-optimized goes for both organic and PPC-driven event campaigns.

Google’s mobile first indexing guide provides further guidance on making your event pages more accessible on mobile.   

4. Grow Your Event Exposure: Attract Natural Backlinks through Promotion

Backlinks or inbound links is a link that comes from another website and drives traffic to your event landing pages. Digital marketing professionals also refer to backlinks as votes that increase the credibility and hence the search rank of your event pages. 

An SEO campaign for event marketing that includes backlinks enhances your landing pages’ authority and relevance, attracting more traffic. MailChimp also mentions implementing, managing, and analyzing backlinks is essential to SEO strategies. 

Online Communities

Utilizing Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and other community forums is an excellent SEO marketing strategy for events. You can learn about what online audiences are talking about and how to secure backlinks from them. 

To discover potential communities, Semrush establishes that you must research relevant terms and even survey your audiences to get relevant ideas. Generally, marketers build relationships and rapport with community members before posting event links in groups & forums. 

It is an excellent idea to connect with people in your local community within groups and meet up with interested audiences in person. However, professionals recommend waiting to pitch your event and get to learn what audiences demand instead. 

Create Facebook Events

Facebook offers an excellent events feature that can provide you with a high-authority backlink for your event SEO. In addition, the Facebook events feature allows you to add events and provides four privacy options to promote an event: private, public, friends, and group. The official Facebook event guide offers a complete tutorial for the process:

1. Go to your Feed and click Events in the left menu. Users may have to click ‘See more’ first.
2. Click + Create a new event, then click In person.
3. Add the event details.
4. Tap Create Event.

The significant aspect of Facebook events is that many ticket-selling websites integrate directly with the feature. To learn how to get more attendees from Facebook events, look at our dedicated blog on the topic. 

Add Links to Social Media Profile

Another popular SEO method businesses utilize to market an event is through their official social media profiles. Using intuitive tools like LinkTree, SEEDPro, Tap Link, etc., you can link your event pages to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and several other social profiles to secure a solid backlink to your event landing pages.  

5. Research Consumer Intent: Drive Success with Targeted Research

SearchEngineJournal explains that numerous studies have been conducted to understand the user intent behind keyword search queries. As a result, consumers’ search intent influences the results displayed by Google.

The official Google Search Quality Rating Guidelines also discuss how user intent makes more relevant results appear. For example, if a user searches for ‘cybersecurity events,’ that user will discover the nearest events happening within their geographical location.

Keyword research

Keyword research is ideal for discovering the relevant user intent regarding event searches. Remember that Google’s primary purpose is to satisfy users’ search intent. Therefore search intent is one of the top SEO tips for event promotion. 

Usually, marketers tend to choose keywords with high search volume, but it is essential that you research which keywords have the highest intent behind them, claims SEJ. Moz describes that a searcher intent can be of four types:

• Informational – Audiences looking for information about events 
• Commercial Investigation – Audiences comparing alternatives for events 
• Transactional – Audiences looking to buy tickets for events and registering 
• Navigational – Audiences looking to navigate a particular event landing page 

Remember that your marketing budget should accommodate tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, MOZ, and other intelligence tools to identify intent-based keywords accurately.

6. Boost Local Visibility: The Importance of Location-Based On-Page SEO

One of the essential SEO approaches for event planners is to perform located-based on-page SEO. Furthermore, the website’s content should highlight location-specific details such as information about your event, its participants, and how it benefits that place-related audience.

This includes optimizing aspects including:

• Heading 1 (consider having 1 or 2 max) & Heading 2 (can exceed 5) headings on-page
• Alt text of images
• The URL 
• SEO Meta Descriptions 

As we mentioned above, it’s a great idea to research keywords based on customer intent and think of phrases they would use to search for your event. A simple tactic is to type the event name and see what suggestions come up. 

Most professionals consider using tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and others to discover keywords customers use to search for their branded events. Using secondary keywords and minor modifications of your primary keywords is also recommended. 

7. Conduct In-Depth Competitors Events Audit:

Our last but essential SEO tip for webmasters is to conduct an in-depth audit of what your competitors are doing. A great place to begin is by auditing the backlinks to your competitors’ event landing pages. Again, intelligence tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz are handy since they can compare competitors and your backlinks. 

Example:

Research all the intent-based keywords and discover which events are ranking on these search terms. Automation tools like Ahrefs and Semrush provide a comparison feature that gives you additional information about competitors, including the sites linking back to them, the keywords they rank on, and the audience that searches for them.

A competitor audit can identify potential customers and their event SEO strategy and discover potential sources to market your event online. You can also conduct a comprehensive event marketing audit to determine precisely who your competitors are, their SEO strategies, and which platforms they are partnering with to gain online visibility. 

Conclusion 

We hope you found our SEO guide for event marketing resourceful. As an aspiring digital marketing agency, Think Orion identifies potential growth opportunities for event organizers to enhance their SEO marketing campaigns. 

Optimizing your event SEO strategies remains one of the most critical processes for modern businesses to appear in top SERPs by search intent, location, and interest. By utilizing the tips and best practices outlined in our event marketing guide, you can effectively enhance your event’s online visibility and reach.