An SEO Guide for Event Planners: 6 Tips to Attract and Convert Attendees
13 July 2021The world is still recuperating, and we have a long way ahead of us to fully end the pandemic, but some countries are boldly moving back to event organisation and enabling group gatherings for business as well as pleasure.
While you’re exploring the latest 2021 event trends that will help you set the stage for event success this turbulent year, you also need to keep in mind other strategies that will be essential to make your event stand out. One of them, SEO, should be your primary concern in the months and weeks closing in on the event itself.
Digital marketing in general is a powerful tool for generating buzz around your event, and it helps companies connect with potential guest speakers, lecturers, build connections, and of course, build interest for the attendees. Many institutions are also leveraging SEO strategies for colleges to boost their online presence, helping them attract prospective students and participants by optimizing search rankings and visibility.
Businesses looking to improve their digital marketing strategy can benefit from working with a digital marketing consultant who offers personalized insights and practical solutions to boost engagement and achieve sustainable digital growth.
To do that successfully, you should consider using SEO intensively, to gain more visibility and make sure your event will truly attract the right audience and the most positive response. Whether you are working on SEO yourself orworking with a consultant,here are a few SEO tips you can use while planning for your event this year.
Carefully written content
Announcing the event and publishing that content on your website as well as your social media platforms will make all the difference when it comes to your SEO. Social media event pages are great for creating hype and getting a sense of the audience’s interest – but getting more visibility will give you more actual registered attendees.
Use your blog page to write a few articles about the event and its core themes, any event can leverage from this, all the way from online events to an San Francisco Escape Room! this is in order to inspire people to think about the event and consider registering. Drive engagement in the comments and you’ll be able to bring your people to your website.
Videos you post on your site and social media will also help you make an impact but also give search engines more to process to understand the relevance of the event.If you’re not sure where to start, begin with story-boarding your video to ensure your content delivers the correct message.
Image optimisation
Images are always important for engaging audiences for your event promotion. Place them strategically within your content to break up text while visually showing off what your event is all about. To ensure images are properly optimized for both visitors and search engines, use tools like ShortPixel image compressor to compress the original files without losing too much quality. If your website is powered by WordPress, a plugin can do this on the fly.
Also consider converting images to modern file formats like WebP or AVIF. These offer better compression than your average JPEG or PNG, resulting in even smaller file sizes and better performance across devices. For longer content, implementing lazy loading can help reduce initial page load times by only loading images as they become visible when scrolling.
Finally, remember to add meta title and alt tags to the images themselves. These should be descriptive and include the keywords potential attendees are searching for. Plus, you can check keyword rankings to ensure that your images are optimized for maximum visibility and search engine performance.
A dedicated landing page
Set up a dedicated landing page that will be concise, but informative, and above all, optimized in every sense based on SEO KPIs. Images and videos on the page need to load quickly and properly on every device, while your meta descriptions should also help search engines understand the purpose of the page easily. Seamless navigation and clear CTAs will boost the user experience, giving you even more SEO points and making your event even more presentable, to get more people to sign up, In order to do an SEO audit of your dedicated landing page you can use special SEO tools. For example, one of such tools is Page Counter by Sitechecker. Focusing on landing page optimisation will ensure your page performs well, both in terms of user engagement and search engine ranking.
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Local events demand local SEO
While we still dream about international get-togethers, most businesses are currently being vigilant and organising events limited to the local audience. That narrows down your attendee list quite a bit, even if you do permit people to join online – they’ll want to know in which time zone your event will be published online and at what time. Enhancing the visibility of local events can be challenging, but with the right SEO tools, it becomes much more manageable. Platforms like EzyHotel can help boost your online presence, ensuring your event effectively reaches the right local audience.
For a Sydney-based event, you need to mention the location of the event enough and clarify the program for your local audience to gain interest.
This also elevates the impact of your Sydney SEO strategy as it helps you rank higher locally and attract more website traffic, boosting your click-through rates for the right people.
Local SEO helps you qualify leads also leverage SEO for greater online visibility, not just get random people to visit your site. So, if you’re looking to attract Sydneysiders to register, make sure to give them all the right local details, talk about the event in the local news, and spread the word on local portals.
Don’t neglect keyword optimization
One of the most essential SEO premises that no business can neglect is keyword optimization, and the same applies to event planning. Make sure that your landing page copy, newsletter copy, as well as other promotional content you’re posting contains the most relevant keywords your attendees might be inclined to research when looking into their options.
Attracting people to your landing page and giving them enough information to make a decision will also drive them to actually register for the event instead of having to do much more digging – which few will be inclined to do. Quality copy with keyword optimization helps potential attendees understand precisely what to expect, so they can decide what they want on the spot.You can check and optimize your website keywords with the help of rank tracking tools or by partnering with a B2B SEO agency to ensure your content reaches the right audience effectively.
Focus on link-building
Another way to extend the relevance and impact of your content strategy is to work hard to earn backlinks to your new landing page for your event or at the very least your business website where people can get a pop-up about the event.
Backlinks signal search engines that your website is relevant and that your brand is doing something important to which your audience should pay attention. Although link-building takes time to take effect, spreading the word through guest posting, press releases, and interviews can help achieve a powerful effect.
Choose carefully where you talk about your event – you need to collaborate with quality websites that have good ranking and that are reputable. The same goes for influencers since their reputation will be inextricably linked with yours.
Wrapping Up
Planning an event is surely a challenging endeavour no matter your industry, but marketing that same event comes with a slew of entirely separate challenges for your business.
Make sure to leverage SEO for greater online visibility to increase your audience’s interest in your event ahead of time and make sure to learn as much as you can from the experience, so that every future event you organise can be better and more effective than before.
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