Events And Your SEO Strategy
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This document discusses how events can be used as part of an SEO strategy. It provides tips for optimizing event pages, including using keyword research in titles and descriptions, promoting events to build links, and using schema markup. Properly optimizing events can improve visibility and rankings by highlighting relevance and authority. The document emphasizes that SEO is about more than just rankings - it should be treated as a marketing channel to drive traffic.
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Events And Your SEO Strategy
- 1. Using Your Online Events in Your SEO Strategy Presented by: NEW PICTURE
- 2. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Learning Objectives: • Why events are important – promoting your organization through key events. • Basic Tips, Tricks and Takeaways. • How calendar software and building an event community can improve your organization’s rankings.
- 3. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back EVENTS AS A DIFFERENTIATOR Events are an ideal way to highlight the importance of a positive experience NEW PICTURE
- 4. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Robust Event Promotion and Marketing Your Organization’s Events Fresh Content Community Outreach Growing Participation Increase Revenue
- 5. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back The Event Conversion Funnel World Wide Web Search Engine Optimization Site Visitors Event Registrants Attendees
- 6. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back We all know this one. So now here’s the data.
- 7. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back All these goals contribute to higher yield rates
- 8. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back TIPS & TRICKS FOR BETTER RANKINGS The Stuff You Should Know
- 9. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Search Engine Optimization “Natural Search” (or organic)
- 10. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Search Engine Optimization Source: http://kapost.com/content-marketing-facts/ • Technology Are all your pages readable, crawlable, and findable? • Relevance Do your pages answer particular search engine queries? • Authority If yes to the above, then what’s the rationale for a search engine to rank your page highly?
- 11. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Things to Remember… • Google Updates Algorithm 400 Times A Year Make sure you’re valuable enough to withstand all the quality changes. Always stay on your SEO campaigns. • Up to 80% Of Clicks Come From Top 5 Ranks If you’re not in the top 5, many searchers refine their search. Be in the top 5 every time for branding and mindshare. • SEO Is Not Just About Rankings… What good is a high rank if nobody searches or clicks the ranking? Consider SEO a marketing channel.
- 12. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back SEO EVENT OPTIMIZATION More visibility. Better Rankings.
- 13. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Optimize Titles and Headlines Use the opportunity to write splashy titles that not only use keyword research, but influence a click. •Include Calls To Action •Include Location and Region Examples: •“Join Our Event – Philadelphia SEO Education Session” •“Sign up for our open call – Abington, Penn State” SEO and Your Events
- 14. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back SEO and Your Events
- 15. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back SEO and Your Events Use Keyword Research to Choose The Right Words Use the words visitors use to search for your pages. Ex: URL registration (3,600 monthly searches) vs. website registration (27,000 monthly searches) https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
- 16. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Write Full, Detailed, Descriptions • The more you write, the more it educates Google and your users in tandem. This improves your rankings! SEO and Your Events
- 17. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back • What about images and attachments? SEO and Your Events
- 18. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back SEO and Your Events Promote your events and earn links Is your event interesting to a specific group? Promote your event URL and encourage links. • Blast the URL to your email list • Put it in your newsletter • Ask interested parties to promote in social (improves amplification) • Link from other departments within your domain • The “publish” button is not enough. Google is attracted to buzz.
- 19. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back SEO and Your Events
- 20. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Active Data events use schema.org • Google can grant “rich snippets” if microdata exists. Active Data’s code base has this built in: • Example: SEO and Your Events
- 21. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back A Few Final Thoughts & Highlights All Together, It’s A Recipe For Visibility Search engine algorithms try to determine the best results for their users. They rely on over 200 signals (most are a secret). •Quality of backlinks is a factor •Text in links is a known signal •Put keywords everywhere – Tags & content •Keywords in URLs when you can •Social shares help amplification •Page load speed – quicker the better •It’s always about relevance •The sooner you get an event online, the better for Google
- 22. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Q & A? NEW PICTURE
- 23. We Build Event Communities That Keep Them Coming Back Contact Details David A. Lavigna Education Practice Manager 610.997.8160 david.lavigna@activedatax.com www.linkedin.com/in/davelavigna Bill Sebald Owner, Greenlane Search Marketing bill@greenlaneseo.com
Editor's Notes
- Sales: Hello everyone and welcome to Active Data’s KnowledgeShare. My name is NAME, TITLE, at Active Data and I’ll be guiding you through today’s presentation on how using your organization’s online events can help to improve your SEO strategy and even help online rankings. Let’s get started.
- Sales: We all know how important search engine optimization has become to a company or organization’s success, and we all know how difficult it is to rank among the first page on websites such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. Some of you may be struggling with exactly how to make this happen. During today’s presentation we’ll start with why your organization’s events are so important to your SEO strategy. We’ll then introduce, Bill Sebald, SEO specialist and owner of Greenlane Search Marketing. Bill’s going to dive in to tips and tricks that you can use to improve your SEO. Once those are covered, we’ll dig a little deeper into the SEO world and explain how optimizing your events, and how using the right calendar software can really have a major impact on your SEO success.
- Sales: Lets begin with the importance of events. How can promotion of a simple event enhance your organization’s success?
- Sales: There are several layers to this answer. Let’s start off with how events can serve as “Fresh Content”. Well why is fresh content so important? Because when it comes to SEO and rankings - content is king. Creating new and solid event content that can be found on the internet is the foundation of what you need to support all of your other SEO efforts. By creating an event that matches the real-time needs of your industry - you have the greatest chance of receiving a boost in search results. Improved SEO rankings enhances your community outreach efforts. By promoting your events on multiple platforms you’ll be able to hit a wider audience and spread product awareness, brand awareness or effectively encourage community to become involved with your mission and services offered. The more you reach out to your community - the more you can grow your event participation. By increasing your events growth - there is a greater likelihood that news of your product or organization’s services will spread without your marketing team actually having to do any of the work. Your community can now become your brand ambassadors. Like they say, “Word of mouth is the best referral.” Through a robust event promotion campaign, the end result will be increased revenue for your organization. Whether a nonprofit, higher education institution, or restaurant looking to boost volume, the importance of creating a solid and needed event for your community can have lasting impacts on your organization’s success.
- Sales: Here’s how it all starts: You begin by adding your event information to the internet. Hopefully with calendar software that will aid in additional event success, but we’ll talk more on that later. With this fresh content and some tricks and tips we’re going to talk about in the next few slides your event information will be ready for search engine optimization. This increases your event calendar’s site traffic, which in turn leads to an increased amount of event registrants, and ultimately day-off attendees where you can promote your mission, products, or services in-person.
- Sales: What you may find interesting is how consumer, student, or even patient perception changes after participating in events and experiences. In 2013 70% of people had a more positive outlook about organizations that held an event. In 2014 this number increased to 79%. What this tells us, is that if we can get people to attend events, there is a higher probability that they will see a need for your company’s specific product or service, or feel as though they have a stake in your nonprofit’s mission. For higher education institutions - this tells us that if you can get students on campus, you have a higher probability of getting them to apply, or to feel a real connection with the campus- improving drop-out rates. All of these benefits lead to increased ROI and Donations. http://blog.idashboards.com/spotlight-on-kpi-higher-education-applicant-yield-rates/
- Sales: Let’s check out how other organizations and companies are leveraging their event and experiential marketing strategies: 79% are find events useful to increase sales. 78% are using events to increase brand awareness 59% are using events to launch new products. What better way to sell something than to actually let your prospective buyer get their hands on it or see it in action. 52% are using events to enhance product knowledge or understanding or publisize their corporate or nonprofit mission. 51% are using events to influence deeper customer involvement. This can be through volunteering, referrals, and partnerships. There is a real need for events in business.
- Sales: Here’s where Bill, our SEO specialist from GreenLane Search marketing, will take over. Now that we’ve reviewed some statistics on how online event promotion and holding events in general can benefit your organization, we’ll dive into some tips and tricks for better rankings.
- Bill: So now that we know how events can greatly increase the value of your company or organization, let’s dive into SEO. Everything we’re going to talk about going forward is not only best practices for your event pages, but the entire website as well. We all want to show up at the top of Google, Yahoo and Bing, but how do you increase the chances of this happening? First, let’s get some definitions under our belt. Engine’s makes most of their money on PPC (or pay-per-click ads). Google’s ad system is the most well known, called Adwords. Look at the right hand, and often the very top of the results, and you’ll see paid ads. They are marked with a yellow “ads” icon. Search engines really want you to click them. But the “organic” portion is directly in the middle. You can’t buy your way into this section – you have to earn it. In most verticals, natural not only makes up the largest percent of your traffic, but brings the most new visits. Plus, it’s free. This is why SEO has become so incredibly valuable. Search engine optimization is a tough task, but it’s more than worth it.
- Bill: Generally, we break SEO up into 3 different areas – Technical, Relevance, and Authority. 1. First, technical. Are all your pages readable, crawlable and findable by Google? If not - than it’s unlikely your site will ever rank well. One important update that Google has recently made which may be effecting your rankings, is in regard to mobile friendly websites. As of April 21st, organizations who continue to use websites and applications that are not mobile friendly will find it harder to rank in Google’s mobile search results. http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/83483-SEO-Google-to-Make-Mobile-friendly-a-Ranking-Signal Although this will not affect your search results used over desktop, more than 81% of smart phone users have done product research from their phone, and 50% have made a purchase via their phone. That’s a big deal, and something the “technical SEO” will focus their time on. As a notable aside, this is also an important fact to consider when it comes to your event calendar software. With Active Data, all calendar products have a responsive design, assisting in your SEO efforts. 2. Second, relevance. Great – Google can perfectly crawl and read your website. But do your pages answer particular search engine queries? Google succeeds in pleasing their users as long as they continually serve relevant pages to user queries. Every query is a need. Is your website helping Google help their users? That’s the goal of the SEO who focuses on relevance. Keyword research, copywriting, and data analysis are incredibly important to this part of SEO. 3. Last, Authority. One of the reasons Google exploded 13 years ago was due to its unique search algorithm (called PageRank), which factored links from other websites. To be seen as an authority, and rank better, you needed to be seen as an authority by other websites. Links from those websites improved your “authority”. In Google’s own words, think of links like editorial “votes” from others in your niche. Today link building is still a huge part of SEO. Perhaps you have a perfectly crawlable site, and the most valuable content on the planet. If you have no popularity – that is, virtually no links from high authority sources, you then have no fuel to really push Google’s PageRank algorithm.
- Bill: You probably already know Google owns the majority of search traffic in the US. Bing (which actually powers Yahoo.com’s search) is a distant second. For that reason, SEOs typically optimize for Google’s technology with the expectation Bing may eventually catch up. Google is so advanced, they update their algorithms more than 400 times a year. Some are small changes that few ever notice, and some are large affecting up to 5% of searches. Sometimes Google targets specific industries, and sometimes they target web spam (that is, spammers or “black hat SEOs” who are trying to manipulate the engine for quick wins instead of long-term success). These days spammers are rarely successful. If you noticed in the last few years Google has gotten a lot better, or alternatively your rankings have taken a big hit, that’s because of some serious algorithm changes since 2011. Today’s SEO is quite different from the SEO of 10 years prior. Searches tend to search, then refine their query with another search. They don’t like scanning page after page after page. If you’re webpage is in the top 5 positions consistently, you tend to win the visitor. If you’re on the second page, you’re virtually invisible in most verticals. These days rankings are personalized to you based on what Google knows about your searching habits and location, but typically, ranking higher is still better. But SEO isn’t just about rankings. What good is a high rank if nobody searches or clicks that ranking? We had a client come to us with a list of keywords they were ranking in the top 5 for, but weren’t seeing any traffic. They thought SEO must have been a scam, some kind of myth. In reality, their first company earned them rankings on keywords nobody ever used. What looked like a slam dunk turned into a false victory. A good SEO not only wins the keyword, but knows what keywords to go after. Today good SEOs think about usability, design, and A/B testing to make sure their clicks are converting into dollars. Some SEOs only think about the rankings, and that’s a real issue in our industry.
- Bill: Chances are you’re already doing a lot of the things we talked about in our SEO tricks and tips section – but are you thinking about all your important landing pages? This segues perfectly to event landing pages. These are pages designed to draw in attendees and make your event truly special. If you’re using event calendar software, is it equipped to aid in your organizations SEO success? Is it built with technical, relevance, and authority in mind? This is where event optimization and Active Calendar comes into play. We made our platform SEO friendly out of the box, while providing the abilities for you to layer more SEO on top in terms of content.
- Bill: Let’s start off where you would- at the beginning - naming your event. By optimizing the titles and headlines of your events and creating an SEO friendly URL, you’ll not only rank better, but you’ll influence a greater amount of clicks. The titles of your events are used in search engines listing, so you want them to stand out. Remember – users of search engines scan results, so make yours pop. Locations or regions are great to add into your title as well. See our example – “Join Our Event – Philadelphia SEO Education Session”. This helps the search engine user know exactly what the page is about. They have a sense of what the engagement will be after the click. The user who is searching to join an SEO education session in a location near them in Philadelphia will probably click.
- Sales: By using Active Calendar, your events automatically come fully equipped with customizable SEO-friendly URL’s. What does this mean? For example, if we create a test event on Active Calendar, the URL will represent exactly what we put as our event title (which is what site visitors will search most often when looking for an event from your organization).
- Bill: SEO only works if you’re using the keywords people search. Companies tend to use what I call “inside baseball” terms – that is, terms that insiders use. The problem there is many of your target searchers don’t speak the same jargon. Use the terms they speak if you want to get their clicks. Google gives you a great tool for learning what keywords are common, and which are less common. For example, URL registration has 3,600 monthly searches vs website registration at 27,000 monthly searches. Given one of the two choices, which should you use? Obviously the one with more people searching each month. This tool is called Keyword Planner. The URL is here for you. All you need is a free Google account to access it. I often recommend leaving the Keyword Planner open in another tab anytime you’re going to do some writing. Think of it as your SEO thesaurus. This tool not only helps you like a thesaurus, but the data you’ll uncover can stimulate ideas all over your website. It can inspire new content ideas, new products and services to sell, and more. It’s one of the most valuable tools in the SEO’s toolbox.
- Bill: Write Full, Detailed Descriptions. The more you write, the more Google learns. The more they learn, the higher the likelihood of building trust and earning better rankings. Two popular studies from last year showed us longer form content had a correlation with better rankings. It actually makes sense. Have you ever asked Google a question, whether through your speech-to-text or simply typing it into Google.com? Google has gotten pretty good at answering these questions – and it’s not only because of keywords. Google has raised their comprehension level. If you’ve heard of the Hummingbird update 2013, you may already know that Google has raised their AI. So while keywords are important, you should be writing valuable, useful content. Google isn’t easily fooled anymore. If you want to rank #1, you need to have better content than the current site ranking #1. If you’ve never taken your content strategy seriously, now is the time. Bottom line - The more you write, the more it educates Google and your users in tandem. This improves your rankings! Sales: You’ll notice from the PowerPoint that Active Data not only uses Active Calendar for our events – we also use it to promote news, press releases, and announcements. Because our platform is responsive and accessible across all platforms, the information that we put on our site is crawled by google providing greater visibility no matter what platform you’re on.
- Bill Google loves all kinds of content. They have different algorithms for shopping, videos, news, and images. Whatever media you put into your event pages, Google will index. In this screenshot we’ve highlighted a unique graphic from the Lehigh Valley Business Forty Under 40 event. This graphic appears in the event page for Active Data’s Company Calendar software. Depending on your image and your industry, image search traffic can be a strong traffic driver.
- Bill: One SEO misconception is that if you build it, they will come. There is a lot of competition out there. There is a lot of noise. If you have something worth sharing, you need to amplify it. Doing so will earn those links. Once you’ve earned enough links, and the rankings are where you want them, you can stop. Very few sites actually earn links just by clicking “publish”. Wikipedia, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and sites of that size don’t need to do much promotion – they have a built in audience. You however may need to target a few influencers to get them aware of your great content; thus, earn links. Think about your online relationships. Who can you leverage? Think about what relationships you can build. Starting to sound like PR? You bet! PR and link building departments should be best of friends. Both groups can leverage each other for the greater good. Read through the bullets in the slide….
- Sales: The best thing about working within Active Calendar is that a lot of the event promotion can be done directly within the application. We make it easy for you and your calendar site visitors to easily share the event information that’s posted on social media sites. Users even have the ability to email current registrants, or add additional emails to the list that might be interested in attending your events. We know how important event visibility is and our application will help you get the maximum exposure.
- Bill: Next, let’s talk “technical”. We have added Google’s schema.org microdata to our product. Active Data has embedded schema.org data by default, which works to teach what purpose certain sections of the page represent. Remember – when Google reads a webpage, they’re reading the source code of that page. That’s where all the content and HTML is found. So, if Google sees a calendar event, without schema markup they may guess it’s event information. With schema markup, we can reassure Google that “yes, this is indeed event information.” This structured data influence can be powerful. We’re still in the early stages of what impact this will have with rankings, but we’ve definitely seen some unique results. In SEO, we love winning search result real estate. The bigger our listing, the more we pop. Schema has been known to lead to “rich snippets” – for example, look at this actual search result. Dates for the events are posted right in the listing, making this result pop more in between competing pages. While Active Data has covered the “events” schema, there’s certainly more you can do throughout your site. Schema.org is the address to visit for more information.
- Bill: So let me leave you with a few final thoughts, and restate some concepts that are very important: Read slide
- Sales: Alright everyone- that about wraps it up for today’s presentation regarding our Events and Your SEO Strategy. Does any have any questions for Bill or myself?
- Remember – we’ll be sending a link out with the recording of today’s presentation so you can always go back to reference. I hope that we provided you all with key takeaways to improve both your event and SEO strategy. I’d be happy to schedule and appointment to talk to each of you in greater detail about the additional benefits Active Data’s event calendar software can have on your organization so please feel free to give me a call or shoot me an email at any time.