Complete Guide to SEO for Conferences
When considering how important SEO is to your conference, consider the first thing you do when you want to learn something or find new information. You, along with almost everyone else with an internet connection, would probably type in a Google search, looking for your answer.
Despite the power of social networks and new publishing platforms, this default behaviour still makes Google the centre of the universe for almost any business – including your conference. For all intents and purposes, Google = SEO, which means SEO is very, very important for your conference, and you should consider working hard to improve (or maintain) yours. If you want to be the first result clicked on after a potential delegate or sponsor has searched for a relevant term associated with your event then this is the guide for you.
When to start conference SEO
SEO is not like an email or promotional campaign. It isn’t seasonal, and you can’t just ‘turn it on’ like a tap. Therefore the sooner you start proactively improving your conference’s SEO, the better. It’s also worth noting that Google has a surprisingly high regard for legacy content (that meets certain criteria), so if you do things well, you’ll continue to reap the benefits for years to come. SEO expert and Managing Director at Alchemy Viral, Andreas Voniatis, explains. “The main benefits of SEO are ensuring your brand appears prominently against searches for what it is you do. More importantly, you want to ensure the correct product/service page appears for a given search. That way, the user knows they’re on the right page and you’re more likely to enjoy higher conversion rates from SEO. From a near standing start, typically a company will achieve their SEO campaign objectives after seven months, providing they follow all the advice given in terms of optimising the site, executing the content strategy, and creating search optimised online PR. Of course the benefits may be seen as early as month one, depending on the competitiveness of the search space in the target market,” says Voniatis.
Where to start to optimise your conference for search traffic
As with any marketing campaign, you need to start at the end: what do you hope to achieve? Some typical goals for SEO improvement might be:
- Absolute: Rank No. 1 for the term “Technology conference” or “Healthcare Thought Leaders”
- Relative: Improve your organic ranking from 12th to 4th for “Best Marketing Conference Australia” or “Future of Big Data”
- Outcome-based: Increase organic search traffic by 25%. Whatever your goals, once you have them, you can then work backwards to figure out how to make them happen
A standard SEO process will then look something like this:
- Define goals
- Find the phrases and words you want to rank for by using keyword research, competitor profiles and Google trends
- Find out who currently ranks well for your chosen search terms and why
- Build a content publishing plan to improve your SEO for those key phrases
- Build a partner plan (i.e. who will you partner with to publish your content and gain valuable 3rd party credibility in Google’s eyes). Spammy backlink building will not help your SEO and may hinder it, so don’t try to shortcut this part!
- Measure your success against your goals
Andreas explains how he tackles the keyword and competitor research stages: When it comes to keyword research, businesses should consider the following angles:
The competition:
Successful online competitors have often done the research beforehand so looking at the search phrases in their title tags can be a rich source of search phrases that drive revenue or enquiries. Using a tool like Deep Crawl can help businesses crawl large sites to get a database of a competitor’s title tags.
The buyer cycle:
People use Google to get answers to problems, the best thing to do is literally brainstorm with a blank piece of paper the kind of searches your customer would use to find you and buy off you.
Analytics:
If you’re trying to decide which keywords are performing for you either in terms of engagement or revenue, analysing your web analytics package will help you see which keywords are worth chasing and others being left alone.
Whatever angle you take, Google Adwords provides a free tool which shows you useful data to help guide your research by showing the number of monthly searches, the competitiveness and the seasonality. If you’re targeting different languages and countries, Adwords has the data you need. Nothing beats modelling a leading competitor to see what it is that’s working in SEO for your target keyword.
Short-term strategies and quick wins
If like most conferences, time and resources isn’t on your side, you’ll need to see some relatively quick results. Here are a few simple, quick wins that will get you into good habits and start to shift your conference’s standing within Google’s organic search results.
Index and optimise existing content:
If you have a repeat event, it’s likely you’re going to have a ton of content that could be indexed for Google and used to help boost your conference website. Particularly if you have videos from the last event, consider getting them transcribed (it’s cheaper than you think these days), put any speaker interviews you might have into a dedicated resources page, and ensure photos or other non-text assets are properly tagged and have descriptive text around them.
Keep your web forms to a minimum:
If you require a user to sign-up to access your content, chances are that Google won’t be indexing anything behind that webform. The leads that they generate may outweigh the SEO benefit you would get, but do remember that your exposure could be limited if you don’t have enough content directing people to these forms.
Keep it frequent:
Google loves sites that offer fresh content. It shows you’re trying to stay relevant to reader’s interests by creating value on a regular basis. Make sure you’re frequently updating your key pages, adding posts to a blog, and increasing the content available in your resource centre. The more frequently you update things, the more often Google will crawl your site, and the faster you can climb the rankings.
Choose the right conference registration partner
Google has partnered with Eventbrite and a handful of other ticketing providers to launch a feature that indexes events when people are searching for things to do. Now, when someone searches for something to do, your at-a-glance event details will show up in a skimmable list. For instance, if you are in Sydney, and you search for “events near me”, you get something like this:
Keep content high quality and consistent for long term success
The whole long-term success of your SEO strategy boils down to two things: quality and consistency.
You need to focus on quality if you don’t want to get penalised by Google. Think about the originality and value of your content. If it offers real value, people will share it, reference it, link to it and so on . All of these actions will improve your SEO performance over the long-term.
It’s also worth thinking about the length of your articles too. Short is not always the best strategy, even in an attention-span challenged world! While writers may suggest keeping blog posts to around 500 words, posts that average 1500 words considerably outperform shorter posts in terms of sharing and search rankings.
While Search Engine Optimisation has spawned a legion of consultants and is considered an industry in itself, at its heart the concept is quite simple. It boils down to consistently providing original content of value. As an organiser of conferences, which are centred around quality content, this should actually be playing to your strengths! You just have to figure out the most efficient way of harnessing your existing resources and practices to create that output. Google should then do the rest, and you’ll be rewarded with higher rankings in the search results, traffic, and ultimately more paying delegates.
Eventbrite is the #1 most authoritative ticketing website
Having an event listed on Eventbrite is the simplest way to boost your SEO. Eventbrite is one of Google’s top 100 most trusted sites — the only ticketing or registration page with a high enough domain authority to rank alongside sites like eBay and TripAdvisor. Learn more about conferences on Eventbrite.