01. SEO Marketing
for Events:
The Complete Guide

As an event organizer, your primary goal is to get people to come to your event. But for people to come to your event, they have to know about it first. And while proactive marketing definitely has its place, there are also simpler ways to make sure your potential customers are able to find out the details of your event. Chief among them is SEO. Read on for SEO tips from our in-house expert, Kike Alvarez.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of fine-tuning your website to ensure it appears within organic search results when someone uses Google, Bing, or another search engine. With search engines often being the first choice for anyone trying to learn about any event, it’s essential that yours turns up when someone is looking for an intriguing event to attend.

Even better, optimizing your search engine results is free. With attention to a few key details, your website or event listing page instantly becomes more discoverable, which can ultimately boost ticket sales — and revenue. With so much at stake, it’s easy to see why SEO is an essential and cost-effective marketing tool for event organizers.

So, how does it work? Search engines assign a ranking to your website based on a range of factors, which can include the content of your site, how quickly it loads, how easy it is to read on a mobile device, and whether third-party sites link to your pages. How your website is ranked by the search engine determines how discoverable your website will be to anyone searching you out.

Fortunately, our team of in-house experts — comprising engineers, product managers, and SEO specialists — constantly review the Eventbrite website and adapt it to meet Google’s algorithm changes to increase its search engine visibility. However, there are a number of things you can do to optimize your event listing page today.

How to optimize your event page for organic search

Your Eventbrite webpage is easy to optimize so your customers can find your event quickly. We’ve laid out the steps you should follow to optimize the search results of both your event page and your website.

Organizer profile page

This single page lists all your events and is designed to rank well for search terms like “[name of your organization]” + “events” or “tickets.” Customizing your organizer profile can help add substance to your site and enable a search engine to rank your site higher than sites that are less thorough or thinner in details. You can customize your page by selecting “Organizer Profile” in the account menu and adding your location, a logo, and a description. Don’t copy information word-for-word from any other source, as Google’s algorithms favor original content over duplicate content.

Event listing page

Your event listing page also offers ways to enhance your site’s visibility. There are two areas of your event listing pages that you can optimize for organic search:

Event title
This should be short and concise — 60 characters or less (for example, the subject of a workshop, the name of a performing artist, or the name of a speaker at a conference) — so it appears in full within Google’s search results. Too long of a title and your text won’t be clear, with key information potentially missing.
Event description
This should contain images and at least 100-200 words of original text — in other words, text that’s not copied and pasted from somewhere else. Use Google Ads or Moz’s keyword research tools to discover what words resonate with your audience. Also, search various terms that are relevant to your event to see which pages are currently ranking and which keywords and types of content are being used. Including the phrase “[your event name]” + “tickets” can help optimize your page for search, but make sure not to spam the reader.

How to optimize your website for organic search

We’ve all seen websites that seem barebones, giving the impression no one has posted anything new to it in some time. We might also have seen websites that are thick with blocks of text that make reading and gauging the site a challenge. Avoid these pitfalls and find additional ways to make sure your website stands out.

PRO—TIP

Create good quality content

Carry out keyword research (see the Google Ads chapter later in this guide) and look at what other event organizers are talking about.

Consider the needs of your attendees as well as the requirements of search engines. Easy-to-read and informative content makes for a positive user experience, which will boost your site’s organic search rankings.
Aim to solve potential queries — a FAQ section is positively assessed by Google.
Keep it fresh — new and frequently updated content increases your opportunity to rank organically.
Never duplicate content from your own or other online sources.
Think beyond text and include images and videos as search engines rank rich content experiences favorably.

Optimize your SEO meta tags

Meta tags are used in web design to include metadata about a webpage. They’re generally part of a web page’s head section and provide you with a great opportunity to rank higher in SEO if you know what to do.

Meta titles
For your title, try to use keywords that are unique to and define the main idea of each webpage. If your webpage is describing you or the company that’s organizing the event, for example, use words like “team,” “organizer,” and “creator.” They should be no more than 65 characters long.

Meta descriptions
Since these show up in search engine results, they should inspire the reader to find out more. Descriptions should be between 120 and 160 characters. When completing them, use active verbs and avoid a passive voice which can tend to sound less exciting or interesting to readers.
Image alt tags
Because Google can’t “see” images, you need to explain all visual elements using top-performing keywords. This will help connect your website to these images, which is yet another data point that a search engine can use to find you.

PRO—TIP

We recommend using a plugin like Yoast SEO to enhance your meta tags. Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization plug-in for WordPress that can help elevate your SEO results.

Put your event details front and center

Search engines like Google know events are time-sensitive and location-based, so include details like the date and venue to help boost your ranking. Be sure to include geographic details like “South Shore, Chicago” or “Southeast Atlanta” in all event listings and website copy, along with the venue’s— and tell potential attendees if the venue is an attraction in and of itself, since this helps anchor Google’s indexing when tying together sources to compose search engine results pages.

You might even consider including distinctive details about your location. If someone forgets the name of the location, they may try searching “King’s Cross club low ceilings.” Including a couple of key details in a description of your location might help make that connection.

Link to your events on your website

The more links to your event that exist on the internet, the easier it is for Google and other search engines to find and rank your page. For example, while Google will find your website by crawling Eventbrite, you can give yourself even more of an edge by linking to your event pages from your own website.

Adapt your website to Google’s technical requirements

Your website should be mobile-friendly and responsive, with your server configured to maximize website performance and page-loading efficiency. Search engines favor websites that are quick to load and offer an excellent mobile user experience, so be sure yours is optimized and adheres to Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Evaluate your results

Google Analytics provides numerous metrics and reports to help monitor the performance of your SEO efforts, Google Search Console can help identify other elements such as accessibility and indexability issues as a result of your sitemap configuration, link quality (which plays an important role in driving organic traffic), and a range of other technical issues.

SEO FTW

Search engine optimization requires only your time and effort, but the results will be long-lasting. It mostly involves paying closer attention to what information goes on your website, how it’s written, and what words you use to increase the odds a search engine will find your site and boost it in the search results.

Check out how you can make SEO work for you and get more and more people learning about — and buying tickets to — your events.

Feeling inspired and ready to host your next event? We’d love to help. Contact our events team or call us at (877) 620-9578.