Do you have an event planning website or, maybe you’re in the process of designing one now?
It’s important to have an online presence so your clients can find you. I use my site to advertise in online directories, forward to potential clients and use as an advertising piece for people who were looking for an event planner in my city.
And it’s much harder to get clients when they can’t find your website in search engines like Google.
Trying to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your event planning website can be overwhelming and it can feel like you have to learn a new language, which can be frustrating because that language can be strange.
And often, people have conflicting opinions about what the most effective SEO techniques are.
But, SEO is critical if you want your website to come up in the search results when someone is searching for an event planner in your area.
I’ve built in entire business because I took the time to learn the basic, yet fundamental, principals of SEO marketing.
But not everyone wants to or needs to learn advanced SEO techniques, so if have little desire or time, hire someone who is good at it and loves doing it!
Event Planning Website & SEO Tips
SEO can be technical and a lot of jargon is often used. For example: what the f**k do analytics, black hat, bot, META tags, or PPC mean anyway? Don’t let these terms scare you. You don’t need to know everything about SEO but it’s a good idea to know something as you build your business. For a complete list of SEO terms, use this as a reference. In this post, I’m sharing the 8 most important (and easiest) event planning website SEO tips you want to consider when building or updating your website or blog. I base these easy SEO tips on the many hours I’ve spent learning about SEO since I built my first site nearly a decade ago.
- Use keywords in your domain name or page URL where possible. A “keyword” or “keyword phrase” is something you think people will type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. When the actual keyword phrase appears in the URL (the actual address of the page), your page is more likely to come up higher in a search result for that phrase. For example, my site is www.eventplanningblueprint.com – key words are event planning. Can you spot the URL for this bog post?
- Page titles should include keywords. Don’t call your portfolio page “portfolio.” More effective would be “Toronto event planning portfolio” as an example.
- Repeat keywords in headlines and subheads. Can you guess which phrase(s) I’m using in this article?
- Link keyword phrases within your pages, it helps search engines know what your site is about. Plus it encourages people to spend more time on your site. For example, in many of my posts you’ll see a link to another event planning blog post I previously published. It’s important to have internal links (to your own site) and external links (to outside posts/sites).
- Get relevant and well-established websites to link to your website. If you’re the preferred event planner for a venue or other vendor, ask them to link to your site.
- Don’t over stuff your pages with keywords, keep it under about 5% of the total words on the page – a good rule is to use your keyword or keyword phrase every 200-300 words in your post.
- Include relevant and interesting content on your event planning website so that people visit multiple pages on your site, share your content through social media, comment on your event planning blog, etc.
- If you’re offering your event planning services in a specific geographic area, don’t try and compete for the very general and competitive phrase “event planning.” Narrow your keyword phrases further by being more specific. For example, by including the areas you serve: “Event planning Seattle” or “Atlanta event planning.”
It’s important to understand SEO basics when building an event planning website because it’s how Google determines the relevance of your content and site, and how clients find you.
It also helps build your reputation, so if you stick with these 8 steps I’ve shared here, you’ll be further ahead than most of your competition.
I’d love to hear from you.When it comes to SEO for your event site, are you brand new to it or have you been using it for a while?
Event planning is not my area of expertise, but as a website builder, I can relate to the challenges that exist for any website. It just seems like such a daunting task to compete for search engine rankings and traffic, particularly, targeted traffic. My friend has had a hand in just about every aspect of corporate event planning and management and have pretty much done it all (short of carrying the hors d’ oeuvres tray).
Thanks Gerald, it can definitely be challenging if you don’t know what you’re doing!
I guess these are all the little details you have got to pay attention to in order to Maximize your SEO efforts. Every little detail counts, especially if you are targeting a very specific audience and also when you have chosen to drill down on a few specific key words. This is necessary when you are targeting a local market such as a particular city or county. I even heard you should keyword your 505 Error page (the default page that the web server accesses when a link is dead or a page can’t be found).
That’s a good idea, Robert, to keyword error pages too. Thanks!
Sales leads and referrals are the life blood of every event-related business. I think this holds true for almost every industry, but the reality is that marketing any event service is not easy. New event projects launch every day behind the closed doors of board meetings, emails and phone conversations. The problem is, as a service provider, you rarely have access to these happenings. This means you are always reacting to inquiries instead of being part of the discussion.
Work with your client so you can be part of the conversation. It’ll help you and them.
I suppose I could run some web page analyzer app to measure and recognize the keyword density of this page and pick out the key phrase, but just from giving it the eye test, I would guess that the key phrase, “keyword is the one that is optimized on this page. If not that, it would have to be “event planning. I also noticed that you placed emphasis (bold text) on “keyword. That is why that was my first guess.
It’s ‘event planning website’ !
Good guess though Matthew.
They say that content is king, Well, if in fact that is the case, be sure to have good, well – written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
Absolutely! Thanks Charles for the tip on back links.