Nowadays, local businesses that are not leveraging local SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) are missing out on a lot of opportunities. If you’re not visible enough in the local market, your competitors can easily outrun you. What’s more, you cannot establish a consumer base if no one knows about your business in the first place.
That’s why local businesses strive to stand out in the local market and create exposure as well as awareness for their company or brand. One of the activities these businesses oftentimes engage in is local events.
Whether it’s a charity event, a fundraiser, a seminar, or simply a celebration, a networking event of some sort is a good way to contribute to the local community and generate buzz for your local business. However, promoting an event in today’s digital world can be quite difficult without a proper local SEO strategy. With that in mind, here are a few ways local SEO can help with event promotion:
Create a webpage for your event
As mentioned before, promoting a local event without SEO can be difficult. The main reason is that consumers these days go online to inform themselves about almost anything, including local events. Therefore, creating a specialized web page for your event promotion is a must. What’s more, optimizing that page for local SEO is equally important so that your page becomes visible on search engines.
In other words, you must optimize your page so that your audience can easily find and access it. That includes focusing on factors such as ranking for specific keywords, ensuring proper page load time, creating well-placed CTA (Call to Action) buttons, and so on. As far as the content goes, you can create backlinks on your promo page that lead back to your website. Just make sure you post relevant content on landing pages so that visitors can get properly informed.
Create local citations
As you may already know, providing relevant business information such as name, address, and phone number (NAP) on relevant business listing directories is important for local SEO. In addition, there are other relevant local websites and community forums that publish information regarding local events. All you need to do is find these relevant websites, apps, or social media pages and submit your business information as well as information about your event.
That way, you create local citations that are beneficial for both your local SEO and event promotion efforts. You can always consult with a digital marketing company if you have difficulties discovering the right local prospects on your own. If you implement a proper strategy, your business information and your event information will become more visible on numerous relevant sites. That way, you’ll create even more exposure for not just your event but also for your business.
Leverage social media
Social media is a powerful tool for any business these days. Even though search engines such as Google have stated that they don’t consider social media signals as ranking factors, your social media presence is still vital for your local SEO. The main reason is that social signals such as likes, shares, comments, etc. can improve your business reputation, and reputation is, in fact, a ranking signal. Therefore, a social media marketing campaign is crucial for both your event promotion and your local SEO.
You can leverage relevant and top-quality content to engage your audience and build awareness for your event. You can even target influencers to endorse your event and promote it to their audience as well. Moreover, you can use Facebook ads to generate qualified prospects and lead them to your event page. Simply put, social media platforms are extremely beneficial when you want to leverage features such as geo-targeting, consumer segmentation, interest targeting, and others in order to promote something specific, in this case, your event.
Get featured with Google
Consumers go online to get informed, and they use search engines to discover relevant events that interest them. One of the best ways to get your event featured in search results is to sign up with Google. As mentioned before, providing business information on relevant listing directories is crucial for local SEO, which includes the Google My Business listing as well.
However, in order to have your event featured in Google’s search results, you don’t have to sign up for their listing, although you should because of its importance for your local SEO efforts. In fact, you must include data items for your event from schema.org in accordance with Google’s guidelines.
Each featured event will include relevant business information and the link for the ticket sale or sign-up process. Simply put, if consumers type in “events near me” in their search engine, Google will automatically display the list of all local events. That way, you can gain more exposure as well as attract more attendees, as your event will be visible in search results.
Local SEO is vital for local businesses these days. As a matter of fact, it has even become mandatory, considering that the market is quite competitive and overcrowded. With that in mind, you can boost your event promotion and ensure your event will be a success with the help of local SEO, but only if you implement the right strategy, of course.
