The Ultimate Guide to Event Venue SEO

The Ultimate Guide to Event Venue SEO

SEO has changed dramatically over the last three years.

Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to make sure users get the best search results from the content crawl. The tricks marketers used to use are now ignored and even penalised. It is really important that you do the right things to maximise the reach of your venue and event spaces.

We’ll run you through some of the things we have learned here at Eventopedia:

This is a really detailed and important area and we would always recommend using an SEO expert to make sure you are on top of all the updates that Google and other search engines introduce. But here are a few things that you should be doing for your event space pages:

Keep correct page structure – in order to help search engine ‘spiders’ (not quite as scary as real ones but almost!) we can submit our event sites to search engines. Google’s search console will make sure the pages are indexed but will also give you a good idea of improvements that need to be made to optimise for readers.

Optimise for mobile use – this is a difficult one for venues, because we want to show our spaces in all of their glory. But Google gives preference to sites that are mobile friendly and the ‘spiders’ crawl sites with this in mind. With the venue space being so competitive technical structure becomes even more important.

URL Structure – this is a difficult one for venue spaces. For hotel event spaces, the meeting room or venue hire pages are often less visible compared to hotel room pages and having an optimised URL structure can really help with this.

Lots of code within the URL makes things harder for those crawling ‘spiders’ and can de-rank your page. We have found a simple structure of: domain.com/venue-hire/space-name works really well.

Internal Links – this is a simple one but quite often people forget. Content pages should link to other relevant pages with easily understandable text for a hyper-link. You might have a great article about the location of your venue – linking the article to your venue location age helps search engines’ to understand the content, giving you a better ranking.

Title Tags– These should always be created with the user in mind, making it simple for them to see what the page is about. The title should reflect the content and the headers should be marked correctly in the code.

Canonicalisation - this one is a bit of a mouth full but incredibly important! helps make sure that we don’t get penalised for duplicate content. The search engines will penalise you for repeated content unless you use canonical URLS, pushing value to a single piece with the others referencing it.

Website Code Language – Search engines can crawl most websites no matter the language it has been built on. But while Google can read Java script it prefers sites that are not built on this, mainly because of the dynamic nature of Java script. If you are building a new website or platform that relies on SEO as a key driver make sure you have a well thought out technical plan before building anything.

Venue Images and Video – Images and videos are becoming essential to the success of a website. Providing venue planners with a virtual tour is great but can sometimes put a client off enquiring. Spending some of your marketing budget to create an engaging video keeps you in control of the narrative and is much more engaging.

Hyatt Hotels are a great example of this, check out one of their videos here

Site Speed – Having videos and large, high resolution images can put a strain on the speed of your site unless you use an iframe to display the video as we do. Make sure you are optimising content and achieving the highest site speeds you can, especially for mobile users.

Domain Authority (DA) - is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERP’s). Domain Authority scores range from 1 to 100, the higher your score the greater your ability to rank. Moz tell us that Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking root domains and number of total links into one single domain authority score. This score can then be used when comparing websites or tracking a ‘ranking strength’ of a website over time. Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google and has no effect on your search engine results but it is a great indicator of how successful your site will be.

A Domain Authority score of over 30 is considered good for an event venue page, but work to get higher than this and you will see great results.

Backlinks – obtaining backlinks from high ranking domain authority websites is not easy to get. Google typically knows if links have been paid for as they often won’t contain a follow code. Good Webmasters won’t want to put backlinks on their own sites unless there is value to their own readers.

Content strategy is an incredibly important tool to work on. A good content strategy will allow you to release and engage with your audience over a long period of time, generating you results over a longer period of time. Simple and informative content is just as valuable to a search engine as a Pulitzer prize winning author.

Length is key to being an authority in the industry from an SEO perspective, your posts should be at least 350 words but in reality 750 words will help search engines tell if you’re an authority or not. Writing between 1000-3000 words will really set you apart, it is not that easy to write that many words on a lot of subjects.

Our advice is don’t write content just for the sake of it. Sure it is great to write something longer, but if your words have no purpose your audience won’t actually take the time to read it. If your content doesn’t engage it won’t help you sell your venue space!

Writing about your venue can be daunting but it is certainly worth it. Think about all of the questions you have been asked by your clients over the years. Writing detailed answers to those is a great place to start. Your potential clients will already be informed and confident that your venue is right for them before they even come to visit. Knowing that you aren’t just brick and mortars but are a professional team that are able to pre-empt questions gives a lot of confidence that you will be able to run the venue perfectly for their event.

This will also help you rank higher in search engines, bringing answers to the questions event planners have when they search online.

Event venues are made up of so many different parts, from individual rooms to catering options, audio specifications and even the contracts.

You can cover all of these areas and explain them in detail in an easy to read format on each of their own pages. The event space pages in particular should have detailed descriptions of the rooms and their exact specifications.

Make sure that you mention all of the selling points, the smallest details can make a huge difference to an event planner. We once had a client who had such a huge emphasis on the bathroom facilities for his guests. All of these details make great content for event planners and search engines!

Conclusion

Well executed SEO and great content is the most powerful way to drive high quality traffic and enquiries to your venue. The hard work you put in now should benefit you for years to come.

It is important that someone within your venue takes responsibility for understanding the benefits that your website is delivering so you can continually make a business case to improve and adapt to the ever changing nature of SEO.

If you don’t have in-house expertise on this make sure you reach out to an agency, but they must be the right agency for you.

We know a couple that understand SEO in the hospitality space and the technical issues that can prevent your venue from reaching its potential. If you would like to know more or get an introduction to the experts we work with feel free to get in touch at venues@eventopedia.com