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5 Ways Your Event Calendar Can Enhance SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an endless battle.  On one hand, you have marketers seeking to optimize their web pages to improve placement in search engine rankings. On the other hand, you have search engine giants (like Google) continually changing their algorithms to accommodate new, unknown metrics and make for a better, more navigable and personalized web.

Some of the best ways to optimize your search ranking include increasing the number of individual pages and backlinks, encouraging social sharing and making sure your site always has fresh content. The common thread?  All of these can be achieved with the launch of an event calendar.

There are efficient ways your online event calendar can influence SEO — here’s how:

Increase the number of individual pages

Working in marketing, you know the effort that goes into launching new landing pages.  There’s copy to write, creative to design, and promotion to do.  An event calendar takes this process and reduces your investment time while multiplying the number of resultant pages available on your site.  Each individual event gets its own page, vastly increasing the amount of pages available for search engines to crawl.  More than just boosting numbers, however, each new individual page gives you the opportunity to have a larger number of long-tail keywords to optimize for. In addition, having individual event pages rather than a one-page calendar ensures that your users will spend a longer time on your site overall – and that “dwell time” is SEO gold.

Boost backlinks

Individual event pages have another use as well: they greatly increase the amount of backlinking. A known large off-page factor for SEO is the number of times other sites link back to your own site.  Search engines interpret this linking as a vote of confidence from one site to another, inferring that your site must have valuable content because others have found it worthy of sharing.  The more pages you have available (think multiple event pages rather than a one-page calendar), the more chances for sites to link back.  One site might link to three different lectures, for example, earning you three times the backlinks than if you had placed all of your events on the same page. Voila! Optimization.

Encourage social sharing

Search engines are increasingly reliant on social signals as ranking factors. The strength of these signals can vary based on things like social reputation and number of quality social shares (similar to backlinks). Event calendars with built-in social sharing capabilities make it easy for your guests to promote your events but also factor into your social and site rankings when search engines are assessing your pages. This increases the likelihood of your event pages ranking higher in search engine results because shared links on social media help search engines determine the credibility and ranking of websites.

Enable unique page titles and meta descriptions

Then there’s old school SEO, the tried-and-true method of customizing meta titles and descriptions on individual pages to get them to rank for particular long- or short-tail keywords. Meta titles are the HTML codes embedded in the page header that provide keyword information to search engines. The math on this one is simple: more individual pages thanks to an event calendar means more chances to uniquely customize individual pages, and the higher likelihood that your pages will rank for multiple keywords. The end result? Your pages will be found in search engines for the terms that you want to rank for, because you have had a chance to give them the individual attention they deserve.

Generate fresh content

You’ve heard the phrase before: content is king. The 2016 version of this phrase might read “fresh, consistent content is king.” So, you wrote a corporate blog post or launched a landing page back in 2011. While great for traffic, search engines want more when it comes to rewarding marketers with rankings. Here it is, direct from Google itself:

Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results.

The bottom line? Fresh content on your site equals a higher placement in search engine rankings – and what is an interactive event calendar but a perpetual source of fresh content?  Because Localist events each have their own individual event pages, the creation of a new event means a new page for you and fresh content for your site. It’s a win-win situation when it comes to SEO.

An interactive event calendar can have an enormous impact on SEO.  By increasing the number of fresh pages on a website, encouraging backlinks, and enabling you to customize meta titles and descriptions throughout, the right event technology platform allows you to make an impact on your rankings without being subject to the ever-changing search engines algorithms.

Here’s an example of an individual event landing page from Boston College:
Boston College Event Calendar Localist

About Localist

Localist is a cloud-based event technology platform helping organizations easily publish, manage and promote multiple events. Localist’s robust interactive calendar software offers the efficiency of a centralized marketing calendar, the power of social sharing tools and the intelligence of analytics to optimize event marketing performance. To date, Localist has powered more than 2 million events across the world.

Here’s an example of a main calendar page from Explore Gwinnett:

explore-gwinnett

Visit Localist  Follow @localist

Krystal Putman-Garcia

Krystal Putman-Garcia is the VP of Marketing for Localist, where she helps organizations maximize the value of their events to grow sales and engagement efforts. She has spent the past 15 years working in various marketing and partnership capacities, from managing and growing multi-million dollar sponsorships at Discovery Channel to leading market entry strategies for an Israeli medical device start up.

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