Digital Marketers use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to sell their products on the first page of a Google search. Can we benefit from this and do the same for our own events, in other words, can we do event ticket SEO?
First of all, let’s understand a little about how Digital Marketers do this. Even though Search Engine Optimization is a full time job, if we know enough about the key concepts then we will be able to make a difference.
SEO concepts in simple language
From a practical point of view the items in the following list have a big effect on whether your event page appears on the first page of a Google search or is lost in the hundreds of pages that follow.
- Your page has content relevant to the Google search
- Your website domain has authority for the subject being searched for
The content of your page is not just the visible words that you see on the page, but also keywords that appear in the Title Tag of the page and the keywords in the Meta Description of the page. More about these later.
An SEO expert will spend a long time searching out new or alternative keywords that describe your business offering that other marketers may have overlooked. Then they put these on the page and watch what happens to where they rank in a Google search as a result. So rather than coming nowhere for the search term “fireworks”, your event might instead be on the first page of the Google search results for “fireworks family fun with entertainers”.
The authority of your website domain is little bit of a fuzzy concept. For the purposes of this discussion we can assume that Google calculates the domain authority based on the number of visitors coming to your website and the number of other websites that link to your website (and their domain authority). So if you have lots of visitors to your website and lots of important websites link to your website then you are much more likely to rank highly in a Google search.
Applying SEO to event ticket sales
When you sell your event tickets on the web then however simple, or however complicated, the tools might be that you use to sell your tickets, ultimately what the buyer sees is a web page. Typically this is your event sales landing page.
Lets consider the two main ways that event tickets may be sold online:
- You use your own website and have a link that launches the ticket selling tool
- You sell from the website of a third party ticket selling platform
With your own website you have complete control. Either you, or your web design team can set the titles and keywords that you want. Then you can modify them at anytime. This is good because SEO experts tend to revisit their keywords often and look for new keyword opportunities to try out.
Despite this, if your website has a low domain authority then it might still be difficult to be found in a Google search. That is to say, if someone was to search for your event and they new the exact name, and there was no possibility of another event with a similar name, then they should find your website and find your sales landing page. But if they searched for something more competitive, such as fireworks festivals near me, then they might not find your event.
What happens if your tickets are sold solely on a third part website? There is good news and bad news. Hopefully the third party would be big and successful with a website domain that has a high domain authority, this is going to help your buyers find their tickets. Unfortunately, the bad news is that many third party ticket sellers don’t give you control over the less visible SEO features (particularly the title tags and meta descriptions mentioned earlier) that contribute to how your particular tickets can be found.
Conclusion
We can apply SEO techniques to event ticket sales. Time spent building the domain authority of your website domain and finding those magic keywords will greatly boost your chances of buyers finding your tickets through an internet search.
However, if you are relying on sales from a third party ticket selling platform then you need to be sure that you have control over the main SEO aspects, otherwise you will not benefit from SEO techniques to sell event tickets. Customers who have a link to your sales landing page will have no problem, but we may be missing out on tickets buyers who are searching for events on the internet.
Coconut Tickets
When selling events on Coconut Tickets, the event organizer has control over the key SEO aspects of the sales landing page. This includes three main areas:
- being able to set a custom URL of the organizers choice for the sales landing page
- setting the desired value of the Title Tag
- entering the complete meta description to be transmitted with the landing page to improve relevancy in Google searches
To make it easy for those of us that are not full time Digital Marketers, Coconut Tickets will suggest the custom URL, title and meta description from an analysis of the information you have entered about your event. You can accept the suggestions with no further effort, modify them, or replace them completely with your own values.
For more information about Coconut Tickets and a free trial please follow this link