How to Create an SEO Strategy Around Your Upcoming Big Business Event
Event marketers should be aware that search engine optimization isn’t the same as it used to be. While this may be a cliche statement among digital marketers, it’s true. Another true statement that isn’t as cliche? Your event’s SEO strategy should no longer center keywords.
Wait. What? In 2019, the majority of businesses have a basic idea about the concepts behind SEO. They also understand why it’s important to their objectives. When it comes to creating a solid SEO strategy, however, creating content to have coverage for keywords that your target audience is using in search is a waste of resources and is ultimately wrong. In this article, we’ll be taking a deep dive into what you should be focusing on in your SEO strategy to ensure a successful event.
What Are The Different Facets of SEO?
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO places your content front and center- focusing on content that exists on the page and centers on focusing on content to work to elevate the website’s ranking for your targeted keywords.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is centered on links that point to your site from other sites on the web. The volume of links and the webmasters that curate those links help you build trust with search engines. Building trust helps you rank higher.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO centers on a website’s architecture that examines the internal workings of the site to see how pages are set up from a technical standpoint. Google focuses on your site’s code as much as it does the content- their overall goal is to improve the quality of sites they rank on their search engine.
Not all businesses are able to optimize their site for search engines in the exact same way. Your SEO strategy should be adapted to your industry and the needs of your target audience. To give you a headstart on adapting your strategy for your event, here are the 6 things you can do to ensure you have proper SEO coverage for your event.
Develop High Level Topics
While keywords are the central nervous system of SEO, they’re not your key to dominating search and making progress with organic traffic. The first thing you should do when implementing a successful SEO program is to make a list of high-level topics you should cover from month-to-month.
Start by compiling a list of 10-12 short words related to your event’s focus. You can use a tool like UberSuggest to identify these terms’ search volumes as well as explore variations that align with your goals and objectives.
By associating your topics with coordinating high-search short-tail keywords, you’re no longer dedicating individual blogs to these specific keywords. These are the keywords that have too much competition to rank well on Google when you’re first starting out.
Analyze terms by both their search competition and the level of competition there is to rank and work to narrow your list down to 10-15 short keyword terms and phrases that are associated with your event’s objectives and the target audience you’re trying to reach are using in search queries. Next, rank these terms in based on priority and then categorize them based on the monthly search volume as well as the term’s keyword relevance.
Your core keywords are called ‘pillars’ and they serve as the foundation for what you’ll build next- larger ‘clusters’ of longer phrase “long-tail” keywords.
List Out Keywords Around Your Topics
At this point, you’ll need to work on optimizing the pages on your site for your focus keywords and building out your site to accommodate opportunities. Every pillar that you identified previously should be used to select five to 10 long-tail keyword phrases that take a deeper dive into your original topic’s keyword. These will be your subtopics.
Taking the time to do this allows your event to attract people who are at different stages in the customer journey, looking for different things as they search. Ultimately, this creates multiple entry points for potential customers that are at every stage in the buying cycle.
Use your subtopics to brainstorm blog posts or page ideas that define concepts within each higher level topic you have selected. Once you’ve identified your subtopics, you can use UberSuggest to identify the long-tail keywords to structure each of your blog posts around.
These subtopics are what your clusters are comprised of. Every single pillar topic should be able to support a single cluster of 5-10 these subtopics. This utilizes an SEO model that is called a “topic cluster” and search engines are highly dependent on this concept to connect searchers with information related to their search query.
The more specific you get with your content, the more specificity into the people you’re reaching. With this more specific intent, you’re much more likely to convert your traffic into qualified leads. Google places high value on sites that dive deep into the full scope of a larger topic and sees it as the best result to a search query and it will rank these sites higher.
Build Your Pages Around Topics
As far as trying to rank a site with a search engine goes, attempting to get a single page to perform well in search engines for a number of keywords is next to impossible. However, here’s where everything we’ve been doing begins to come together:
Using the 10 high-level topics you identified, create a page for every single one that gives an overview for a topic at a higher level– using the long-tail keyword phrases you came up with for every cluster in the second step.
Visualize every pillar page as a table of content where you’re briefing readers on the long-tail keywords (subtopics) that you can elaborate on further in blog posts.
Using your list of keywords, you’ll be able to identify the different high-level pages you should ultimately create. The number of topics that you create pillar pages for should work together with the core offers your event has. This makes it incredibly easier for prospects to find you on the search engines.
Set Up Your Blog
Blogging is a fantastic opportunity to gain rankings for your target keywords while engaging your target audience. The blog posts you create is seen as a new page to give you another opportunity to rank. Your blog is where you’ll be able to elaborate on every subtopic and gain ground in Google’s search results.
As you write your blogs and supply your clusters with fresh content that supports your overall topics and subtopics, you should also do these three things:
- Incorporate your long-tail keywords into the content, but don’t place them more than three times throughout the content. Google isn’t taking exact match usage of keywords into consideration as much as it used to. Using a keyword too many times in a single piece of content can serve as a warning to search engines that you’re keyword stuffing, which can be harmful to your overall rankings.
- Link out to the pillar topic page on your site that you created as a higher level overview on this subtopic. You can implement this by utilizing tags in the CMS you’re using or using it as anchor text in the blog article you’ve written.
- When you’ve published your blog post, link to your post from your pillar topic page. Find the point in the content of your pillar topic page that defines the subtopic and link it here.
Connecting the pillar topics and cluster topics like this, you’re demonstrating to Google that there’s a relationship between your long-tail keywords and the higher-level topic you’re working on ranking for.
Create A Link Building Strategy
While utilizing this SEO model in your on-page SEO strategy is the way to forge forward in modern SEO strategy, it’s not the sole way to rank your site content higher after you hit the publish button.
Our initial efforts were to ensure that your on-site SEO strategy is effective and aligned with the things that search engins like Google are currently looking for. Off-page is every bit as important, which focuses around link building.
External link building is the strategy in which you either attract or otherwise gain inbound links to your site from other places on the internet. The more page authority your target prospective origin site has, the larger impact it will have on the ranking of the page it’s linking to.
Dedicate resources to plan out all the ways you could attract links to your site. Maybe you could share links with local businesses in your industry in exchange for links back to their sites.
Another way to gain links is to post articles related to industry news. This gives you an opportunity to get links from an industry figure or other bloggers surrounding your core topics/industry.
Measure Everything!
SEO takes a lot of time, effort, and resources. This is serious time and effort- what good is it if you can’t see the success of your hard work? There are many metrics that you can track to keep your SEO strategy on track while measuring your success.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you keep an eye on indexed pages, measuring leads, ROI, your external links, search queries.
Author Bio:
Kristen Bowie is a marketing obsessive & advocate for the knowledge economy. When she’s not writing for Qwilr, she’s hanging out with her two goats & painting.