SEO is changing. Link building is becoming over more complex and it’s more critical than ever before to have a varied and natural inbound link profile.
One such method of link building (and I stress that this is just one method of quite literally hundreds) is event hosting and marketing.
Taking your marketing efforts offline and holding a real event that has some real value to people can have a knock on benefit for your link profile and ultimately your SEO efforts.
Here’s a brief guide to link building through event hosting:
1. Decide Upon Your Audience and Event
Start at the beginning. Who will you invite to your event? If you’re in SEO, could it be small businesses in all sectors? Is it a training event for students? Is it an event targeted at a certain industry?
Before you decide upon the content of your event, make sure you know your audience. If your event isn’t tailored properly, you’ll struggle to make up the numbers!
Decide upon your event format, dates, venues etc. For the purpose of this post, let’s assume we’re going to hold a mini-conference with several speakers.
2. Pre-Event Links
Get your event listed online wherever you can (this means links!). Eventbrite is an international hub for events – list on Eventbrite. But also make sure to:
- Try local newspapers with websites listing events
- Run searches in Google for sites listing local events
- Ask the venue you’re hosting at (if relevant) for a snippet about your event on their website (resulting in links, of course)
- Ask any speakers you’ve invited to link to you on their own blogs (if applicable) or to mention the events
- Do the same with your sponsors
- Use Facebook and Google Plus Listings
Ensure you write unique descriptions of your events for anywhere you post it – this makes your listing much likelier to be indexed by Google, thus ensuring your link offers more value.
3. During the Event
- If applicable to your audience, encourage check ins and live blogging
- Make sure you take contact details for everyone who turned up – you’ll need those later
- Take photos/video
Most importantly, make sure your event (whatever it is) delivers on its promise. Ensure you’re holding an event that your audience get something out of.
4. Post Event
- Create a press release about your event including some quotes from attendees and send to relevant local and industry press outlets and websites. Include photos!
- Produce a comprehensive write up of the event on your own website including the photographs/video content you took during the event
- Write to everyone who attended, pointing them in the direction of the write up and asking them to spot themselves on pictures etc. Encourage anyone who did enjoy the event to share their thoughts on social platforms or their own blogs and websites and link back to you. If it’s applicable to your business, offering an incentive for other people to write up their thoughts on their site about your event is a great way to encourage people to make the effort to write up the event and you also benefit from some honest, constructive criticism and feedback.
- Put any presentations (where relevant) from the event on your website and issue the link to people – again this sort of resource, if openly available, could encourage natural links
What you Get
This type of event based link building gives you access potentially to links from:
- Local listings websites
- Global event websites
- Industry press
- Attendee websites
- Speaker websites
- Press outlets
- Industry press
And, more to the point, you could make some valid contacts and start building a degree of authority within your niche area.
This article was written by Lyndsey Adams, a freelance copywriter and SEO specialist writing for a range of websites, including Doubleknot Event Management Software and other sites in the software sector.