By Jon Monk, head of search performance at ASP
Conference websites hold a unique position in the digital landscape, offering distinct advantages that can be harnessed to significantly boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. Despite these opportunities, many conference organisers fail to capitalise on them, often relying heavily on paid advertising and email marketing. By leveraging user-generated content and associations with industry leaders, you can enhance the online visibility of your event and reduce advertising costs. It’s a win-win.
The Advantages of Conference Websites
Conference websites benefit from two key strengths: user-generated content and connections with influential industry figures. Speakers, sponsors and attendees contribute a substantial portion of the content, which lessens the burden on you as the organiser to generate your own unique content. Importantly, the high-profile nature of these contributors provides an excellent opportunity to earn high-quality backlinks.
Content creation and link-building are typically the most challenging and costly aspects of SEO. However, you are in a unique position to exploit these elements naturally within your event cycle, building a robust and high-performing website that excels in search engine rankings.
Common Oversights and Missed Opportunities
Despite these advantages, many conference websites reset each year, discarding the previous year’s content. This approach overlooks the potential to accumulate content and links over time, which can significantly strengthen the website’s SEO. Instead, many organisers lean heavily on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and email marketing to drive traffic and sales.
While PPC and email marketing are effective for event registrations, allocating some budget towards SEO can yield long-term benefits. Over time, a strong SEO strategy can reduce your dependence on paid advertising.
Challenges in Adopting an SEO Strategy
One reason for the lack of SEO focus among conference organisers is unfamiliarity with SEO practices and the associated budget allocations. Additionally, the SEO industry has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, leading to a lack of trust. However, conference websites that have embraced SEO have found it relatively straightforward to gain traction due to their content and link advantages.
Future Trends and the Importance of SEO
The importance of SEO is set to increase as new data privacy laws diminish the effectiveness of ad tech tracking capabilities on platforms like Google and Facebook. As PPC performance declines, SEO can fill the gap, providing a sustainable source of organic traffic.
A Strategic Approach to Event Website SEO
To unlock the SEO potential of a website, you should follow a strategic content plan:
Pre-Event:
- Optimise event pages for target keywords.
- Create detailed speaker and sponsor profile pages with bios and links to their websites.
- Develop topic clusters around conference themes and streams
During the Event:
- Live blog and share updates on social media.
- Capture and share photos, videos, and attendee testimonials.
Post-Event:
- Repurpose this onsite content into guides, reports, and videos (AI tools can really help here).
- Follow up with sponsors and speakers to secure backlinks to their profiles.
- Survey attendees for quotes and reviews.
Overcoming Common Challenges
Budget constraints, lack of in-house SEO expertise, and difficulty in persuading sponsors and speakers to participate in link building are common challenges. Nevertheless, many conference websites have successfully reaped SEO rewards through consistent effort.
Allocating even a modest budget towards a long-term SEO strategy can help you to take advantage of the unique content and link opportunities of your event. With the right approach, they can build an authoritative web presence that drives compounding organic traffic, leads, and sales each year, while reducing paid advertising costs.
For more tips on improving your conference website’s SEO, visit www.asp.events
