There are dozens of tools for customers to find your event listing to buy tickets (including your own website and even the ShowClix homepage). Our traffic data estimates, however, that at least 10% of ShowClix ticket buyers make their way to our site via a Google search. How do you make sure your event listing ranks highly for those fans?
Well, we have you covered (mostly). Over the years, ShowClix has kept an eye on Google’s best practices, and in turn, we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes on our event listings to make sure your pages rank well.
A couple efforts we’ve made include the following:
• Structured data and snippets. When you search for something, you’ll notice that the results often include extra information beyond a title and basic description of the page. We’re diligent about taking advantage of Google’s recognition of rich snippets that puts relevant info forward before your customers even hit the event listing.
• Social media integration. Search engines play more nicely with pages that have been legitimized through the power of sharing on social media. We include the necessary Facebook and Google+ buttons to encourage your customers to engage with your pages, which improves your search results.
In addition to these areas under the hood, though, there are a few things you can do to make sure you’re getting the most of your event listing’s search rank.
• Enter clear, complete event titles. We automatically include the title of your event in the page’s title tag, but that visibility is only as useful as the title itself. Title your events in the system as you would on a flyer or an advertisement: provide the complete name of the event. Avoid abbreviations or nicknames.
• Take advantage of the event description. The event description is a useful place to share more details beyond the basics. It’s also a good opportunity to reference the title of your event again. You don’t need to cram the title thirty times into the page, but additional mentions makes your page seem more relevant to Google.
• Use descriptive image filenames. When Google crawls a page, the visual data of images is essentially invisible — the crawler instead relies upon alt-text and filenames to construct a relevant idea of what the image represents. Title your description, header and background images with the name of your event to maximize your results (e.g., new-york-comic-con-1.png).