5 Ways Reviews Will Improve Your Event SEO
Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, is one of those ubiquitous digital marketing terms that’s always cited as key for developing a successful web presence. Most of us know what it means and yet it is still fogged by misunderstanding, a vagueness, of how to actually achieve it. The true secrets feel closely guarded by the keepers of the ever-evolving Google algorithms. So how do you hit a moving target and how do you prioritise what’s worth dedicating time to in order to secure race entries?
The basic essence of good SEO is a blend of refining and curating your web content whilst also keeping on top of the ‘uglier’ (read: boring) stuff behind the scenes. You want your website to be recognised as highly relevant for the search terms that will deliver you the best conversion rate. So as a very basic example, if you organise a half marathon, you want the search engine to marry your site with those people who are looking to enter a half marathon, which seems simple enough. However, making it easy for athletes to find your web presence in the great mixing pot of other races, many of which may have crossover disciplines and search terms, is competitive and challenging.
When you start getting stuck into the inner depths of SEO it is intricate and multi-faceted, but thankfully there are some easy wins that are proven to deliver a more favourable website in the eyes of Google. Over recent years it has been established that websites, experiences, products and services that showcase their customer reviews are utilising a valuable tool in the kit of possibilities that make up a web content plan. The presence of reviews is now a key driver in online sales and race entry is no different, so let’s look at 5 ways in which reviews will benefit how your event website appears in search results.
Do consumers read online reviews?
Yes, they absolutely do.
1. Keywords
Keywords are the things that link what people are searching for with what is written on your website. They can be short, one or two words, and they can be long-tail phrases or even sentences (sometimes referred to as “natural language search”). It’s nice to have a mix of both, but understand that although it can be tempting to target word combinations such as “running events” these give very broad and potentially inaccurate results. Consider therefore that people looking to enter a race may be more likely to search “spring half marathon events in the south east” and that ranking well in Google for this sort of focussed search is far more likely to deliver a sale.
Writing good content that’s easy to read whilst also bringing the right keywords into play takes time and skill. Here’s where it can be fundamentally beneficial for your SEO strategy to place a review widget on your site, because the words written, much of which could naturally be infused with keywords, also count towards your search engine ranking.
The simple beauty of a review is that you have the people who would normally be searching for your event, writing about your event on your website, so in effect they are doing part of the SEO work for you.
2. Stay Fresh
Following on from Keywords is the importance of maintaining fresh and relevant information on your website. For an event website this can be difficult to achieve because, besides your event, what is there to write about? You could maintain a blog, but this can become arduous and content for the sake of it offers little value.
By showcasing reviews on your website it gives the army of Google bots something different and new to crawl around on, which is exactly what they love.
They then return to the mothership and inform the algorithm that your website has interesting, relevant and current stuff to say that would be good to present to people searching for key terms associated with your event. A website that feels stale will begin to drift in the search results and will lose influence quickly. In short, all that a search engine does is inform an individual about where on the internet the most relevant match to the words they are using to search with can be found, and a key metric to achieve that is how recently the information was created.
3. Trust
This is all about transparency and works across several levels. Firstly, the people who are potentially interested in entering your event have the reassurance of seeing what other people thought about the race before parting with their money. This is often referred to as the Social Proof Phenomenon, whereby individuals are more likely to complete an action if they can see that many others have already done it. It builds a good rapport with your event because it shows that you are prepared to present feedback publicly and respond to it there as well. NB: Whether good or bad, you should always respond to a review. That dialogue is vitally important and will be touched upon in another article.
Furthermore, reviews are trusted by Google. The search engine likes to see a high number of reviews, with a high score, delivered at a high frequency from a diverse catchment. So it’s important that after a race you are able to capture feedback promptly, whilst your athletes are still basking in that post-race glow and riding high on the euphoria.
4. Improve your website analytics
Bounce Rate — This is the frustrating stat that checks whether a visitor enters and leaves a website at the same page without navigating through any other links. A high bounce rate means that a visitor hasn’t found what they wanted and left immediately. With reviews visible within your Google search result it will increase the likelihood that your visitors are satisfied that what they have clicked on is what they want to find and it should help to reduce the bounce rate. By reducing your bounce rate it will likely increase another important metric that we know Google will be monitoring — dwell time. The more time a user spends reading your page, the more it tells the search engine that your site is an authority on a subject.
Clickthrough Rates (CTR) — Again, much like improving your bounce rate stats, by showcasing your reviews it helps to ensure that the people arriving at your site via search results are more valuable and more inclined to make a purchase. Of course, your event page should still have all the information that an athlete would require to buy an entry without having to ask questions. Make it as easy as possible for them.
The more people who click on your website in search results, the more signals are sent back to Google that your website is hot property and should therefore be ranked higher.
5. Blend your Strategy
There’s some degree of variation on the likely influence of reviews as part of an SEO strategy, with research suggesting that search engines rank their importance at 10–16% as part of the overall mix when returning a search results page. Think of it like sending signals to the search engine. The more signals you send from a broad marketing mix and the more you can tell a search engine about yourself, the greater the influence on the results.
Conclusion
As much as anything else, an event is an experience and it makes sense that potential athletes would want to know what other people thought of it, in the same way that you might want to know which café in a town serves the best coffee. Reviews are here to stay and are considered an integral part of the SEO mix, but however you devise your content strategy it’s important to be patient. Your events won’t be catapulted to the top of organic search results overnight, but as your plan comes together and as Google starts to recognise your website as an authority, so the improvements in search rankings will follow. And so will the race entries.
To help support race organisers we have a specific portal of useful tips and guidance that will enable you to understand and navigate the world of online reviews — from practical “How-To” guidance to articles that cut through the technical jargon.
The Racecheck widget for organisers is easy to set up and presents a whole new level of customer feedback and analytics to ensure that your race experience is a level above the competition. Visit the Racecheck website to find out more, ask any questions or read about how other races are using this tool.
