You’re organising a live event, not promoting an online business, so you might think SEO isn’t all that important. It’s an opinion shared by a massive 98% of event organisers, according to our most recent Pulse Report .

This is a worrying statistic because organic search is one of the number one ways people discover events. To prove the point, we took a sneak peak at the analytics of four well known events to see exactly where their web traffic (i.e. customers) is coming from.

WOMAD

WOMAD is an international arts and music festival founded in 1982. It takes place annually in Wiltshire during July. Using SimilarWeb to look at the festival’s web data, we can see that search is by far the largest traffic source, responsible for nearly 60% of visitors. Surprisingly for an event of this type, social barely registers at just 6%.

BrightonSEO

BrightonSEO is the UK’s biggest search marketing conference, launched in 2009 and now taking place twice a year. We can see from SimilarWeb that email plays an important part in this event’s marketing, but even so, search remains in the lead driving more than 37% of its traffic.

Bear Grylls Survival Race

The Bear Grylls Survival Race is a series of running races held in London by celebrity survival expert Bear Grylls. The events are organised by anti-poverty charity Build Africa and, as such, a fair chunk of traffic is referred from them (as well as other partners like Eventbrite). Even so, search remains critical, bringing in nearly 41% of site visitors.

Morning Gloryville

Morning Gloryville organises sober, early morning raves across the UK and globally. Looking at the company’s website stats, we see that while social serves up a notable 13%, it is still search driving the majority of the traffic, at nearly 54%.

WHY IS SEARCH SO IMPORTANT?

What these successful events show us is that whether you’re organising a festival, conference, endurance race or music gig, search is an essential component to bringing in business.

That’s because so many of us now turn to Google whenever we’re looking for something – such as things to do and places to go. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day. With that many people looking, can you afford not to be seen?

The difference between search and say, for example, Facebook advertising, is it makes your event visible when a potential attendee is looking for it and not the other way round.  A Facebook ad will interrupt a user while they are browsing and are essentially in the process of doing something else.

It’s possible that seeing an advert could spark that person’s interest in finding out more, particularly if it’s well targeted. But it’s even more important to be there when your potential customers specifically want to research events to attend. That’s what a good search engine position provides – visibility in the right place at the right time.

The purchase intent of searchers is usually high because we tend to search for things when we’re pretty serious about buying them. If you’re not there at that time, one of your competitors might be.

How high do you need to rank?

Having a first page position in Google puts you at a distinct advantage over those languishing in the seldom visited pages beyond.

Advanced Web Ranking created a graph comparing Google clickthrough rates (CTRs) by position. It looked at CTRs on organic search results (non-paid) generated by branded and non-branded keyword searches.

A ‘branded keyword’ search query includes your brand name or some variation of it (i.e. KWM Marketing conference). Other keywords that don’t reference the brand name are considered ‘non-branded keywords’ (i.e. marketing conference) – these will be people not necessarily familiar with your brand but searching for the type of event you are promoting.

The graph shows that if your event appears in first position in a non-branded keyword search, average clickthrough rate will be 30%, in second position it will be 18%, and 12% in third position. In the lower positions of 9 to 10, CTR falls to a paltry sub 2%.

For branded keyword searches, when people are specifically looking for your company or event, being in first position leads to a clickthrough rate of 44%. Whether branded or unbranded, it’s important to note that organic search results will always produce significantly higher CTRs than paid. Therefore, you must  ensure your website is optimised for SEO and not rely solely on AdWords.

Why Search might look less important than it really is

When you analyse your own website’s traffic sources in Google Analytics, you might see a lot of it marked as coming in direct (i.e. the visitor typed your web address straight into their browser). This might cause you to think that your other marketing is doing such a good job of promoting your URL that you don’t need to target customers through search.

However, it’s not possible to know how many of these direct visitors discovered you originally via search and are now returning. Anyone who bookmarked your site after finding you via Google, will then appear as direct traffic when they subsequently return.

What’s more, there are a number of instances when Google Analytics can incorrectly categorise traffic as direct, such as clicking on a link in an email or document, or accessing the site from a shortened URL. Sometimes, accessing a site from organic search will end up being reported as direct due to browser issues. An experiment conducted by Groupon showed as much as 60% of direct traffic may be from organic search.

Improving your SEO with Eventbrite

In May, Eventbrite.co.uk entered Moz’s list of the top 500 domains in the world, ranked by the number of linking root domains (our US site, Eventbrite.com, sits at position number 79, above Google.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk).

Our massive domain authority is something our customers can benefit from – simply listing your event on our site means searchers are far more likely to find your event (and land on a page where they can purchase tickets in a click!)

What’s more, Eventbrite is the only ticketing company using Accelerated Mobile Page design (AMP) for all of their event pages. These are pages designed on the backend to load extremely quickly, so searchers can get their information before even pressing ‘Search.’ It means your event will automatically show up first — and fastest — when people search for your event on a mobile device.

Anecdotal evidence suggests it could make a big difference to organic traffic – online magazine Slate saw a 73% increase in site visitors from Google mobile search when they updated to AMP pages.

Conclusion

Planners who don’t think SEO is important to their events couldn’t be more wrong. SEO is critically important to most businesses, including yours and should be a key part of your marketing mix.

For practical suggestions on getting your event ranked higher, download our guide Digital Marketing for Event planners: Organic Search.