When you promote an event online, crafting compelling copy to engage visitors on your website or page is important. However, what you write can also have a big impact on the number of people that will see your marketing in the first place.

By including the right keywords, you can help potential attendees to find your event when they use Google or other search engines. To do this, you first need to know what those potential attendees are searching for. Here we tell you how to research the terms they’re using in Google, and how to use them to boost the SEO and relevancy of your Eventbrite event page or standalone event website…

Related: The ultimate guide to copywriting for events

Google AdWords Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a free tool designed to help advertisers build effective AdWords campaigns, but you can also use it to research keywords for your marketing copy. To use the tool you’ll need to create an AdWords account.

The Keyword Planner allows you to search terms that are relevant to your event and see how popular those terms are (i.e. how frequently they are searched for). At the same time, it gives you ‘ideas’ by showing you other related searches and how popular they are.

To make the data more relevant to your audience, you can specify the location of those searches, narrowing down to a country, city or region. You can also set a date range to check what people are searching for around the time of your event – this is particularly relevant if your event is focused on an occasion such as Valentine’s Day or Christmas.

Related: Hone your AdWords campaign for event success

Make a keyword list

Keyword optimisation is not just about bringing traffic to your event page or website, it’s about helping to match the right people with your event. To come up with a list of search terms you need to really try and get inside the head of your different potential attendees.

Let’s say you’re organising a Christmas fair in Brighton, Sussex, you’ll have at least three potential customer personas:

1. People looking for Christmas fairs to attend
2. People looking for something to do in December
3. People looking to buy gifts, but not necessarily at a Christmas fair

Each persona will use different search terms when browsing online, for example:

Persona 1: “Christmas fair Brighton” “Christmas markets Sussex” “Christmas events in Brighton”

Persona 2: “Things to do in Brighton” “Events in Brighton” “What’s on in Brighton in December”

Persona 3: “Best for Christmas gifts in Brighton” “Christmas gifts Brighton” “Brighton gift shops”

Don’t forget that the words can be searched in a variety of orders, so “Brighton gift shops” could be also be searched as “Gift shops Brighton.” And in the case of this example event, the word “Christmas” could also be replaced with “Xmas” or “Festive”

Using the Keyword Planner can help you decide which constructions to favour. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see the results returned for the search “Christmas events in Brighton” during November and December 2015 in the UK.

The term was searched for between 100 and 1,000 times. Unfortunately, since an update in August, people using Keyword Planner who are not serious advertisers are only shown a broad range, rather than the specific number of searches. Even so, it still provides a useful indication – look a little further down that page and you will see the search term “Brighton Christmas market” is clearly more popular, clocking up 1,000 to 10,000 searches during that period.

Keyword Planner also shows you the competition for those search terms. This is competition for people advertising within AdWords, but it can give a helpful insight because if the competition is really high (with lots of people bidding for traffic) that can be an indicator of how easy this keyword is going to be to target.

What’s interesting in this example is that the first, broader long tail keyword “Christmas events in Brighton” has medium competition, but the second one “Brighton Christmas market” is low competition, despite being more frequently searched for.

The trick is to drill down until you can be as specific as possible with your terms, allowing you to tailor your event copy around what people are actually looking for.

Using your research

Now you have a list of proven search terms you can more effectively target your prospective customers, but it’s important not to be heavy handed in your approach. Copy that is overly keyword heavy can come across as spammy and will not be received well by either your potential attendees or the search engines.

Your terms should be seamlessly woven into copy that is focused on providing the information your site or page visitors are seeking. The quality of the writing should always come first, and if that means you can’t get all of the terms you were hoping for into your copy then so be it.

It can be especially hard with long tail searches missing filler words such as “the,” “in” or “and”. For example, “Christmas markets Brighton December” is never going to read naturally in a sentence, but don’t worry, just write naturally and trust that Google will be smart enough to match your sentences with the intent of the searcher.

What’s in a name?

One area worth spending time optimising for search is your event’s title. Particularly when people are searching events on Eventbrite, the name of your event will play a role in the results returned – and the perceived relevancy of your event to the person searching.

The above screenshot shows the results returned when searching for “Christmas market” in Brighton on Eventbrite. You can see that other permeations of the search are also returned such as “Christmas craft market, “ “Christmas celebrations” and “Christmas gift market,” however if you then search for “Christmas fair” a completely different set of events is returned (see below), so it’s necessary to bear this in mind.

Aim to craft a title that accurately describes what your event is, benchmarking it by seeing what other events are returned for those search terms. Use words that people actually search for and avoid flowery terms such as “extravaganza” or made up words like “jamtastic”. Although they might be eye-grabbing it might have the opposite effect of making your event less visible.

Eventbrite will use your event title to create an SEO-friendly URL that’s readable by the search engines, helping your event get discovered outside of the platform. So, taking the “says what it does on the tin” approach is the best bet when naming your event. That way, you’ll know that the customers that find your event are more likely to convert into attendees.

Related: How to double your ticket sales with conversion rate optimisation 

Conclusion

Sometimes the words we think best describe our event are not the ones potential attendees are searching for. Try to reverse engineer your marketing by first researching what people are looking for and then tailoring your offering to meet their needs.