The head of event marketing at SEMrush, Aleksandra Panyukhina, gave a presentation on the MarTech Stage at the 2019 edition of Event Tech Live. Here, she shared her knowledge and experience in maximising an event’s marketing potential.
During her presentation, Aleksandra touched upon meta descriptions, image alt text, SEO and event-specific SERP (search engine results pages) features.
According to research conducted by SEMrush, one of the top features missing from an event website is the title and meta-description. She explained that it is crucial to have your event’s name in the page title and meta description so that it appears in SERP results.
Additionally, use relatable keywords. For example, one person may search for ‘conference’ while another searches for ‘summit’. To gain the attention of both of these potential attendees, you need to use both words in your description.
Continuing onto technical SEO, Aleksandra stated that technical issues such as redirects, error pages and loading speed can negatively affect a user’s experience and therefore cost you a potential attendee.
“In a fast-paced digital world, the medium for page load (time) is still five seconds,” she said, stating, in this time, the user could click off the page and find another event. She also described error pages as the “worst thing” that could happen to your potential attendee.
Keep image alt texts short, descriptive and user-friendly. Potential attendees may search for images of an event before deciding whether to attend. If someone searches for ‘Event Tech Live 2019’ they need to be presented with images from this event, therefore, the image alt text needs to include these words for each of the relevant images.
Drawing her session to a close, Aleksandra listed her “must event content” as: event name; date; location; description; agenda and speakers. This leads to other types of content such as blog posts, social media and emails.
Event Tech Live is Europe’s biggest show dedicated to event technology and is completely free to attend. It is returning to The Old Truman Brewery on 4th-5th November 2020.
This footage was kindly captured by our friends at First Sight Media.