Using SEO to Increase Association Event Attendance: 3 Steps

Preparing for an upcoming event is one of the busiest times in an association professional’s career. After all, there are so many tasks to take care of, from determining event ticket prices to setting up your venue. But your most crucial tasks are promoting your event and encouraging your audience to register. After all, how can your event be successful without any attendees?

Increasing attendance for your association event is a challenging task. It requires you to use all of your marketing channels and tools, including your website. And what better way to supercharge your efforts than with search engine optimization (SEO)? This practice increases your website’s visibility and ranking on search engines such as Google, enabling you to reach a wider audience and garner more event registrations.

To help you get started with increasing attendance for your association event, we’ll go over three crucial steps to implementing SEO for your site. With the proper know-how and a robust website builder, you’ll be well on your way to achieving SEO success.

1. Perform Keyword Research

The foundation of SEO is made of keywords, the search queries that web users input into search engines to find the information they’re searching for. By threading the right keyword throughout your content, you can increase the chances that a web page will rank for that query, therefore increasing your event and overall organization’s visibility.

Ideally, you want to pick a keyword that has:

• High search volume. Search volume refers to the number of web users that search that keyword. The higher the search volume, the more likely people will find your website.
• High relevance. The keyword you choose should be highly relevant to your event to ensure that you reach the right target audience. For example, you might choose “professional networking workshop New York” to attract young professionals in New York to your professional development event.
• Low competition. Some keywords are more competitive than others, making it more difficult for users to find your website. Ideally, the right keyword will have lower competition, so your site will rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP) and thus gain more exposure.

It’s difficult to determine whether a keyword meets this criteria simply by looking at the SERP. We recommend brainstorming a list of keywords relevant to your association’s event and then evaluating their search volume and competitiveness using keyword research tools.

According to Getting Attention, some of the tools you can use to perform keyword research include:

• Google Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• Google Search Console
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• SEMRush

Identifying the right keywords is only the start of SEO for your association’s site. However, it’s the most crucial step—without the right keyword, you won’t be able to reach your target audience and set them on the journey to becoming an event attendee.

2. Create A Well-Designed Event Landing Page

After establishing your keyword, it’s time to optimize your event landing page for it. Incorporate the keyword naturally into the meta title, headers, meta description, and the body of your content. Create blog content that relates to your keyword as well. This allows search engines to understand that your site is related to your chosen keyword and helps it rank higher on the SERP.

Additionally, don’t be afraid to experiment with local SEO, especially if your event is in-person or hybrid. Implement local SEO by creating locally relevant content, optimizing your Google Business Profile, and identifying local keywords. This way, you can target individuals who live in the area and can easily attend your event if it’s open to the general public beyond your member base.

Aside from scanning the content of your page, Google also looks for user experience to determine the rankings of websites. Whether you created your association’s site and event landing page from a template or scratch, make sure that it is:

• Branded to your nonprofit. Incorporate your association’s branding throughout your event website, including your logo, colors, and fonts. This practice allows visitors to immediately recognize that the site belongs to your organization.
• Easily navigable. For the best user experience, visitors should be able to easily understand how to navigate through your site. Incorporate important links on your site’s header and footer and consider implementing drop-down navigation menus.
• Accessible. Make your site accessible to everyone by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which set the international standard for web accessibility. Ensure that your site is easily understood by screen readers by including alt text describing any visual content and providing closed captions or transcripts for any audio or video content.
• Mobile responsive. The average person spends three hours and 15 minutes on their phone every day, and 20% of smartphone users spend upwards of four and a half hours on their devices every day. Support your members’ web browsing preferences by ensuring that your site is mobile-responsive.

If you’d like some examples of well-designed websites, take a look at Morweb’s list of the best nonprofit websites to get a better idea of how to incorporate SEO and great design on your association’s site.

3. Monitor Results With Data And Analytics

Much like how you would evaluate the success of your event with event analytics, you should monitor the results of your SEO efforts as well. When assessing your performance on search engines, keep track of the following metrics:

• Unique visits. This metric refers to the number of unique visitors that access your site. A higher number of visitors means that you’re getting the visibility you want, but this could be attributed to other channels in addition to SEO, like social media or email marketing.
• Organic traffic. Organic traffic refers to visitors who access your site through SERPs, so if you’re seeing an increase in this metric, then it’s likely that your SEO efforts are on the right track.
• Bounce rate. This metric refers to the number of visitors who visit your site and then leave without exploring the rest of your pages. While it’s impossible not to have a bounce rate if the rate is extremely high, then you might have some on-page navigation issues, or your content quality may need to be improved.
• Conversion rate. Conversion rate refers to the number of web visitors that take a desired action, such as downloading a resource on membership benefits or signing up for an email newsletter. For your event landing page, the conversion to pay attention to is usually registering to attend the event and paying for tickets.
• Keyword rankings. This refers to how highly on the keyword’s SERP your page is ranking—the higher your ranking, the closer to the top of the SERP your page will be, and the more clicks you’ll get.

Look at all of these metrics together to evaluate the success of your SEO marketing. For example, if you’re seeing a lot of organic traffic but a high bounce rate, then you know that your SEO strategy is working well but that there may be on-page issues you need to address. Or, if your page is ranking highly, but you’re not receiving much traffic, then you may need to optimize your landing page for a better keyword.

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Planning an event takes time, and so does increasing event attendance and acquiring qualified event leads. To ensure that your SEO strategy is a success, give yourself the time you need to establish a thorough marketing strategy. And don’t be afraid to revise that strategy if you’re not seeing the results you want.

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