My blogging friend and fellow iConnect Naperville networking member, Brad Shorr, was kind enough to lend us some of his SEO and copywriting expertise as it relates to tradeshows. Thanks, Brad!
Heidi and I were having coffee at Starbucks the other day. She said tradeshow planners are always asking how they can do SEO around events. Good question, and believe it or not, I have an answer.
SEO – search engine optimization – is a long term proposition. It can take months to achieve page one Google rankings, and by that time, the event will be in the past. No point in ranking high for a trade show that already happened!
* Use an Indirect SEO Strategy
I can’t manipulate time and space, but there is a way to make SEO work for trade shows, and here it is:
* Use the Tradeshow to Generate Inbound Links.
The single most important element of SEO is having high quality links into your website. High quality links are hard to come by, especially for small and midsized firms. But, one of the best ways to generate inbound links is to do online press releases.
Tradeshows present an ideal opportunity to put out several releases before, during and after the event. Because the releases are inherently topical and easy to make newsworthy, there’s an excellent chance the online release will be picked up by blogs and news aggregating sites in the event’s niche. When those releases are picked up and republished, the links are often intact – creating an SEO goldmine.
Those inbound links will raise the value of your website in the eyes of Google and therefore improve your rankings across the board. The improved rankings may not help with the event itself, but will increase site traffic and leads going forward.
The press releases themselves may produce immediate leads, however! People actually read them, and with the proper targeting you can direct them to the people you want to reach. By putting a call to action in your press release – e.g., “Contact us before the show to arrange a 30-minute private meeting” – you can get the best of both worlds: well qualified leads today and stronger SEO tomorrow.
About Brad Shorr
Brad Shorr is Director of Content Marketing for Straight North, an interactive marketing agency headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois. His firm provides complete online marketing services for midsized and large firms. Brad is an experienced blogger, SEO copywriter and social media specialist. Also visit Brad’s blog with great content marketing insight at http://www.blog.straightnorth.com.
Heidi, Thank you for having me on your blog. We should continue to meet at Starbucks – good conversation and interesting social media ideas always go along with the coffee!
Totally agree, Brad! Thanks for sharing with my readers!
some interesting points. SEO is a long process and some clients expect results within a few days!! Looking forward to your next post. Thanks
Isn’t it amazing what people expect? SEO is not a miracle cure. It is, as you note, a long process and a long-term investment. Thanks for joining the conversation!
If you’re looking for immediate gratification, so-called SMO, social media optimization, is the way to go. Blog posts, tweets, and other social media content are showing up more and more on Google, and users can filter results by recency. I’m not sure what the search volumes are for social media search – it’s certainly high for news – but it’s bound to grow for business use, especially around events.
The possibilities for SMO are astounding. I find it amazing Google can keep up with all the tweets and such! This is a relatively new wrinkle in the SEO puzzle and it will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. Thanks for adding the additional commentary!
Heidi – Hot off the press – had to pass this along.
http://searchengineland.com/twitter-search-queries-up-33-24-billion-searches-per-month-45840
Twitter search queries up to 24 billion per month – a 33% increase.
I’m thinking more server power needed! Twitter search is going to be huge. Thanks for updating us!