How to Use Google to Showcase Your Events

Garry Grant — March 24, 2020

If you’re producing any event, you can make use of the event markup to help people find your event within the Google search experience. Are you hosting a workshop? Use the event markup so that when someone searches “workshops near me,” your event can show up. It’s also possible to discover events when people search for venues. Events may display in a venue’s Knowledge Panel that helps people find out what’s happening at that location.

Google recently launched this feature in Spain and Germany, so now the event search experience is live in nine countries and regions across the globe.

What is the Event Experience?

It is designed to make it easier for people to find and attend events through Google Search and other products such as Google Maps. This feature provides two main benefits:

• More interactive results: Events can be eligible to display in the event experience on Google, which features your logo, event description, and more.
• Increased likelihood of discovery and conversion: People have a new way to interact with your event posting and click through to your website. Eventbrite, for instance, saw a 100% increase in the average year-over-year growth in their traffic from Google Search.

How to Get Your Events on Google

Google provides three options for making your events eligible to appear on the search engine.

1. If you’re using a third-party website to post your events, such as ticketing websites or social media platforms, your event publisher may already be participating in the event search experience. Check to search for a popular event shown on the platform then check to see if the listing is displayed. If your event publisher has integrated with Google, you can continue to post events with the third-party website.
2. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress and lack access to your HTML, check for plugins that can add structured data to your website for you. There are lots to choose from in WordPress, such as SNIP – Structured Data Plugin for WordPress, Schema App, and WP Rich Snippets. Other CMS platforms may have limited options. If you’re not able to find a plugin that works with your CMS, you can make use of the Data Highlighter to alert Google to your events without needing to edit the HTML on your site.
3. If you’re comfortable with it or work with a web professional or hired an SEO Company who can do it for you, you can edit your HTML to use structured data and integrate it with Google. It would be best if you selected the HTML of the event pages.

Structured Data: Event Properties

Schema.org defines an event as something that happens at a certain time and location, such as a festival, lecture, or concert. You can add ticketing information using the offers property. If you are running repeated events, you may structure them as separate event objects.

When creating your event, these are the properties you can include:

• About: Thing: the subject matter of the content
• Actor: Person: an actor in the Event. Actors can be associated with individual items or a series, episode, or clip.
• Aggregate Rating: The overall rating, based on a collection of ratings or reviews of the item.
• Attendee: Person or organization attending the Event
• Audience: the intended audience
• Composer: the person or organization who wrote a composition or who is the composer of a work performed at the Event
• Contributor: The person or organization who is a secondary contributor to the Event or creative work
• Director: The person who directs the content.
• DoorTime: The time admission begins.
• Duration: The duration of the Event.
• EndDate: The end date and time of the Event
• EventSchedule: Associates an event with a schedule.
• EventStatus: Useful for when events are canceled or rescheduled.
• Funder: Person or organization that supports something through a financial contribution
• inLanguage: The language of the content
• IsAccessibleForFree: A flag to signal that the item, Event, or place is accessible for free.
• Location: The address or place where the Event is taking place.
• MaximumAttendeeCapacity: The total number of people that may attend the Event
• Offers: An offer to provide the item. An example would be to give tickets.
• Organizer: The person or organization that organizes the Event.
• Performer: A performer at the Event—for example, a presenter, musician, musical group or actor
• PreviousStartDate: Used in conjunction with event status for rescheduled or canceled events.
• RecordedIn: The CreativeWork that captured all or part of this Event.
• RemainingAttendeeCapacity: The number of attendee places for an event that remains unallocated.
• Review: A review of the item or Event.
• Sponsor: A person or organization that supports a thing through a pledge, promise, or financial contribution.
• StartDate: The start date and time for the Event.
• SuperEvent: An event that this Event is a part of.
• SubEvent: An event that is part of this Event.
• Translator: An event or organization that adapts a creative work to different languages or regional differences and technical requirements of a target market, or that translates during an event.
• TypicalAgeRange: The typical, expected age range
• Work performed: A work performed in some event, for example, a play performed in a TheaterEvent.

You’ll also have a number of properties from Thing such as the URL, alternate name, description, image, etc.

Make Sure to Follow Best Practices

If you’ve already started taking advantage of event structured data, review it to make sure it meets Google’s guidelines. You should:

• Ensure you’re including both the required and recommended properties outlined in the developer guidelines.
• Provide high-quality details per the guidelines. For instance, use the description field to provide more detail about the event itself rather than repeating things such as the date, location, and title.
• Use the Rich Result Test to preview and test your structured data to make sure it is as intended.

Tracking Search Performance

You can use the Google Search Console to see how people are interacting with your event postings.

• The Performance Report in Search Console shows event listing or detail view data for any given event posting in the Search results. Pull these results automatically with the Search Console API.
• Use the Rich result status report within the Search Console to understand what Google can read from your site. If you run into anything it cannot read, you can troubleshoot the errors and fix them.

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