10 Tips for Nurturing SEO
If you’re using Localist then you are already ahead of the game with SEO and user engagement. Below are some additional ways to promote healthy SEO habits.
1. Visibility
Your events should always be Visible—yes, even events that are not necessarily open to the public. Not only will this mean rich content for search engines, but it will also match your community’s expectation to easily find all content in one place, decreasing the likelihood that they will abandon your calendar.
2. Event Submissions & Feeds
By encouraging users to submit events, you can guarantee that your calendar will always flourish with fresh content. You should also set up Feeds because they effortlessly import new events on to your calendar and ensure it has a solid base.
3. Add Content Before an Event’s Start Date
It's vital to upload events at least 7 days before the start date—this gives users plenty of time to discover new content on your platform. Not to mention, if you get events up on your calendar early, you can guarantee more traffic on various landing pages. That said, in order to truly maximize events’ SEO opportunity, it’s also important for your admins to stay on top of approving these submissions.
4. User Centric Filters
Filters should be digestible and recognizable lists that include a wide variety of events. Otherwise, your users may get confused and abandon searching for events altogether. It’s all about quality over quantity here—you should aim to have a group of solid Filters that will attract clicks from your audience.
5. Landing Pages
Localist offers a variety of unique landing pages, such as Places, Groups, and Departments, which boost content and provide context in a centralized location. The more helpful and quality content, the more credibility your website will get from search engines. Likewise, search engines take time spent on a page into account, so we suggest that you fill out all text fields, add photos, and embed videos to ensure that users stay on your landing pages as long as possible.
6. Rich Descriptions
You should also stray away from using text heavy images for your event photos. Instead, add this info to the event’s description. By doing this, users will ultimately spend more time on the page reading these details. This not only signals to search engines that you have excellent content, but it also helps them find the content in the first place.
7. Trending
The Trending Algorithm gauges the most interesting events on your platform. If you have Trending as your default event listing, users are likely to find events they find interesting and therefore spend more time browsing your calendar.
8. Social Engagement
We suggest that you utilize the I’m Interested function, which promotes participation on your platform. You should also keep comments and reviews turned on to encourage users to share event details and interact with one another. A good user experience indicates that people are actively engaging and enjoying your site, which enhances your SEO.
9. Widgets
Widgets not only promote your events all over the web, but they also direct traffic back to your calendar. With one simple click from a Widget, people will be browsing and checking out other exciting events on your calendar. These clicks signal to search engines that your site is thriving and, as a result, promotes healthy SEO.
10. Custom Domain
A custom domain is a distinctive website name, for example, support.concept3d.com. You want to make sure that your domain is memorable, recognizable, and consistent with your brand. In addition, it is important to implement SSL with your custom domain to ensure a secure browsing experience. As a result, your calendar will not only be secure, but it will also get a higher ranking from search engines. If you do not currently have SSL and you’re interested in setting it up for your platform, please check out our documentation to get the ball rolling.