It’s officially 2020 and people are starting to make plans for the year ahead. If you produce any type of event, you can help people discover your events with the event search experience on Google.
Have a concert or hosting a workshop? Event markup allows people to discover your event when they search for “concerts this weekend” or “workshops near me.” People can also discover your event when they search for venues, such as sports stadiums or a local pub. Events may surface in a given venue’s Knowledge Panel to better help people find out what’s happening at that respective location.
Launching in new regions and languages
We recently launched the event search experience in Germany and Spain, which brings the event search experience on Google to nine countries and regions around the world. For a full list of where the event search experience works, check out the list of available languages and regions.
How to get your events on Google
There are three options to make your events eligible to appear on Google:
- If you use a third-party website to post events (for example, you post events on ticketing websites or social platforms), check to see if your event publisher is already participating in the event search experience on Google. One way to check is to search for a popular event shown on the platform and see if the event listing is shown. If your event publisher is integrated with Google, continue to post your events on the third-party website.
- If you use a CMS (for example, WordPress) and you don’t have access to your HTML, check with your CMS to see if there’s a plugin that can add structured data to your site for you. Alternatively, you can use the Data Highlighter to tell Google about your events without editing the HTML of your site.
- If you’re comfortable editing your HTML, use structured data to directly integrate with Google. You’ll need to edit the HTML of the event pages.
Follow best practices
If you’ve already implemented event structured data, we recommend that you review your structured data to make sure it meets our guidelines. In particular, you should:
- Make sure you’re including the required and recommended properties that are outlined in our developer guidelines.
- Make sure your event details are high quality, as defined by our guidelines. For example, use the description field to describe the event itself in more detail instead of repeating attributes such as title, date, location, or highlighting other website functionality.
- Use the Rich Result Test to test and preview your structured data.
Monitor your performance on Search
You can check how people are interacting with your event postings with Search Console:
- Use the Performance Report in Search Console to show event listing or detail view data for a given event posting in Search results. You can automatically pull these results with the Search Console API.
- Use the Rich result status report in Search Console to understand what Google could or could not read from your site, and troubleshoot rich result errors.
If you have any questions, please visit the Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Source:Â Official Google Webmasters Blog
Not many events going to be showcased with this coming pandemic…my two cents…
Using rich result test, we anticipated event outcome even before the event itself. It helped us prepare beforehand and better manage our events.
more great info…do you ever sleep Taylor!!! 🙂 I was just reading your other article, which I found to be very in depth and amazingly robust – THANK YOU!
https://www.taylorreaume.com/improve-your-website-traffic-with-schema-markup/
For some product, restricting the cart checkout process is the best option I think. It ensures a symmetrical distribution. Useful article. Thanks Taylor!
Just using plugins with our CMS we could manage multiple events including the analytics! All in one place; it’s like magic wands.
Event markup is a great option google provides to maximize audience using third-party websites. It helped us maximize our target audiences!
Hi, I’m working on an upcoming event for my company using a third-party website. How can I use the data highlighter option?
Many travelers from foreign country who are on vacation will benefit from this.
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Using the search console API, event management couldn’t be better!
I have organized some virtual workshops recently. Managing it through google gave it a new height! Nice write-up!
Very useful article. Especially considering this pandemic time. Thanks!
Structured data confuses the heck out of me! I am just mastering WordPress coding, and now I have to climb this Schema mountain… ughh…
Disabling the cart functionality rather than completely shut down the site should be considered as a preferable emergency option. Your customer still got to see the first hand information you got to offer.
Good read!
How to use google crawl function?