Getting your Event’s details in Google results

Posted by Sam Sargent

Do you or your company run events? Sell tickets and want more bums on seats? Then tell GoogleBot about it and dominate the SERPS to give your events the edge over other events.

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The Google Algorithm is clever but sometimes you can help it out by giving it a little nudge in the right direction. With some help, it’ll be able to highlight extra information in your search listings to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

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Normally you don’t have a whole lot of control over what a result looks like. A search engine will find what it thinks is most relevant and you’re pretty much stuck with that. By including micro-data that the search engine can consume, you can have a bit more control over what your search listing includes.

We’ve recently tweaked our event page templates to include schema.org microdata about each of our upcoming events. Now when we have events on, our Google results look something like this:

Dates, direct links to specific occurrences and venue information are all now included in an expanded version of a regular organic Google search listing. Isn’t that much more interesting and valuable to someone searching for events?

Steps to take

I won’t go into the fine detail on exactly how to get this working since there are numerous better resources already… but start here:

Make sure you’re ready & able to make changes to the HTML markup of your various pages.
Watch the below video and read up on Google’s Rich Snippets – Events documentation to figure out exactly what changes you need to make.
Use (& bookmark) Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool to verify your changes are working.

I’m really interested to see if these changes we’ve made will result in a higher click-through rate on Google. It’s too early to tell from the data we have but please let me know in the comments below if you’ve had any success or gained any insights from adding event rich snippets (or any other rich snippets for that matter) to your website.