How to Earn High-Quality Backlinks as an Event Planner

How to Earn High-Quality Backlinks as an Event Planner

Quality backlinks are essential for anyone with an online presence—anyone who ultimately wants to get found, that is. The keyword here is “quality.”

There are a ton of so-called black hat linking strategies that will only get you penalized by Google.

Having high quality backlinks (or links from reputable sites that direct users to your site) shows the search engine powers-that-be that your site is indeed trustworthy. Authenticity, credibility and value are hugely important for site ranking.

And as an event planner, you have several viable avenues at your disposal as far as helping you gain those much-needed backlinks. First, a few things to keep in mind regarding the importance of high quality backlinks for SEO:

• Quality is more important than quantity.
  
  The best quality links are those that come from a high domain authority website. What exactly is a “high domain authority website”?

  Basically, it is one that scores on the upper end of a 1 to 100 point scale used to determine how well a site will rank. So for instance, Wikipedia has an extremely high score; whereas smaller businesses tend to fall on the lower end. If you can potentially get links from higher scoring sites within the event planning niche, this is better than many links from low-scoring sites.
  
  

• Linking to spammy or low quality sites can hurt your ranking.
  
  If, for instance, you use paid links or get links via some sort of link building scheme meant to try to outsmart Google’s algorithm, this can not only hurt your ranking, but in some instances, can get your site removed from the search engine index all together. 
  
  

• A quality backlink is essentially a “vote of confidence” from other sites, as explained by Moz.
  
  This means that your content is trustworthy, informational to the user. Google is all about presenting the most valuable information out there to those engaged in searching.

  In this particular industry, you might, for example, focus on event planning ideas, event trends and the latest in event technology, among other such topics to keep your content fresh and relevant. 

So how do you get those quality backlinks?...

The event planning field is relatively crowded.

And while this is an industry where demand is expected to grow fairly rapidly over the next few years, it is critical that those in the field do everything that they can to give themselves a competitive advantage—this means maximizing online and digital strategies.

And this also means figuring out how to organically rank toward the top of the SERP.  Enter, a dynamic link building strategy designed to get you those quality backlinks, even if you’re not consequently well known in the event planning field…not yet anyway.

Below are 4 ways to increase your chances of actually getting an authority site to agree to link to yours.

How to get quality backlinks

1. It starts with providing great content

Here’s the thing, authority sites want to link to sites relevant to theirs, that have something engaging to say.

Remember, they are in a sense putting their reputation on the line by suggesting that their users “check you out.” What happens if they then send those users to a site where the content quality is subpar, boring, or worse, grammatically flawed? 

You could start by researching your competitors—what works well, what maybe falls flat as far as their strategy? In event planning, creativity is hugely important; your content therefore needs to not only reflect your brand but also that creative side. This won’t automatically result in a plethora link offers, but it is a necessary first step. 

2. Create downloadable guides

Piggybacking on this idea of great content, you might think about developing more comprehensive guides. As mentioned, Google prioritizes useful and informative content. Guides and how-to series are gaining an incredible amount of traction among search engines.

So if for instance, you were to create a blog post about event technology trends or innovative event marketing ideas, and also, you wrote it up as a step-by-step long form guide for aspiring event planners, this could help you gain some credibility you need to catch the eye of a high authority site. 

3. Write on timely, trending topics

Putting out material, more comprehensive guides and articles are definitely important. That is not to say however, that you should ignore more timely topics. Research the event planning industry, what’s trending?

What could you write a compelling and newsworthy piece about that might help get you some worthwhile links? 

4. Send a link pitch or two

There’s something to be said for the straightforward approach.

When crafting your link pitch be sure to highlight what value (s) you bring to the table and why their users would care. In other words, as an event planner if you’re pitching a website focused on all things auto repair, obviously their audience wouldn’t be all that receptive to your site.

Do your research and pitch to those sites that complement yours in some way. 

In the end it really is going to be about doing your due diligence. It takes some work; you’re going to have to build up a library of valuable content. It also never hurts to “get out there” and network with people in industries related to event planning so that you can start to gain some recognition for your brand.

As much as it is about link building, it is also about link earning!