The process of taking advantage of local, national, or international events to generate backlinks back to your website is known as event link building.
You can get these SEO event links in two ways. You can create your own event and ask a third-party event website to give you a backlink. Or you can sponsor event link building and acquire a link as a sponsor. Both of these methods are legit as they are, in fact, “earned” links.
If you sponsor event link building, you can build a meaningful relationship with the host and get the opportunity to be showcased on their site.
Event link building strategies can help you increase your ranking and credibility. We have rounded up 39 event link building tips for you:
39 Best Event Link Building Techniques
When it comes to collecting high-quality event backlinks, SEO experts are constantly on the lookout for fresh and unique techniques to land backlinks that their competitors won’t be able to easily mimic. Let’s dive into building local event links:
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Leverage Alumni Lists and Directories
Using alumni lists and directories is one of the cleverest event link building strategies. Most college and university websites (or separate alumni websites such as the Venus Alumni Association) feature a section designated for alumni. And some of these directories have links to other sites.
For instance, let’s look at a list of alumni businesses on the University of Maryland, Baltimore County website.
Source: University of Maryland, Baltimore County
You can list your business for the purpose of even link building and getting link events.
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Ask People You Know for Links
This is another beginner SEO event link building technique that you can try if you are just getting accustomed to the process.
You can ask others for links, including your colleagues, friends, relatives, acquaintances, clients, business partners, or anybody else that you know. People are increasingly building their own websites and blogs (or know people who do), so you have greater chances of getting event listings links.
Source: Backlinko
That being stated, you really only want backlinks from relevant websites. It won’t have much of an impact if it isn’t relevant. Furthermore, these individuals may be (rightfully) apprehensive about linking to your brand or business from their blog, especially if they are different.
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Use Social Media for Event Link Building
A more indirect strategy to enhance your event link building is to become active on social media and engage with bloggers, influencers, and reporters in your field on a regular basis. Establishing and maintaining an online presence for your business will help you expand your audience, increase chances of sponsor event link building, raise page views, and may even result in new links over time.
Source: Hallam Internet
Here are some pointers to consider while using social media for event link building:
- Use your hashtags strategically: Let’s suppose that a reporter or blogger searches for a hashtag on Instagram or Twitter, and you have used the same hashtag to post or tweet about a recent case study you published. That tweet might garner some attention because of the hashtag.
- Keep an eye out for journalists looking for data: A majority of journalists (including political and sports) use Twitter to find data, so keep an eye out for hashtags like #journorequest or #prrequest for even link building chances that fit your business.
- Engage actively with like-minded people on industry platforms: Another approach you can use to increase brand awareness is to leave your opinions in the comment sections of other people’s blog entries.
These techniques not only demonstrate that you are actively involved in industry discussions, but they also assist you in developing relationships with other bloggers who may contact you for coverage in the future.
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Utilize the Better Business Bureau
Links for local events websites from the better business bureau are now all nofollowed. Furthermore, Google has stated that being listed on the BBB does not immediately help with SEO. However, if you think that being featured on the BBB website has some SEO value, it may be worthwhile.
Source: Better Business Bureau
The cost of a BBB listing is based on area and employee count. You can get a quote from the Better Business Bureau according to the number of employees.
Source: Better Business Bureau
In any case, you should get some form of link building out of this. You must monitor your listing once it has been published because every area has its own directory guidelines. In some cases, a business’s website URL in the directory’s listing may not even be a live link but merely text. Simply contact your local BBB representative and request that this be changed.
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Comment on Blogs Related to Link Building Events
This is another pretty basic event link building technique. While comments under blogs do not lead to a dofollow link directly, they are an amazing approach to getting on a blogger or influencer’s radar. These blog comments can assist you in building local event links down the road.
Source: Traffic Crow
For example, you can go and comment on sites and blogs such as Backlinko and other SEO websites. Commenting on other blogs will help you build meaningful connections with opinion leaders in your niche. Sooner or later, you will notice other bloggers spontaneously linking to you and your content. And if you are lucky, people will also ask you to guest post on their websites.
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Unleash the Power of the Chamber of Commerce
Obtaining a link from your Chamber of Commerce is a sure link that is just waiting for you to grab the opportunity. In other circumstances, however, it may take some time to locate the appropriate individual to contact.
Source: Search Engine Land
If you are looking for rare event link building tips that your competitors don’t know of, then this is the one!
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Company Directory Submissions
Another approach you can take is submitting your website or blog to general company directories in the same way that you can general web directories. However, one important thing to keep in mind is that you need to concentrate on obtaining links from highly relevant sites.
Source: Site Req
Remember: Relevance is key!
For instance, if you are running an SEO agency in New York City? You can find a business directory and submit your blog to it.
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Broken Link Building
Broken link building is an amazing event link building tactic for securing links on resource pages by identifying broken links and recommending your article as a substitute. It’s a reasonably simple technique to earn links because the majority of the hard work is done for you once you’ve published your piece of content.
We suggest writing a guide on a topic related to your website in order to gain links that demonstrate your expertise and serve as a replacement for that broken link. For example, as a digital marketing agency, you can compile a list of SEO agencies for small businesses. This can be useful to other content authors wishing to amp up their articles with relevant facts.
You can take the help of search modifiers to add to the target keywords you want to target for broken link building. Here are several examples:
- Inurl:links
- Inurl:useful-links
- Inurl:resources
When combined with pertinent keywords, you can get your search for possible prospects off to a good start. But what do you say when you locate an excellent prospect? You send them a personalized outreach email.
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Make Your Mark by Contributing to Crowdsourced Posts
If someone offers you a chance to be a part of crowdsourcing, just say yes. Do not even think about it. Make sure that you get to be a part of crowdsourced content invites unless you’re incredibly busy.
Source: Post Planner
They frequently ask you questions about things you already know. As a result, writing a response should only take you 5-10 minutes. Therefore, participate in crowdsourced content for event link building.
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Create an RSS Feed
If your blog is powered by a popular Content Management System (such as WordPress), you most likely already have an RSS feed. If you don’t have one, make one ASAP.
What role does an RSS feed have in an event link building guide?
Source: Neil Patel
It’s straightforward. There are websites that will scrape your information (take it sans your permission). And people discover your stuff through your RSS feed. Simply incorporate internal connections to other web pages on your website in your content. Even if the scrapers do not link to your original content, they will capture your internal links.
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Create Shoulder Niche Content
Are you stuck in a rut? It is still feasible to obtain links. You simply need to be inventive.
Source: Marketing Profs
One industry research, for example, discovered that “tangential content” (material not related in any way to what a site sells) resulted in 30% additional links and 77% greater shares on social media than information regarding the business’s specialized industry.
This is your sign to dive into the world of tangential content.
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Monitor Your Competitors’ Links
One smart technique to determine which event link building strategy works best for your sort of content is to conduct some ‘monitoring activities’ on your competitors by examining their links, which are referred to as backlinks.
As an added bonus, this helps you identify the types of content that your target market appreciates and links to the most, allowing you to write with SEO in mind.
Source: Ahrefs
There are several approaches you can take in this regard. You can use a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to:
- Examine your competitors’ top-ranking web pages to see what types of content formats they use and which keywords they target.
- Examine your competitors’ links to see which web pages and articles receive the most backlinks and who links to them the most.
- If you want some ideas, look at your competitors’ articles to see what type of content (listicles, long-form, guides, or comparisons) and keywords are ranking at the top.
Remember that if you observe a high frequency of placements on high-value websites like Forbes, other businesses are most certainly employing sponsored ads, which is a no-no.
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Donate to Non-Profit Organizations and Charities
Source: Cornell Law School
Non-profit organizations and charities typically have a donations page, which looks somewhat like the one in the image below:
Source: Slideshare
However, we have some bad news associated with this event link building 2023 technique. This tactic is one of the world’s most overused link-building tactics. As a result, donation links, in general, have been classed as “paid links” by Google.
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Email the Personnel That You Mention
This is a very simple event link building tactic. But it works. Every time.
Source: Ghost Blog Writers
When you mention someone to link to their website or blog, let them know. You can email them.
It will not always result in a backlink, though. However, as long as you are not pushy, you can gain some connections and shares from this method.
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Improve Your Website’s Visibility
If you want to increase the number of backlinks to your website, you must also develop a personal brand and improve your exposure. One approach to accomplish this is to focus on off-page SEO, which consists of optimization strategies that are not directly applied to your website, like building local citations and mending broken links.
Among these strategies for event link building are:
- Ensure the accuracy and consistency of third-party citations: Check that information such as your name, address, and phone number are accurate.
- Creating and keeping your Google My Business listing up to date: If your company has a physical location, create a Google listing and keep the information up to date.
- Taking control of your listing on popular user-generated content (UGC) platforms: Contact the website in order to claim your listing and supply the necessary details.
- Invest in digital PR strategies, social media marketing, influencer marketing, blogger outreach, and review management to improve the public perception of your company.
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Acquire Backlinks From Scraped Content
If your content has been scraped by someone else and the scraped content lacks a link back to your website, contact the webmaster and request one.
Scraping content without acknowledgment, like photos and infographics, is a kind of copyright infringement. As a result, sites that want to prevent DMCA lawsuits will gladly include your link (or erase the copied content).
However, most scraper sites aren’t all that great in the first place. This implies that a link from that site won’t help you much.
However, it is worth a try.
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Hire A Recent Graduate to Automate Event Link Building
We are not suggesting that you hire a fresh graduate only to get a link. However, if you’ve recently hired one, see whether there’s a career part of their university or college’s website that talks about recent grads obtaining jobs. If so, request that your new hire reach out for the backlinks. It usually only requires a phone call or an email.
Source: University of Oregon
The University of Oregon’s career center (in the image above), for instance, includes a blog category dedicated completely to this.
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Utilize Internship or Job Postings
You can receive a few simple.edu backlinks if you have any career or internship possibilities. For example, if you work in sociology and need an intern, you can find interns doing bachelors in sociology.
If you manage an SEO agency, make a spreadsheet with as many of these internships or job opportunities as you can. And sort them by category (for example, link building, content writing, guest posting, etc.). These will prove to be useful whenever you have a new client in that niche.
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Monitor Your Own Links as Well
Apart from monitoring your competitors’ backlinks, it is equally important to monitor your own backlinks from event listings.
Besides guaranteeing a healthy backlink profile, tracking your links allows you to identify who is helping build your backlink profile, i.e., who is providing SEO event links to your site. This allows you to focus on relevant niches when conducting outreach and developing content.
Source: Monitor Backlinks
Furthermore, there is link relevancy, which is more significant than the authority of people who link to you. The reason for this is that relevant links tell Google that you’re a reliable source in your field. This helps you rank for keywords relevant to your business.
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Do Sponsor Event Link Building From Shopping Mall Websites
If you’re located in a shopping plaza or mall, chances are that the mall has a website. And if and when they do, they almost certainly feature a list of the companies that are included in them (in addition to a link to every business’s homepage).
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Create Lists
People love to read list articles (AKA listicles). You can create super long lists mentioning hundreds of strategies for SEO or tactics for link building. However, it is not a compulsion.
You can create small lists with ten to fifteen strategies or agencies for SEO, for instance.
Source: Globex Outreach
List articles get a good amount of backlinks, especially when one is working on event link building. For instance, here is an article on List Of 1000+ Guest Posting Sites In 2022 that has been linked to multiple times:
Source: Ahrefs
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Use Local Listings for Event Link Building
Source: Delante
Submit your website to local directories. You’ve probably heard of the larger ones (such as Yelp). However, there are hundreds of thousands of these. Keep an eye out for any websites that are specific to your city. These are really relevant, with less entries to sort through.
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Mention Specific People in Your Content
Mention individual people in your articles wherever you can and whenever you can.
Why?
Simply because people enjoy being mentioned. And once they discover you’ve linked to them, you’ll at least be on their radar. They may even share and link to what you wrote on occasion.
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Share Your Content on Forums
Forums are a great place to get answers to your issues and meet new people. They can also be an effective event link building method because they give a beneficial approach to enhancing traffic to your blog, increasing the likelihood of others connecting to you.
It’s crucial to not merely link to your post and hope for the best when publishing your information on forums. After all, forums typically contain rules and standard practices that you must observe.
Source: Mostly Blogging
When you share your post on a forum, you need to stick to the following guidelines:
- Respond to comments to contribute to the conversation and keep it going.
- Give actionable advice and useful tips.
- Respect the forum’s guidelines.
- As an added resource, include a link to your post.
To identify forums to post on, start by searching for subjects or frequently asked questions about your niche. You might also establish a habit of reading through forums pertaining to your topic.
Some good places to start are Facebook pages, Reddit, and Quora. As an added perk, you can scroll through forums to spike your creativity if you are having a creative block. Plus, this way, you can find new topics and interesting keywords to write about.
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Consider Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is another wonderful approach to gaining mid to top-tier event seo links back to your website. It’s certainly one of the event link building techniques that you’ve heard about the most and has definitely tried yourself. Approach your guest posting technique with an educational goal in mind, and hunt for sites that offer external content without advertising guest posting options.
Within that category, you’ll find mid to top-tier websites with topical significance that are likely to accept excellent content. It can be difficult to contact a site that does not openly want pitches. It’s critical to emphasize why their audiences should care about your content in these outreach emails.
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Focus on Reciprocal Linking
Even though we do not condone reciprocal linking, it is important to include it in our event link building guide because a wide majority of SEO experts and digital marketers use this strategy.
Source: BiQ Cloud
However, if you want to indulge in reciprocal linking, keep in mind that the website you exchange links with is of high quality. You have to be picky! Therefore, make certain that the website is trustworthy and relevant.
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Work on Infographics
Creating nicely produced infographics on a weekly basis can be a smart strategy to gain crucial link events benefits. Infographics, when combined with relevant and intriguing articles, offer excellent fodder for guest posts.
Using infographics as a supplement to your informative content instead of the main focus of the post means you’re more likely to receive topical links from bloggers instead of the standard infographic farm websites.
A well-designed and interactive asset elevates your infographic pitch and encourages a faster spread. In your pitch, you can also highlight the layout of your asset.
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Use Scoop.it to Drive Traffic for Event Link Building
Scoop.it is a website where users curate material to share with others. It is an excellent strategy to increase traffic while also creating a few nofollow links.
Source: Scoop It
All you have to do is discover Scoop.it pages that receive a lot of traffic. You can even find pages with views as high as over 2 million. Then, pitch your idea to the person in charge of that page.
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Slideshare Presentations
Using Slideshare presentations is one of the easiest event link building strategies. Plus, it is extremely simple and straightforward.
Source: Thrive Agency
You do not need to do much. If you have an impressive slide deck, all you have to do is submit it to Slideshare as a nofollow backlink.
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Utilize Sponsor Event Link Building
Source: Slideshare
This is another one of the simplest beginner event link building tips. Events are always searching for sponsors, whether it’s a neighborhood gathering, an industry conference, an influencer meet and greet, or something else. Therefore, they’ll almost always link to you from the event website (or at the very least acknowledge you during the event).
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Target Resource Pages
When you create helpful and original content, you can target pages that want to share your piece as a reference. This works especially effectively for information centered on “how-to guides” and “what is” themes for beginners.
Source: BiQ Cloud
These blogs are usually lengthier and cover everything you need to know about a subject. For example, Globex Outreach’s article on using ChatGPT for link building and SEO is an excellent addition to a link building reference page.
After you’ve created your resource post, you can start looking for websites that offer a resource page to which you can link. To do so, use search modifiers along with your term to find pages.
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Video Submissions
If you love making videos (be it reels or shorts), you can leverage your talent for event link building.
If you have video content, see to it that you are leveraging it and getting links from it. Be aware that the majority of these sites (such as Vimeo) only provide nofollow links.
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Consider Newsjacking
Newsjacking is an even link building digital PR approach that entails identifying chances in the news and creating relevant blog posts with your own comments and opinions — usually while advertising your or your client’s product.
This method works because more individuals will seek the topic, which helps to create expertise and trust, especially if trustworthy experts provide insights and advice. However, this means you’ll have to keep up with industry news, podcasts, and roundups, as well as develop content swiftly – news stories typically only endure 24 to 72 hours!
Source: HubSpot Blog
Newsjacking is effective across a wide range of businesses, from banking to lifestyle. It’s simply a matter of being up to date on current events and being able to tie them to your material.
For example, if your customer sells pillows and there is some noteworthy buzz about quality sleep and psychological well-being, you may write an article about how their pillows influence sleep quality. Here’s a great example by Oreo:
Source: Search Engine Journal
You can also undertake outreach and select news websites that might cover your topic to boost your chances of obtaining links to your newsjacking piece.
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Leave Testimonials
Do you want to do event link building, but you do not want to put in a lot of effort? This technique is made specifically for you.
How does this function?
First of all, you need to make a list of any recent services or purchases. Then, contact the company and express how much you appreciate their product, service, tool, and so on.
As long as the company isn’t too large, there’s a decent possibility they’ll use your testimonial and include a link to your website.
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Create Surveys to Engage Your Audience
Have you ever seen a brand’s survey go viral and wondered, “How did they manage to achieve this?” Surveys can be difficult to get right since they take time and sometimes produce irrelevant results. But when they work, they may pay off handsomely.
Survey content is effective for numerous reasons:
- You get to pitch entirely organic and one-of-a-kind data.
- You get to ensure that your inquiries are directly related to your brand’s offerings.
- For more focused results, segment your data by demographics.
- Journalists aim to cover stories that will pique their readers’ interest. That means your survey’s major takeaway should be eye-catching.
While you should always have an end objective in mind when constructing a survey, keep in mind that the findings may not always be what you expect. Nonetheless, don’t be afraid to work with the facts to discover another compelling tale or to incorporate external evidence to back up your claim.
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Alumni Spotlight for Event Link Building
This event link building technique is somewhat similar to Alumni Directories, but it is a lot more valuable.
In contrast to a directory listing, you will be mentioned in an article if you follow this strategy. Furthermore, because the link is contextually relevant, it is more potent than a mere directory link.
Source: Union College of Union County
The trick is to have a compelling story to share. If you do, your institute will almost certainly want to write about it. Ask customers for a list of their employees’ alma maters if you manage an agency. And tell them to pitch their stories to these universities.
Moreover, look for any awards (such as Drexel’s 40 under 40) that could provide another possibility for a link.
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Ask Your Customers for SEO Event Links
If you receive an unexpected email from a satisfied customer, ask them to share what they liked about your product and service online. You get a link even if they don’t have a large following. Writing an article that portrays your company in a glowing way.
Source: Bird Eye
Obviously, inform them that you will throw your weight behind the piece and promote it widely.
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Reap the Perks of Associations and Organizations
Do you belong to any associations or organizations? If so, see if they have a link to their membership list. And request that they add you to their mailing list. In fact, joining an organization solely for event link building is sometimes worthwhile.
The American Dental Association is an excellent example of this. If you have a dentist customer, there’s a great relevant link that couldn’t be easier to obtain.
Source: American Dental Association
If you want to take it a step further, most groups maintain blogs about their members that emphasize what they’re up to (similar to Alumni associations). So, if you have an amazing story to tell, contact them and request a feature.
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Conduct City Studies
A city study is an event link building method that leverages data from specific places to make a statement about the individuals, companies, or even weather patterns in that area.
City studies frequently have high open and click-through rates because they are very relevant to the region’s reporters and blog writers. You can target specific locations with subject content using city studies. This can aid in obtaining unique links to news sites, resource pages, and blogs for various cities.
You may also use city studies to generate connections to your location-specific product pages (if you have them), which will be valuable to readers in that area. What a win-win situation!
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Make the Most Out of Badges
If you’re giving out rewards, badges are ideal. Just make sure the embed code includes a link back to the awards page.
Source: Slideshare
Your badges can be anything you choose. There are obvious “top X blogs” in a specific field. However, you can also create a list of the best local venues, restaurants, link providers, service providers, and so on. Or the top items in a category that doesn’t attract much social attention (for example, seo tools or link building tools).
These untapped awards are usually more effective because these groups have never been featured before. That implies they’ll be ecstatic to share the message.
Use Listings to Get Event Links
Source: Search Engine Journal
Here’s how you can use listings for event link building:
Find a Relevant Event
Start by locating a relevant event to your target niche, keywords, and audience. Relevance is extremely important since it will help you naturally incorporate your link and desired keywords while crafting the event listing.
For instance, you need to develop links to advertise a B2B SEO company. In that scenario, you should look for marketing events that are of interest to business people.
Write the Listing
You need to research all event-related facts and generate event-related articles. You can get all the information on the event’s page, such as the organizer, the location, the itinerary, and more.
Make sure that you let your audience know a listing is promoting a third-party event. Do not make any claims of ownership of the event. Make sure to provide this disclaimer along with a link to the original event page.
When working on your listing, make sure to incorporate your target link and keyword into the content you write. Sticking to niche-relevant events is useful here because it makes it easy to insert your link in a natural approach.
Create the New Listings
You can find multiple platforms for this purpose. These include eventbrite.com, Brownpapertickets.com, Petaluma360.com, Punchbowl.com, and so many more. Furthermore, all of these websites allow users to write and publish their own listings.
Once you understand it, link building becomes straightforward. Simply choose an event website, sign up for an account, and then create a new listing for the event you want to cross-promote.
Search Queries You Can Use to Find Event Listing Opportunities:
Once you have created the content for your event link building strategy, you need to look for event listing websites that are relevant to your niche. Because many of the local event websites you’ll be looking for are specific to your area and event, your best method will be to prospect for links using search terms like the ones below:
Naturally, you’ll want to replace the ‘city keyword’ with something more relevant to your event and add or delete terms to get more or fewer results. There are many more search phrases you may use – it all depends on your event.
And That Is a Wrap!
In order to sponsor event link building, you just need to follow the above-mentioned event link building techniques. Do not overcomplicate it for yourself. Hosting and sponsoring local, national, and even global events can be as simple as you want it to be and vice versa. Furthermore, by sponsoring an event, you can create links that your competitors will find difficult to imitate.
To acquire successful backlinks, however, you must properly plan and execute your events. Make no mistakes! You may establish links, promote your brand, company message, and principles, and become an authority in your field by carefully picking events to organize and support.
If you do not want to do it by yourself, we can handle it for you.
Let’s talk!
