Your event website should not go dark for ten months of the year
Jon Monk has been optimising event websites since 2022 and doing SEO since 2012. The pattern he sees is always the same: a big ramp up, a cliff edge, then silence. Here is what he changes first.
Most organisers treat the website like the event itself, Jon says. A long build-up with content and marketing pouring in, the show, then a cliff: traffic falls away, content gets deleted, and the site sits in stasis for the rest of the year.
Arriving in events four years ago from other industries, that was the first thing he noticed. Elsewhere the website is the primary digital asset and grows every year, with more pages, more content and more people arriving. In events, the site shrinks after every cycle.
He understands why. There is a large financial investment with a hard cut-off date, budgets set against registrations, sponsors and exhibitors, and no appetite for risk in the run-up. Email, PPC and some social worked last year, so the same budget gets carved out and the process repeats. What gets missed, in his experience, is that adding to the website reduces PPC spend over time and stops the drop-off that leaves the database dwindling until next year's push.
1. Stop deleting your speakers
The classic move, he says, is to delete last year's speakers the week after the show and wait for the new line-up to be confirmed. But plenty of people attend an event specifically to see one person. They have authority, they know the industry, and people search for them by name all year, keynotes especially.
“Speaker pages can be real hidden gold,” Jon says. Someone may not know the event exists, find the bio page of a speaker they follow, and arrive that way. His advice: keep them. A talk from four years ago can live in a library called past speakers and still bring people in to see this year's line-up.
2. Categorise the show the way people search it
On any e-commerce site it is normal to find a category, then subcategories, then products organised logically. With events, Jon points out, people very regularly do not categorise why somebody is coming at all.
Take an event about AI. There are many subsections: machine learning, video avatars, robotics. Someone interested in one of them may conclude the event is too broad for them. The machines have the same problem: ChatGPT and Google do not know specifically what the event covers, because nobody told them. His fix is to name the overriding topic, then map the subtopics inside it, which serves both audiences at once.
3. Give the homepage one job: getting people off it
Homepages are the hardest page for any organisation, because they have to serve everybody at whatever stage they are at: a first-time visitor, a returning one, an exhibitor, the press. You cannot know which.
The most effective thing, in his view, is to help people leave the homepage quickly, into the layer where content is genuinely relevant to them, rather than hoping they scroll far enough to find the right tab.
4. Give the machine something true to work with
The queries have changed shape more than the channel has, in his view. A Google search might have been two words: “AI events.” In ChatGPT, the same person is happy to type out a hundred: the time of year, the exhibitors they are hoping to see, the specific topics on the agenda. By the time they hit enter, they have effectively written a brief.
That leaves the machine somewhere to get the answer from, ideally your website. If the information is not there, it invents it. “Machines are built to please,” Jon says, so rather than come back empty it hallucinates: made-up quotes, speakers who do not exist, exhibitors who were never there. None of that is hypothetical, and none of it is something an organiser wants written about their event.
The fix is the categorisation from point two, taken one step further. A page for the robotics stream needs the real speakers, sessions and exhibitors on it, or last year's if this year's are not confirmed, so the machine has something true to draw from. There is a neater test built in too: whatever you would say out loud if someone asked what is happening in robotics is exactly what should be sitting on that page. The video and the page should be saying the same thing.
What to do on Monday
- Find last year's deleted speaker pages. Restore them under past speakers.
- Write down the event's one overriding topic, then five subtopics. Check each has a page.
- List everything you delete after the show. Decide what could stay.
- Look at the homepage and ask what each of the four audiences landing on it should do next.
Watch the full session