An event page for a business

Answer the practical questions first

Date, start time, end time, address, price and whether booking is required. Those six decide whether somebody can attend, and they should be visible before any description of why the event is worthwhile.

Most event pages lead with the theme and bury the logistics halfway down. That order suits the organizer and nobody else, because the person reading is working out whether it is possible before whether it is appealing.

Our page on answer-first writing covers the principle, and an event page is the clearest case of it anywhere on a business website.

Remove the reasons to hesitate

Parking, access, whether it is suitable for children, whether food is provided, what to wear, whether you can leave early. Every unanswered question is a small reason to decide later.

Accessibility information matters more than most organizers expect. Step-free access, hearing loops, quiet spaces and accessible facilities decide attendance for a meaningful number of people.

Say who else will be there, in general terms. People are far likelier to attend something when they can picture the room, and vagueness about the audience is read as a warning sign.

Publish early and update in place

Put the page up as soon as the date is fixed, even if the detail is incomplete. It takes time to be found, and an early page with a note saying more details to follow works perfectly well.

Then update the same page rather than creating new ones. A single address accumulating information is far stronger than three pages competing with each other for the same event.

Say when the page was last updated. Anybody deciding whether the information is current will look for that, and its absence makes a page look abandoned even when it is not.

What an event page must contain

The list below is what somebody needs before committing an evening. Missing items do not usually produce a question. They produce a decision to think about it, which is the same as a no.

• Date, start and end time, stated plainly
• The full address and how to get there
• Price, including anything not included
• Whether booking is required and how
• What happens on the day, in order
• Parking, access and facilities
• Who to contact with a question

Marking it up

Structured data exists for events and states the date, place and price in a form that needs no interpretation. It is one of the clearer cases where markup genuinely helps a search engine or an answer engine understand a page.

Keep it identical to the visible page. Our page on schema markup covers why a mismatch is worse than no markup, and event details change often enough that drift is easy.

Update the markup whenever anything moves. A cancelled or rescheduled event with stale markup will keep being described with its original date by anything that read the page earlier.

After the event

Do not delete the page. Replace the booking section with a short summary, photographs and anything useful that came out of it, and the page keeps working as evidence that you run these.

If the event recurs, reuse the address and update it each year. A page that has run four times carries far more weight than a new one, and links built each year accumulate on one address.

Where an event genuinely ends, redirect the address to whatever replaced it. Our page on redirects covers doing that without losing the links people built.

Cancellations and changes

Say it at the top of the page, immediately, in plain words. A cancellation buried below the original description is how people arrive at a locked door having read the page that morning.

Update every place the event appears, not only the page. Business profiles, listings, any newsletter still scheduled and any partner site that carried the announcement.

Then leave the notice live for a while. Somebody who saw the event mentioned elsewhere will arrive at your page days later, and the notice is the only thing that helps them.