Event Link Building: The Complete Guide

What if I told you there was a way to build powerful backlinks and gain offline exposure to your target audience at the same time?

And not only that…

…but you can do it all from the chair you are sitting in right now?

I’m talking about Event link building!

You can pick these links up for low prices and get high levels of exposure!

So in this tutorial I am going to show you how to build links with your events and get offline exposure to your target audience, simple!

What Is Event Link Building (And Why Should You Care)?

Event link building is the process of getting backlinks to your site through local, national, or international events to improve your website’s visibility and authority.

There are two ways to obtain these links:

1. Hosting: Creating your own event & having a third-party event website link back
2. Sponsoring: Sponsoring an event & obtaining a link as a sponsor

Both of these are legitimate methods of building links and are generally accepted by Google as good links. This is because these are links that need to be “earned”.

If you’ve created an event – even if it’s a small coffee shop event for five people – you’ve earned the link back to your site.

If you’re sponsoring, you’ve developed a relationship with a host and have also earned the right to be featured on that site.

Let’s look at some examples of these links in action.

When Social Media Examiner host their Social Media Marketing World conference, it attracts a lot of links back to their website from third-party sites and event listings:

These links will also be highly relevant to and powerful for, the website they’re linking to because they come from…

This also works in the other direction, too.

Event sponsors can take advantage of this highly relevant link juice a site is getting by having them link back to their own site.

So, when SEMRush sponsored the Social Media Marketing World event, they got a highly-relevant backlink to their site:

Although this link has been paid for it is not a “purchased” link. This is because the transaction was for sponsorship of the event, and not for the link on their website.

The link is just a little bonus that comes with the package.

But for the purposes of this this tutorial, we’re going to focus on getting sponsor links for your site.

Why?

Because out of the two event link building techniques, this comes with all of the upsides of event link building without the downside of having to host your own event.

That being said, let’s dive into how you can get those links, shall we?

BONUS: Learn how to build powerful edu backlinks.

What Kind Of Events Can You Sponsor?

Depending on your industry the types of events you can sponsor will vary.

However you could tie it into pretty much anything on this list that is relevant:

Just be sure the subject matter and location are relevant to your website or business.

8 Websites To Find Sponsorship Opportunities

Before you go looking for events to sponsor it’s good to know where the events will usually be hosted online.

There will be a range of local events websites you can search in your area through Google.

But on a more general scale, here are where lots of events will be posted:

1. Eventful
2. MeetUp
3. Events.org
4. Patch
5. Eventbrite
6. Craigslist
7. Facebook Events
8. Resident Advisor

These websites can easily be slotted into the Google searches in the next section to help you make the most of these link building techniques.

PRO TIP: Before starting any link building campaign, it’s best to determine how many backlinks you need to rank and archive your goals.

How To Find Events To Sponsor

To find the events to sponsor you are going to use a few handy Google searches.

Here are some of the search queries you can use when looking for events to sponsor-

• site:eventful.com inurl:events +”sponsors”
• site:eventful.com inurl:events +”link to your”
• site:events.com inurl:registration +”sponsors”
• site:craigslist.org +”sponsors”
• site:meetup.com + “donation”
• site:eventbrite.com + “become a sponsor”
• site:eventbrite.com -inurl:support -inurl:blog +”link to your website”

You can add in any of those website URLs from the last section to tailor each of these searches to that website, too.

This will highlight all of the pages on the relevant website that contain these keywords in your Google search results.

You can then search and find an event that matches up with what you’re looking for.

For example:

If you’re working on a dating themed website, this event would be a great fit:

But if you want a more specific search you can also add your website’s keyword or business type into those searches as well.

Just add a keyword to the end of your search-

And you’ll find much more specific results surrounding your type of event.

How To Automate Event Link Building

When you have exhausted this process for finding events to sponsor, you can automate it for any future link building opportunities that come up by using Google Alerts.

Head over to their website and enter your target search into their search bar.

This could be a niche-specific search, or a more general search:

You can then adjust the settings to deliver all new results for this keyword to be sent directly to your inbox as soon as they get crawled.

That means you can swoop in first and pick up some great links, and help out some causes in your industry.

But I suggest setting queries up using various web monitoring tools# because Google Alerts doesn’t deliver the same volume of results it used to in general.

Wrapping It Up

Event link building is a simple link building technique that allows you to obtain backlinks from local (or bigger) events.

You can obtain these links by:

By sponsoring these events you can benefit from the link juice they create from their promotion and have a guaranteed backlink and advertising place on their website.

Opportunities can be found for different types of events using Google footprint searches.

And you can automate the process by using Google Alerts.

But now it’s time to take a closer look at a link building strategy you may have chosen to ignore… Web directory link building.

Pro tips: Before starting building links, make sure you have read the full link building checklist that explains all the link building process.