How to showcase your events on Google Search

Tuesday, February 25, 2020

It’s officially 2020 and people are starting to make plans for the year ahead. If you produce
any type of event, you can help people discover your events with the event search experience on
Google.

Have a concert or hosting a workshop? Event markup allows people to discover your event when
they search for “concerts this weekend” or “workshops near me.” People can also discover your
event when they search for venues, such as sports stadiums or a local pub. Events may surface
in a given venue’s
Knowledge Panel
to better help people find out what’s happening at that respective location.

Launching in new regions and languages

We recently launched the event search experience in
Germany
and
Spain,
which brings the event search experience on Google to nine countries and regions around the
world. For a full list of where the event search experience works, check out the
list of available languages and regions.

How to get your events on Google

There are three options to make your events eligible to appear on Google:

• If you use a third-party website to post events (for example, you post events on ticketing
  websites or social platforms), check to see if your event publisher is already participating
  in the event search experience on Google. One way to check is to search for a popular event
  shown on the platform and see if the event listing is shown. If your event publisher is
  integrated with Google, continue to post your events on the third-party website.
• If you use a CMS (for example, WordPress) and you don’t have access to your HTML, check with
  your CMS to see if there’s a plugin that can add structured data to your site for you.
  Alternatively, you can use the
  Data Highlighter
  to tell Google about your events without editing the HTML of your site.
• If you’re comfortable editing your HTML,
  use structured data to directly integrate
  with Google. You’ll need to edit the HTML of the event pages.

Follow best practices

If you’ve already implemented event structured data, we recommend that you review your
structured data to make sure it meets our guidelines. In particular, you should:

• Make sure you’re including the required and recommended properties that are outlined in our
  developer guidelines.
• Make sure your event details are high quality, as defined by
  our guidelines. For example, use the
  description field to describe the event itself in more detail instead of repeating attributes
  such as title, date, location, or highlighting other website functionality.
• Use the
  Rich Result Test
  to
  test and preview your structured data.

Monitor your performance on Search

You can check how people are interacting with your event postings with Search Console:

• Use the
  Performance Report
  in Search Console to show
  event listing or detail
  view data for a given event posting in Search results. You can automatically pull these results with the
  Search Console API.
• Use the
  Rich result status report
  in Search Console to understand what Google could or could not read from your site, and troubleshoot rich result errors.

If you have any questions, please visit the
Webmaster Central Help Forum.

Posted by Emily Fifer, Product Manager