Search for almost any event category plus a city and you will see a block of events near the top of the results, with dates, venues and ticket links. That block is not paid. Events appear in it because their pages carry structured data telling Google what the page describes.
Most event pages do not have it. That is the opportunity.
What structured data is
Structured data is a small block of machine-readable information in the page source. A human reading your page can tell it is an event happening on a particular date. Software cannot, reliably, because "October 17" could be a date, a band name, or part of an address. Structured data removes the guessing: this is the name, this is the start time, this is the venue, this is the price.
The format Google uses is called schema.org, and the type for events is simply Event.
The fields that matter
You can mark up a lot. In practice a small set does nearly all the work:
- name: the event title, matching what is on the page
- startDate: full date and time including timezone offset
- location: venue name and full postal address, or a virtual location URL
- offers: ticket URL, price, currency and availability
- organizer: who is running it
- eventAttendanceMode: physical, online, or both
Two of these cause most of the failures. The timezone is frequently omitted, which makes the start time ambiguous. And the address is often incomplete, listing a venue name with no street or city, which is not enough to place the event geographically.
If you use a ticketing platform
Eventbrite and similar platforms add structured data to the listing pages they host. That is why an Eventbrite listing can appear in event results without you doing anything.
The gap opens on your own site. If you have an event page on your own domain, that page usually has no structured data at all, because your website builder does not know it is an event page. So the ticketing platform ranks and your own site does not, which matters if you would rather own the traffic.
How to check what you have
Google's Rich Results Test takes a URL and tells you which structured data it can read and whether anything is invalid. Paste your event page in. If it reports no event detected, you have nothing. If it reports errors, they are usually the timezone or the address.
Check after every change. Structured data breaks silently. Nothing on the visible page looks wrong when it stops working.
What this will and will not do
Structured data does not make you rank. It makes you eligible for a result format that most of your competitors are not eligible for, and it helps search engines understand your page correctly. For searches where someone is looking for an event like yours in a place like yours, that is often enough.
It will not win you competitive general terms on its own. Ranking for something like "conferences in Boston" is a content and authority problem measured in months. Getting your event into event results is a technical problem measured in an afternoon. Do the afternoon one first.
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Tell us the date. We'll tell you what to do first.
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