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Concert Venues "Buyer" Keywords? - Need Advice From Any Ticket Sellers

by dukestravels1972
9 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I recently started a new venture into a fiercley competitive area. Ticket Selling. My problem is that the most of the obviously "buyer" keywords are beyond my limited expertise to rank for. Example: "concert tickets", forget it. 'Cheap tickets" no chance. I cannot compete with ticketmaster.

Anyway, I'm seeing a number of venue keywords that might be do-able for me.

Examples being, Hollywood Bowl, Key Arena, HP Pavilion. Now, these are obviously, for the most part "informational" keywords at first glance. I am looking to get the thoughts of marketers on the probability I could get some sales on these keywords though? Obviously someone searching Hollywood Bowl might be looking for info on who's playing there. Another might be looking for capacity info and someone else may just be wanting to know what the place is exactly.

Does anyone think SOME of the searchers would buy looking to buy tickets?

I'm particularly looking for help from ticket sellers, but anyone with good marketing experience too. Thanks!
#advice #buyer #concert #keywords #sellers #ticket #venues
  • Profile picture of the author WilliamBlah
    I would imagine you would be best off ranking well for keywords like:
    hollywood bowl tickets
    hollywood bowl events

    Also keywords like:
    hollywood bowl 22nd Feb
    and
    hollywood bowl kanye west (for want of a better artist!)

    Have you thought about trying to reverse engineer the keyword rankings of one of your competitors?

    An additional thought is that you might find it easier to compete with the big guns through PPC or through social networking. My reason for this thought is that it would mean you could target particular events without knowing that your SEO work will be fairly worthless after the event has finished.

    Regards
    Will
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    • Profile picture of the author dukestravels1972
      Originally Posted by WilliamBlah View Post

      I would imagine you would be best off ranking well for keywords like:
      hollywood bowl tickets
      hollywood bowl events

      Also keywords like:
      hollywood bowl 22nd Feb
      and
      hollywood bowl kanye west (for want of a better artist!)

      Have you thought about trying to reverse engineer the keyword rankings of one of your competitors?

      An additional thought is that you might find it easier to compete with the big guns through PPC or through social networking. My reason for this thought is that it would mean you could target particular events without knowing that your SEO work will be fairly worthless after the event has finished.

      Regards
      Will
      Hi William. Thanks for the feedback.
      Can you clarify what you mean by "reverse engineer"?
      PPC is too expensive for me right now. I tried it and even average talent singers like Kanye West cost $2.00 a click....well thats with adwords. Are there any other good PPC places?
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      • Profile picture of the author WilliamBlah
        Originally Posted by dukestravels1972 View Post

        Hi William. Thanks for the feedback.
        Can you clarify what you mean by "reverse engineer"?
        PPC is too expensive for me right now. I tried it and even average talent singers like Kanye West cost $2.00 a click....well thats with adwords. Are there any other good PPC places?
        Have you tried using some sort of keyword scraping/mining tool so you have a larger number of longer key phrases in your AdWords account?

        Rather than getting 1000 clicks per day from "kanye west" you might look to get:
        kanye west tickets new york (3 clicks)
        getting kanye west tickets (1 click)
        ticket for kanye west concert (4 clicks)

        Multiply this by a few hundred keywords and you are getting the same number of clicks per day, but at a lower cost. (Set your CPC to far less).

        When I say "reverse engineer" I mean take a look and try and copy or build upon their marketing strategy.

        This is a very basic blog post (not written by me!) about what I mean:

        How to Build Your Own Successful Website By Reverse Engineering Successful Sites | Financial Freedom Ideas

        Take a look here: ticketmaster.com

        Unfortunately the free version of SpyFu only shows limited data.

        Regards
        Will
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  • Profile picture of the author Shawn Wilson
    I was ticket broker for a while on eBay, back in the day though. In doing some research on the subject matter and also being an aff for some of the ticket brokers.

    I would scour this site for keywords, mostly longtail as you already are well aware the top searched keywords are very difficult to rank for.

    Ticket Industry Rankings

    Consider targeting artist and venue, tour and city, venue and city, etc. This is an ultra evergreen niche and you can make money. Just remember that some of the long tail keywords may not be applicable always, mean the tour ends or maybe venue changes names or whatever. I would consider creating a "ticket" selling site with a catchy main domain keyword to include tickets. Create your pages around the long tail keywords, venues, artist, dates, tours.

    This does two things for you, allows you to change page name on the fly if need be and also keeps you from possibly from getting a C&D letter that could topple your ticket empire. Don't want an artist or venue wanting your domain because of trademark issues.

    Take action and create an authority ticket site. There's plenty of room for more.
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    • Profile picture of the author dukestravels1972
      Originally Posted by Dream Big WB View Post

      I was ticket broker for a while on eBay, back in the day though. In doing some research on the subject matter and also being an aff for some of the ticket brokers.

      I would scour this site for keywords, mostly longtail as you already are well aware the top searched keywords are very difficult to rank for.

      Ticket Industry Rankings

      Consider targeting artist and venue, tour and city, venue and city, etc. This is an ultra evergreen niche and you can make money. Just remember that some of the long tail keywords may not be applicable always, mean the tour ends or maybe venue changes names or whatever. I would consider creating a "ticket" selling site with a catchy main domain keyword to include tickets. Create your pages around the long tail keywords, venues, artist, dates, tours.

      This does two things for you, allows you to change page name on the fly if need be and also keeps you from possibly from getting a C&D letter that could topple your ticket empire. Don't want an artist or venue wanting your domain because of trademark issues.

      Take action and create an authority ticket site. There's plenty of room for more.


      Hi. You've given me some great info and its greatly appreciated. I will look at that site and see what I can harvest from it. As you've mentioned, the problem with this niche is that the keywords DO end after a while. So, I need super easy to get on page one keywords (stuff that googles machines don't drag their heels indexing)...if I'm going organic.

      You're right, there are quite a few options in this niche. I'm just trying to figure out the best signpost to follow. I've tried researching sporting events, but that's even tougher than concerts. I should have mentioned this before, but I am actually have a "partner" site. I don't host it. Thus I have very little control over SEO. I have dabbled with the idea of creating a feeder site that will receive all of the traffic. That I can properly optimize. The partner site I have is a lazy mans dream, it has some 2000 indexed pages with pretty much every artist, venue and event you can think of...all updated automatically. All I do is change the front page to the big sellers. All of the venues have their own page. The URL looks like this http://mysite.com/ResultsVenue.aspx?venid=31&vname=HP+Pavilion

      The same goes for "tours"...these are just listed as events. For example theres a dedicated page for The Metal Alliance Tour...the url looks like the one above. Do you think this URL is clean enough to be picked up by google if someone searched for The Metal Alliance Tour? It does contain the kw, but the url is a mess.

      However, the url works just as well if I remove the + parts and put in spaces, which means I can have the full keyword at the end of the url. example http://mysite.com/ResultsVenue.aspx?venid=31&vname=HP Pavilion...again I'm not sure its clean enough for SEO purposes.

      Although I cannot create pages that have solid URL's with a combination of keywords, using my sites search function and searching for something like Madonna New York, would bring up a page thats says
      the following events and venues match your search for "madonna new york". and lists the places in new york shes playing. This looks like a auto generated temp page because its not indexed in google when I search for it....

      Another alternative is to use my sites "featured events" tool. Through admin I can add unlimited key events calling them whatever I want. Here is one I just created for the kw "madonna new york". Its listed on this page TheTicketGarden.com

      The only problem is the Url doesnt have the keyword in the title. Would the keyword be found in a google search? I can actually add as much text as I want below the link...hell I could create an article...im just not sure if it would make a difference since its on a page called "concerts".

      A fix for this could be tinyurl which allows me to tag on any words I want...so I could have TheTicketGarden.com as a url for TheTicketGarden.com
      Do you think this would be as good as creating a page on a seperate catchy ticket site that has a url of www.theticketgenius.com/madonnanewyork?

      I know I wrote a lot. If you can answer just one or two I'd be grateful.
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  • Profile picture of the author dukestravels1972
    William.
    Some great info there. the spy site is something I will definitely utilize. I had tried to find long tail keywords before, but most of what I find that are dirt cheap cpc have REALLY low local monthly exact searches, nothing like 1000...more like 30. I suppose a ton of those would be better than nothing.

    I don't have the greatest arsenal for getting long tail keywords though. traffic travis helps a little. I also have keyword ninja. Are there any decent free/cheap methods for finding long tail keywords?
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  • Profile picture of the author WilliamBlah
    Nothing wrong with a long post if it is justified! If you are unable to change anything but the homepage, my advice would be to attempt to create some sort of feeder site in order to pick up organic traffic.

    Remember, though, that in adding an extra click-through, you are adding another stage at which potential buyers may drop-out.

    Also in terms of a tool that will scrape or mine vast numbers of keywords, the tool I use is no longer available, but this one will do the trick:

    Keyword Scraper Tool | Scrape Keywords from Google, Bing, Yahoo and Alexa Suggest (It's not my page or tool, so sorry about the opt-in!)

    Regards
    Will
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    • Profile picture of the author dukestravels1972
      Cheers Will.
      Seems like a decent tool, found a couple of possibilities on first go.
      You think a keyword of something like "kanye west tour" is a buyer keyword?
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      • Profile picture of the author WilliamBlah
        Originally Posted by dukestravels1972 View Post

        Cheers Will.
        Seems like a decent tool, found a couple of possibilities on first go.
        You think a keyword of something like "kanye west tour" is a buyer keyword?
        Not as much as something like "kanye west tickets".

        My thought was that you might wish to scrape a whole bunch of keywords, and then use them in an AdWords campaign with a rock-bottom CPC.

        They won't all bring in traffic, but once you have some stats to go on, you can sort by the number of visitors sent (so you are only looking at the terms sending you much traffic). Then you can go through manually and remove any keywords that you definitely wouldn't class to be buyer keywords.

        You can also play around with "Goals" in AdWords and Analytics, but this is something I haven't even looked at in a while. This will allow you to work out which clicks are resulting in sales.

        Regards
        Will
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