How Should We Best List Events Pages?

[keL.A.xT.o]

Hi everyone!

Luke here from CHARGED.fm hoping that a brilliant mind could help me with another annoying (at least for me) technical seo question. It's about how we list the events on our ticketing site. Here's the rundown:

We currently list tickets by event id, but our competitors keep the event page in the same silo and use the venue name and date of event in the url. So we do this:

http://www.charged.fm/kinky-boots-tickets (disregard redirect for now)

List the events where you can choose from these:

http://www.charged.fm/event/tickets/2518362/kinky-boots
http://www.charged.fm/event/tickets/2511448/kinky-boots

Moz lists these as duplicate content, so we're wondering how to resolve this. We're also wondering if it would be benficial to keep the events page in the same silo like our competitors:

http://www.vividseats.com/theatre/kinky-boots-tickets/kinky-boots-9-20-1537274.html (notice how they go /theatre/kinky-boots-tickets/event/)

Would it be beneficial to list like this? Is it inconsequential? Could we leave things the way that they are or should we at least add the venue and date to the events page URL?

Thanks a lot for any help,
Luke

[simplycary]

I would use each page created as an opportunity to target specific keywords. For each ticket page you can target the following areas: Month, Date, Venue, Type of Show, Play Name.

So for example:

http://www.charged.fm/event/tickets/2511448/kinky-boots

vs.

http://www.charged.fm/tickets/broadway-play/kinky-boots/Month-Date/

So if someone was to search:

broadway tickets for September...boom targeted

kinky boots september....boom targeted

kinky boots broadway tickets...boom targeted

broadway play tickets....boom targeted

[keL.A.xT.o]

Awesome answer thanks Cary!

[Travis_Bailey]

If you haven't considered it yet, you should definitely use Schema Event markup. It's lovely when you're doing something that has pretty cut-and-dried examples. Just scroll to the bottom and click the Microdata tab.

[keL.A.xT.o]

Thanks for the advice Travis. The markup would show in the SERPS? Or it's something that Google likes to see?

I checked some competitors, and they have it, but I didn't see anything in the SERPS for their listing.

[Travis_Bailey]

I haven't worked in that vertical so I'm not entirely sure what triggers these particular snippets. But here's a little more from Google about the subject. I managed to get them to show up by searching 'ticketmaster events'. Though the results were definitely skewed toward my location.

At any rate, look at how Ticketmaster marks up their pages. View the src, hit ctrl+f (if you're using Chrome - I don't use any other browser, unless I'm doing some cross browser tests.) and enter 'itemprop'. That will take you directly to the markup.

Seriously, if you don't do this - you're missing out.