Event Link Building Strategies: Conferences, Webinars & More

If there is one particular asset that can pass the “evergreen test” of constantly acquiring high-quality backlinks to your site, it would be events. 

Event link building utilizes the power of events, such as conferences, webinars, training workshops, or even small community gatherings, to manually build or earn links from other websites (organizers, publishers, journalists, etc.). 

Events are inherently “link-worthy”  given that people want to share or curate new launches, industry trends, or any prominent speakers you invited to your events – and from having exposure to any of these comes links from publishers who want to cover your stories. 

Event link building campaigns are naturally relevant for tightly niche communities, as they use events to amplify more of their networks, which leads to more organic link acquisition from schools, business organizations, chambers of commerce, etc. 

When someone creates events, publishing a webpage to launch them is crucial. Now, it’s important to have a specific page that others can easily link to from their sites. 

Event Link Building Strategies

Let’s move on to the meat of this guide—the strategy itself. Here are event link building strategies you can try.

Host Your Own Event

If you can organize your own event, you can get the best of both worlds—brand visibility/potential income and links. Whether it’s a webinar, training workshop, or a big conference where you invite industry speakers (or personal brands), getting full ownership of this entire asset is still worth your investment. 

There is no question whether you could acquire links, but more into nudging others to credit you with links. Here are sure-fire ways you should plan when launching your own events:

• Create a dedicated landing page with details about your agenda, speakers, registration details, and FAQs. You can even optimize the page for specific industry keywords (“SEO conference Chiang Mai”) to get organic visibility from people searching for available industry events. Hint: The most linkable events often name their events with the keyword they want to rank for. 

• Leverage speakers and partner networks to further attract participants and links. You can provide customized graphics, press kits, or suggested captions so speakers and sponsors can link to your event page when they promote it. 
• Offer media assets such as recordings, highlight event reels (same-day edits), or speakers’ slides (if possible). These highly shareable assets can help you continuously attract backlinks even after the event. Thought leaders and publishers building their own personal brands might reference your asset in their future content. 
• Turn events into a series – if you have resources and a good team to manage hosting recurring events, it will help build long-term thought leadership and attract a pool of brand advocates, which, over time, can be your own entity that earns backlinks every year. It’s not just a backlink asset – but can become your company’s branding tool. 

Event Directories & Calendars

Submissions are still a useful link-building technique, especially when you’re running events. Investing minutes to submit your event details (with a link to your event page) to relevant event directories can help spread awareness about your offer and enable organizers to include a link to the official event page. 

You can submit events to any of these target groups:

• Local government websites – specific to city halls, tourism boards, or city or municipal websites that have their own or maintain calendars of upcoming events – essentially, the main goal is to support local communities. Using this process, you can secure backlinks from trusted .gov domains.
• Chambers of Commerce – robust links from business chambers (these institutions frequently promote events and public lectures of their members – especially if they’re hyper relevant). 
• Universities and schools – .edu backlinks are still powerful (regardless of what other SEOs have told you) – institutions often list conferences and workshops where one of their professors or staff is a speaker of your event – getting .edu links can pass strong trust and authority signals to your website.
• Niche directories – not the usual generic directories thousands of businesses have submitted their entries – but niche platforms like health conference listings, booths, tech meetups, or even trade fair portals that are target hyper-relevant audiences (though might be lower DR30 are still manageable links you can acquire).

 

Speak at Other People’s Events

Ideally, you’re not looking for a quick backlink to speak at other events. In fact, a link from the events page is just a by-product of wanting to collaborate or build your own thought leadership (if you’re a personal brand).

Whether the event is an industry conference, training workshop, university lecture, or trade expo, it’s one of the best ways to naturally open opportunities for your brand and get featured among many of their event websites (without doing much of the effort promoting it yourself, in the case when you organize your own). 

Where exactly do you get links? 

• Speaker bio with backlinks – they usually allow links within speaker bios on their website for conferences.
• Event page mentions—if there’s no specific speaker page, the official agenda or full event page lists all speakers and links to their websites or company sites, which attendees can visit if they want to learn more about the speaker.
• Media coverage – if the event organizer has done a great job promoting the event, it would attract journalists, bloggers, or niche publishers who would cover it with plenty of links they reference in their content. 
• Credibility by association—having your profile listed alongside other thought leaders in your space can spark brand recall, which in the near future could open up new opportunities (speaking, content collaboration, digital PR—in other words, it sustains the by-products of your event link building for you). 
• Offer free assets—these are additional resources your attendees can freely access (e.g., frameworks, guides, cheatsheets, or checklists) and download to help amplify your brand.
• Leverage partnerships with co-speakers or panelists by building authentic relationships with them (without having to ask for links upfront—make the relationship the gateway for link building, don’t try to force it).

Sponsorships & Partnerships

Sponsorships and brand partnerships are huge when hosting or participating in events. Partnering with different organizations, brands, or sponsors can help you achieve win-win content promotion.

Both entities can absorb each other’s audiences, followers, brand advocates, and customers, allowing the association to impact their branding efforts. 

Here are a couple of ways to leverage sponsorships and partnerships for links:

• Secure reputable sponsors and partners who are credible and truly aligned with your industry (trade associations, NGOs, local businesses, etc.).
• Provide ready-to-use content that is easily shareable – potentially good linkable assets for your event landing page. 
• Feature repricocity by initially linking to sponsors and partners from your event page – the effect itself can do wonders for you in return – links. 
• Encourage pre- and post-event brand mentions by actively promoting content assets such as highlight reels, recap posts, and even post-interviews for speakers that will eventually extend backlink opportunities. 

Offer Lectures for Educational and Community Links

Thought leadership is more evident if you offer value-adding content in person. For instance, lecturing to schools, NGOs, and civic groups can help build your brand authority, attract new followers, and link back to the source (your website). 

Given that lectures are tied to specific fields of study or areas of advocacy, the links you’ll acquire from this approach can truly strengthen your topical alignment, helping your site get higher visibility in both traditional search rankings and AI-generated answers. 

When utilizing lectures, you want to make them more educational, not promotional, as you want institutions to voluntarily feature you, aiding in the later link acquisition process. So, for instance, you’ll see a medical professional (doctor) offering a health awareness lecture for an NGO, helping her clinic gain backlinks from a .org domain.

Turning Events into Evergreen Link Assets

If you can successfully leverage events for link acquisition, it could be a predictable system for your brand’s authority growth, which has a compounding effect on your branding efforts.

Ready to sustain your link building efforts? Explore more of our link buiding services.