Find out what factors influence your search performance with Calendar Events

How do calendar events work

The Calendar Events are visible in the Monitoring Overview in Search Success, with the overlay graph Real Google Visibility.

We set default events, "system events", for example, Google Updates, and you can set an unlimited number of your own customized events - "user events". By clicking on the top right-hand corner of the overlay, you can switch off system events and/or user events. Here, you can also add and manage events.

Figure 1: Choose to make events visible, add events, or go to the events manager

Add and manage calendar events

Click on "Add event" to create a new calendar event. You can give it a name and description. Set a start date, and if the event occurred over a certain time period, you can also set an end date. You can define colour and shape for the events - this will help make the overlay graph clearer, especially if you want to define multiple events. You can set an unlimited number of events.

Clicking on "manage events" directs you to the Calendar Events manager. This gives you an overview of the events you have set, including dates. You can also choose to edit or delete events here. You cannot delete system events, but if you don’t want them to be visible by default on your overlay, you can set them to invisible.

Figure 2: Manage calendar events

Use cases

Many factors can influence your search performance, both internal and external. We include external factors - such as Google updates - as system events. To analyze your search performance in more depth and see what internal factors have influenced your search performance, here are some examples of calendar events you might want to set:

• Website relaunch: a website relaunch will most likely have an impact on search performance. Setting an event for this will make it clear to see in one glance how your traffic dipped or increased after the relaunch, and how long it took to stabilize.
• Adding a new subdomain or subdirectory: this could cause your traffic to increase. Alternatively, it could show that this makes no difference to your website’s traffic; useful to bear in mind for future decisions regarding website architecture.

• Changes in strategy: for example, if your company strategy is now focussing more on mobile SEO, this should lead to an increase in mobile traffic. Another possible event could be a new hire - if a new team member has joined and is focussing on a particular aspect of SEO.
• New campaigns: Google Ads campaigns, social campaigns and offline events could have an affect on your search performance.

You can set anything as an event, no matter how big or small. Generally, we recommend you set events for factors you think might, or should, have an impact on search performance. If publishing blog articles is an important part of your SEO strategy, you might even want to set events for publications of individual blog articles.

Conclusion

Calendar events will give more transparency into changes in your search performance, and you will be able to understand how certain measures influence your search performance.

This has many advantages:

• You will easily be able to evaluate the success of certain measures and campaigns
• Understanding what influences your search performance will help you derive measures for the future
• You will be able to concretely prove the success of your optimization measures, and show this to stakeholders - your boss, clients, and/or investors.

Happy Optimizing!