A Beginner’s Guide to Wedding SEO
As a wedding professional, you already know that most couples start their wedding planning journey online. From finding inspiration to researching different options, and ultimately booking wedding vendors, most wedding plans start with a Google search.
One of the best ways to ensure that your business is found by these couples is to use search engine optimization (SEO).
Unfortunately, there is a lot of conflicting advice surrounding SEO and the topic can feel completely overwhelming for many wedding professionals. So we’ve put together this beginner’s guide to break it all down for you, and explain Wedding SEO in plain English.
So, What Is SEO?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of making improvements to your website so that it ranks higher and appears more often in online search results. This makes your website more visible to users of search engines such as Google. The more visible your website is, the more visitors your website will receive.
And when SEO is implemented correctly, your website receives visitors who are interested in the specific products or services that your business provides, in the location where it provides them. This makes your website visitors far more likely to become paying customers for your business.
What Is Wedding SEO?
Wedding SEO is the process of using SEO strategies and techniques to increase the visibility of websites in the wedding industry to their target audience.
Wedding SEO is typically used by wedding professionals who want to attract more potential clients (i.e. newly engaged couples) to their business website. The goal of SEO is not just to attract more clients, but the right clients. This means that wedding SEO can help a wedding professional attract the type of clients who are looking for the exact service or style of service that they provide. For example, an adventure wedding planner wants to attract adventurous couples, and a luxury wedding venue wants to attract couples with a suitable budget.
Wedding SEO is also used by wedding professionals who want to reach a global audience of potential couples, such as those who are planning a destination wedding. It helps local vendors get found by potential clients anywhere in the world.
Why Is Wedding SEO So Important?
There are a few key reasons why wedding SEO is so beneficial for wedding professionals.
It puts your business in front of potential clients, right when they are searching for you
As we’ve already stated, most wedding planning happens online. According to WeddingWire, 80% of all weddings are researched and planned online using resources like wedding professionals’ websites and wedding blogs.
If your business isn’t appearing at the top of the search results, right where these couples are looking, your business is invisible to them. That’s a massive 80% of the market that you’re not reaching.
It converts into paid bookings at a much higher rate than other forms of marketing
When you implement SEO, you attract targeted traffic to your website. Targeted traffic means that these visitors are finding exactly what they are searching for, and are therefore far more likely to convert into paying customers for your business.
While it might be nice if your website received thousands of visitors a day, it means nothing if these people are not actively seeking the service that you provide. For example, social media can send visitors from your Instagram page to your website, but how many of these visitors are actually brides or grooms who are ready to book you, right now? The truth is, we don’t really know the intent of your social media audience, and the vast majority of them will never become paying clients.
Alternatively, a person who types “mountain elopement planner in Austria” into Google is pretty likely to be planning a wedding. When you use SEO to get your business in front of those people, you have a very high chance of converting your visitors into wedding bookings.
It works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
SEO is certainly not a one-time activity. It takes research to get it right, effort to implement it, and time for it to start working. But once it does start working for you, it sends you targeted traffic around the clock.
And unlike social media posts that are quickly buried under the next post and forgotten, SEO can deliver website traffic from a single blog post for months or even years to come.
How Do I Optimize My Website For SEO?
SEO covers a range of different techniques and strategies. They can be broken down into three broad categories;
On-Page SEO
On-Page SEO refers to the tasks that take place on your website. Typically, this involves updating your website to include the specific keywords that your potential clients use to search for the specific service or product that you provide.
Some common on-page SEO tasks include;
Keyword Research – Discovering the keywords that your audience is using to find businesses like yours (and your competitors), and using these keywords in your website content.
Writing Blog Posts – Publishing regular, high-value content that informs your readers about what you do and answers any questions that they may have.
Creating Landing Pages – Writing SEO-friendly content that attracts traffic and turns your website visitors into new customers.
Heading Tags – Updating the headings on your web pages to include keywords.
Title Tags – Improving the titles used in your content to include keywords.
Meta Descriptions – Writing optimized descriptions of your web pages that tell visitors (and Google) what your content is about.
Image optimization – Making sure your images load quickly, display correctly, and contain your focus keywords in the image alt text.
Internal linking – Adding links between the various pages and blog posts on your website to help both Google and human visitors understand and navigate your site.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to the actions that take place on other websites that either link to or mention your site. Google uses these signals to understand more about your website. The aim is to be seen as a relevant and authoritative website in your chosen niche so that Google will rank you at the top of the search results.
Some common off-page SEO tasks include;
Link Building – Getting other websites to link to your website, particularly if they are respected, authoritative websites that cover the same topics as your website.
Directory Listings – Listing your business in relevant and respected online industry directories (the BWB Destination Wedding Directory is a great example!)
Citation Audits – Ensuring that your business information is correctly listed in all locations where it appears on the web, such as Google My Business, business directory listings, social media profiles, etc.
Brand Mentions – Searching for online mentions of your brand or business that don’t currently link back to your website, and asking the site owner to link to you.
Posting to Social Media – Posting your latest work to social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest, to get your work in front of a larger audience and draw these visitors back to your own website where they can learn more about you.
Collecting Reviews – Encouraging your past clients to share their positive experiences of working with you on online review platforms such as Google My Business, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and other review websites. It’s also important to capture and address any bad client experiences before they are shared online.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to how well your website functions. The aim is to ensure that your site loads quickly, displays properly, is free from errors, and provides a good user experience to your visitors.
Sites that don’t provide a good user experience cause your visitors to click away to other websites, and they are also ranked lower in the search results.
Some common technical tasks include;
Improving Site speed – Making sure that your site loads quickly (under 2 seconds is ideal)
Ensuring Mobile-friendliness – Making sure that your site displays correctly on all devices, including mobile phones and tablets.
Improving your website structure – Ensuring that both human visitors and search engines can easily navigate around your site and that all web pages on your site are linked in a logical manner
Fixing Broken Links – If users do land on a “broken” page on your site, they must be directed to the most relevant or updated content rather than receiving an error message.
Can I Do My Own Wedding SEO?
Absolutely, although some tasks are more advanced than others and may require some knowledge of web development or coding.
Typically, the more technical SEO tasks such as improving site speed or mobile optimization are best handled by an experienced SEO professional. While many on-site tasks such as writing blog posts and adding keywords to your website are easy to implement, once you know how. If you are prepared to invest a little time to understand how SEO works and make some time to implement these changes to your website, you can certainly expect to see an improvement in the quantity and quality of traffic that your website receives from potential clients.
Are You Ready To Start Showing Up On Google?
The Bliss Digital Web Blog is a great place to learn more about Wedding SEO, and our newsletter is also a fantastic source of advice, answers to common SEO questions, and news on the latest developments in the SEO world, so be sure to sign up HERE.
Or, if you’re simply too busy working on your craft and you’d prefer to leave your SEO to the experts, we can absolutely help you.
Whether you’re just looking for a little bit of help to figure out some blog topic ideas, or if you’re looking for a fully-managed, completely hands-off SEO campaign, we’d love to hear from you. All of our services were created specifically for wedding professionals, so take a look at our Services page to see all of the ways that we can work together.
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