SEO for Wedding Professionals: Everything You Need to Know
You’ve done the research. Sifted through the articles, podcasts, and video trainings. You’ve listened to seasoned professionals talk all about it.
There is infinite information about it on the internet. But you have a finite amount of time to learn and apply.
And no one is talking about how SEO applies to you, a wedding professional.
Let’s put a stop to that trend right now. I’m going to walk you through everything you need to know about implementing SEO for your wedding business, starting with your website.
Here’s all the stuff you need and none of the crap you don’t. Let’s start with the obvious – the one thing you should know no matter how familiar you are with SEO.
All wedding pros need to know SEO.
Let me preface with this: I am not an SEO expert. I’m a professional copywriter and content marketing strategist. But I have done my research. And I’ve been able to put in place what I’ve learned in my own business with visible results.
When I started my business, I used my SEO knowledge to bring my website to the 4th page in my first month of going live. I know, that doesn’t seem like a huge accomplishment, but in the world of SEO, it’s great progress. Unfortunately, SEO won’t transform your website’s visibility overnight. But trust me, the results are worth the wait.
Before we get into the basics, I want to give you the two resources that helped me when I was first learning about SEO. They come from industry experts Neil Patel and Brian Dean.
Neil’s SEO Unlocked Training comes in bite-sized pieces, so you can tailor the training to fit your schedule. Personally, I watched 2-3 videos per day, and it took me about two weeks to complete the training. This training isn’t a great place to start if you have no idea what SEO is. Neil moves pretty fast. Before using this resource, I would look at a few articles explaining was SEO is at a basic level.
Brian’s SEO Guide is extensive but worth the read. I would suggest breaking it into sections so you don’t get overwhelmed. He uses a lot of visuals to make things easier to understand. If you’re pressed for time, at least go through the first module. I’d suggest reading the first three. The rest are good information, but not the most important if you’re on a tight schedule.
Here’s the big problem with these resources: they’re not made for wedding professionals. They both explain SEO on a general marketing level. The wedding industry tailors to a much different audience than the marketing industry. They explain how SEO works and why it’s important, which is a great first step. But there’s way too much marketing jargon in them, and they’re not specific enough to be super helpful.
Alright, let's dive deep into the SEO hacks that have helped both myself and my clients in the wedding industry.
What is SEO?
Just in case this resource is your very first introduction to SEO, I’ll give you a brief run-down. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO works to improve your website’s ranking on search engines like Google. It uses strategies that work within Google’s algorithms to help your website rank higher. The higher your ranking, the more people will find your website.
SEO is super important for your business. It doesn’t just help improve your website’s visibility. It can have an overall positive impact on your business in the form of more organic traffic, more leads, an increased ROI, and more social shares.
And it's not just for your website. Social platforms like Pinterest and Instagram also use SEO keyword strategies.
Keywords are single words or phrases used to improve content's ranking for those keywords. If you were a florist, you might use keywords like “wedding florist” or “wedding flowers.” These are common words or phrases that potential clients could search in Google to find you.
You can use strategic keywords to draw your audience on any platform. Learning SEO inherently teaches you the nature of your audience. You can use this knowledge across your entire marketing plan. Keywords are like phrases clients search for and hashtags they follow on social media. If you know what your ideal clients are searching for, you can tailor your marketing plan to fit exactly what they need.
Why wedding pros need to learn SEO
I could go on forever about the benefits of SEO for wedding businesses. For now, let’s just stick to my top 5 (which, by the way, are more than enough to convince you that SEO is the way to go).
It’s free
No, I’m not just talking about education. Although learning SEO is super easy (and free) these days. SEO itself, as a marketing strategy, is also free.
And this is where I hope your interest piques.
Does it take some effort? Yes. Does it take some time? Absolutely. But once you set up your website for SEO, it’s super easy to maintain. The results you’re going to see by optimizing your website far outweigh the time and energy you’re going to put into it.
You get authentic traffic
By using SEO, you have full control over the audience who views your website. This is because you get to pick what keywords you want to rank for. You can use keywords that your ideal client is searching for to help them find you. For example, if your ideal client might has a higher budget, avoid using keywords like “cheap” and “DIY.”
Keywords can also bring you traffic tailored to your services. For example, if you’re a calligrapher specializing in envelope addressing, use keywords specific to that service. Using “wedding calligrapher” might get you traffic, but it will bring you anyone looking for a wedding calligrapher for any reason, not necessarily someone looking for envelope addressing services.
When you use SEO, you can control your leads (to a certain extent, of course). Combined with great website copy, targeted SEO keywords can bring your ideal clients right to your virtual front door.
It works for you 24/7
SEO doesn’t only work after you upload a new piece of content or change the metadata for a webpage. It works 24/7. Any time a person searches for your keywords, it populates your website in the results.
Where it populates depends on how well you integrate SEO strategies. But it populates nonetheless. If you have good website SEO, you’ll be at the top of potential clients' search results at any time of the day, any day of the week. Even while you're sleeping, SEO is bringing you leads.
It’s a long-term investment
I’m not going to harp too long on this – if you’ve read my blogs before, you know how much I value a solid investment. Yeah, you might be putting out what seems like a lot at the beginning, but if it’s a worthwhile investment, your return will be oh so worth it.
SEO is definitely a worthwhile investment. And the best part, remember, is that you’re not investing money. Just your time and energy, which means your ROI will be through the roof.
I want to point something out before we go any further. SEO is a long game. You won’t see results immediately. In fact, most people don’t see results for 2-3 months. That’s because as Google is crawling your website, it’s trying to determine your authenticity.
If your website is brand new or was just updated for the first time in a while, it’s going to take Google a while to trust you. That’s okay. Because once the momentum gets going and you’re getting consistent organic traffic, your rankings will get better.
Google is constantly tweaking the algorithm that finds and analyzes your website. These changes are usually subtle and do not affect your existing SEO. Occasionally, there is a big change that disrupts current SEO strategies.
But SEO isn’t going anywhere. If you put in the work to set up your website properly, the time you invest will be well worth it. As Google makes changes, you can adapt your SEO accordingly. It’s much easier to make small changes every once in a while than to completely redo your website.
It’s a great market research tool
You can use SEO to determine what topics will do well across your marketing strategy, and what topics may only do well on a specific platform. The organic traffic on your website can tell you what keywords are most popular, and what isn’t worth your time.
Engagement tells you if a topic is interesting to your audience. If a blog post has great engagement, use that post to create content on other platforms.
Let's look at an example. Say your best-performing blog post ranked for “wedding calligraphy fonts.” You could turn that post into an Instagram series about different font styles. You could make a video or podcast about choosing the perfect font for your wedding invitations. You could create a quiz about what your favorite font says about you as an opt-in for your email list.
Or you could do all three of these! See how easily you can reuse great topics to create other content?
Once you know what content your audience wants to see, you can recycle keywords and turn them into new and engaging content you know will succeed. This ensures you're spending your time creating content that your audience will value.
You don’t have to recreate all your content to improve website SEO.
One of the most common pushbacks I receive from wedding pros about SEO is the “I’m going to have to scrap all my hard work and start over” rant.
It’s simply not true. There are plenty of ways to improve your website’s SEO without having to create a brand new website. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, start with these.
Fix broken links
Even if you’re not a firm believer in SEO, you should be checking your website for broken links. I do this every 3-6 months. Go through each page of your website and click every link. If a link brings you to an error or “page not found” page, the link is broken. Google can read broken links as spammy, which might lead it to think your content is outdated or unreliable.
Remove any broken links. This might mean you look for an updated URL for the original source, or remove the link entirely. Either option will improve your SEO. If you remove a link entirely, update your content so the missing link isn’t misleading.
Add anchor text
Anchor text is a seamless way to house your links within your text. You should only use bare links in a resources or references list. Anchor text looks like this:
Are you looking for high-quality copywriting services that create consistent, organic leads? If so, contact me.
In the sentences above, I linked to both my services page and my contact form within the text without disruption. Make sure you vary your anchor text. In a long-form piece of content, you might link to the same resource a few times. You want to change the anchor text slightly each time.
Let’s say your link is a free guide. Instead of linking to it every time you write the words “free guide” you could link it to words like "opt-in," "freebie," "free copy," or the title of the guide.
Make sure your anchor text doesn't overwhelm the text. You don’t want to link to the same resource more than once every couple hundred words. Too many of the same links can look suspicious, which will negatively impact your SEO. Be strategic with your link placement and make sure the resources you link to are reliable.
Clean up tags
This one is super important if you have a blog on your website. It might seem fun to add 15 tags for every blog post, but you need to pick your tags strategically. Every time a new tag is created, your website automatically creates a new page to house the content with that tag. If you have a bunch of tags with only one or two blog posts, you’ll have a bunch of pages with very little content on them. This can significantly impact your SEO and cause your Google ranking to lower.
I recommend picking 5-7 general tags that the majority of your content can fall into. When you’re first building your blog, you might have some low content pages, and that’s okay. Once you have enough content, these pages will fill out and you’ll be in the clear.
Re-write or strengthen old content
This is the most time-consuming option on this list. Google is constantly changing its standards for content. A few years ago, blog posts of 300-500 words were normal. Today, 300-500 words is far too short for a blog post.
Look through your existing content and see what could be improved or updated. Maybe you have a blog post about trends that you could update for this month or year. There may be a topic you’d like to elaborate on.
Strengthen your old content by giving it a refresh every once in a while. I generally go through my content 6 months after it’s posted. I check my links and make changes simultaneously to save time. Revamping old content also gives you a break from content creation. Don't have time to write a whole new post? Refresh an old one!
Optimize your images
This one is super important for wedding professionals, especially photographers! Google doesn’t read your images the same way it reads text. If you don’t optimize your images, it can negatively impact your SEO.
There are a few ways you can optimize your images. First, condense your images to make them load faster. Load speed impacts SEO just as much, if not more, than keyword usage does. This is because load speed affects how long people stay on your website. If it takes forever to load, people are not likely to look at it as long. A good load speed is anywhere between 2 and 8 seconds, depending on the platform. Mobile sites need to load faster than desktop sites.
Another way to optimize images is to include alt-text. Alt-text is text that shows up when the image is unavailable or someone who is visually-impaired is interacting with your content. Alt-text increases your website’s accessibility. Having an accessible website makes a great first impression because it lets people know that you conduct your business for all.
Add alt-text to every image you can. Describe the image in as few words as possible, but in a way that is easy to picture. For example, you might rename an image of a couple during their reception to “couple feeding each other cake at wedding reception.”
Lastly, to optimize your images you can rename them using keywords. Instead of a mix of letters and numbers, rename your images using your optimized keywords. Examples of this could be “fall-elopement-new-york” or “mauve-wedding-invitation.” When you use keywords in your file names, it helps Google determine what the image is.
Common SEO mistakes you may be making
Already know everything there is to know about SEO for wedding businesses? Use this section as a checklist to make sure you’re avoiding these common SEO mistakes.
No keyword research
It’s a waste of time to optimize your content for keywords you haven’t researched. Not every keyword is going to do well. Before you write, research potential keywords that fit your topic.
You want to find a balance between volume, or how often a keyword is used, and competition, or how difficult it will be to rank for that keyword. Find keywords with a high volume and low competition for the best results. You can use a tool such as Ubersuggest to do this.
Not having a blog
Google ranks websites higher if they have consistent, high-quality content. You can’t update your website pages all the time. There’s simply not enough changing information. But you can update a blog consistently. That’s why having a blog is one of the best ways to improve the quality of your website.
Gone are the days of copy and paste blog templates. You need to create unique content that outweighs your competitors. More than anything else, your website serves as a funnel for your clients. Today, many people find websites through other platforms such as social media. Your website is not where potential clients are going first.
Having a blog disrupts that trend. If someone uses one of your keywords to search, they will find your website (usually because of your blog). From there, they can check out the other pages of your site. If you don’t have a blog, you take away that direct link between Google search and your website.
Writing for Google instead of your audience
I’ve spent most of this blog talking about optimizing your website for Google. But the one thing you absolutely cannot do is write your content for Google.
Usually, this looks like keyword stuffing – writing long, bulky sentences filled with keywords. Not only can Google tell when you’re doing this, it never reads well for your audience.
Write with your audience first and Google second. If your writing is difficult to read, it doesn’t matter that you’re on the first page of Google. You won’t book any clients. You want your audience to stay on your website, not run away from it.
Not writing enough content
We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king” before. But the quality of your content is largely based on length. Generally, a smaller number of long, high-quality content is better than many short pieces. I go into much more detail about the quality vs. quantity debate in this blog post.
Hubspot found that the ideal blog post is 2100-2400 words [3]. Their definition of ideal is not clearly defined, but they talk a lot about blog posts that rank highly and see consistent engagement. And that word count is just for general content. If you’re looking to generate leads with a specific piece of content, Hubspot says the ideal length shoots up to 2,500 words [3].
While length varies according to industry, there’s no quantifiable data for the wedding industry, so we’ll just have to go along with marketing trends. Do your best to stay within these ranges and your content is likely to perform well.
Not tracking and updating your strategy
Industry trends are constantly changing. The same goes for marketing trends. To stay relevant and reliable, you need to keep an eye on your content and your competitors.
There are many technologies that you can use to track engagement and popularity. Some of these include Google Analytics, Ubersuggest, and your website’s internal analytics software. I use Squarespace’s analytics as well as Ubersuggest for my website. I’ve found using a combination gives me a fuller picture than just one.
So there you go. You have all the information you need to incorporate SEO successfully. Remember, the goal is not to become an SEO expert. You don’t have time for that. All you need are the basics, which I’ve outlined here. Implement them and you’ll be well on your way to Google’s #1 spot.
If you have any questions on your SEO journey, feel free to email me at emily@emilydilworthcreative.com or send me a DM on Instagram. I’d be happy to chat with you!
Resources:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-long-should-your-blog-posts-be-faq
