Why SEO?

Search Engine Optimization is important for wedding venues to increase their online visibility, attract the right clients and can give a clear competitive advantage. Local search has become an ever more important category with a 900% increase in such searches over the last two years according to hubspot. Tapping in to this market can provide a strong boost to your sales and marketing efforts and today we are going to give a few tips for wedding venues to get you going.

What is SEO

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the art of increasing your ranking on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc. The goal is to find keywords that your customers are searching for and then create content around those keywords so that when they search your website and venue bubble up to the top. SEO breaks down into three distinct categories:

On Page SEO

This is where you add the keywords your are targeting to your website. You want to add them to the home page but you are also going to want specific pages dedicated to keywords that you have researched and you can then create blog posts or specific pages around those keywords dedicating content to them.

Off page SEO

A major part of search engine algorithms for ranking sites revolves around backlinks or links that other websites have that come back to your own website. Search engines consider each of these backlinks as a kind of vote. If another site is willing to link to you that must mean you have good quality content and the search engines want to put good quality content in front of their users. The process of getting backlinks to your site is called off page seo.

Technical SEO

Search engines also use other factors to help rank websites in their search results. Some of these include the speed at which the page loads, whether you have broken links or errors on the site, the structure of the site and whether that is easy for the search engine's robots to crawl and index the content on your site.

All three of these pieces work together to tgive the search engines an overall view of the quality of your site the relevance of its content to whatever the user is searching for. It is important in your SEO strategy to address each of these pieces of the SEO puzzle.

It starts with your website

Your website is the unsung hero of this process. It is the foundation upon which the rest of you SEO strategy is built. Websites don't always get a lot of love because they can be expensive and the return isn't always easy to see right away but it is where everything starts.

For a wedding venue (or really any wedding vendor) you want to start with a strong technical base. A website that is fast is a good start. Then build from there. On your homepage you want to target your most important keywords in the title of the page and the first head or H1 tag of the html of the website. For a wedding venue you will almost always want to target local keywards such as Wedding Venue in [whatever location]. Some keyword research can be very helpful here. Do brides search more often for "Beautiful Wedding Venue in [whatever location]" or do they search for "Cheap Wedding Venue in [whatever location]" or "Luxury Wedding Venue in [whatever location]". Each of these positions your venue in a different way and answering how you want your venue to be positioned and then aligning that with your ideal clients is important.

Keyword Research

Finding the right keywords your clients use is an important part of this process. As mentioned above you want to align the keywords on your website to those used by your ideal client. Further than this though you will find that your clients are searching for more than just a wedding venue. As a bride they are probably search for all kinds of things related to the wedding venue. For instance maybe they are searching for help with seating arrangements at the reception or food trucks that work in the local area. All of these extra things that your clients are search for are opportunities to provide some extra value to your clients and in the process draw them in to your website.

For instance, a blog post on top food trucks in the area may be very helpful to your potential couples and once they reach your site looking for this information they may then keep your venue in mind as they work on planning their wedding. What is important here though is that you find what they are searching for and tailor content to those searches. If you do this correctly you will find a lot of traffic being generated to your site which can then turn into good leads.

There are many tools online to look at keyword trends two of the most popular are SEMRush and Ahrefs. These are both very good and I have used them both but they are also quite expensive. There are free tools too such as the Google Keyword Planner but honestly I find them of limited use as it can be difficult to tell which keywords are worth your time. Personally, I have recently found and like very much KeySearch. It is much cheaper than some other options and gives really good information. We have no affiliation with them so not trying to sell it or anything but I just think it is the best bang for the buck at the moment.

Create Content

Once you have found the keywords you want to rank for it is time to create some engaging content around them. Blogging on a regular basis is a good way to do this. By creating engaging blog posts you are providng concrete value to potential clients and that in turn will drive more of them to your site. Beyond blog posts, creating content such as case studies and wedding features can be other ways to incorporate keywords into your business. Other ideas include video tutorials or behind-the-scenes clips of events at your venue to create further engagement.

The important part of all of this is to tie your content in to keywords that you know clients are searching for. Then make relevant content around those keywords and use that to bring more and more traffic to your business.

Build Backlinks To Your Content

Once your content is creaated search engines will crawl and index it. However, depending on the difficulty of the keywords you are trying to rank for you will also need to attempt to build backlinks back to that content. There are several ways to do this including reaching out to media, cross posting on social media, posting to directories etc. One good way, which can work very well for venues especially, is to curate a list of "Top [whatever] in your area" i.e. "Top Wedding Photographers in Virginia" Then reach out to those photographers and see if they will link back to you. Many times they will be happy to if they are already mentioned positively in an article.

Closing

SEO for wedding venues is a marathon not a sprint. If you are like me I like to dive headfirst in to something and then the flame will die out and I want to move on to the next thing. With this you really can't do that. You have to just keep generating new content. Do it on a regular basis and keep focusing on data driven keywords to drive that traffic. Eventually, the traffic will continue to come in and clients will start booking. You just have to trust the process - which admitedly isn't so easy all of the time.