For many wedding businesses, one of the most important ways to drive leads to your contact form is through website traffic. Many people want to appear on Google’s first page for their desired keyword, but the road to get there can take time, depending on the competition of the keyword they choose.
Because your wedding business will likely require localized website traffic, it’s a good idea to start learning the fundamentals of SEO as soon as possible.
Wedding Supplies Local SEO Techniques and Strategies
SEO professionals use the following SEO techniques and strategies:
- Know Your Keywords
- Include Keywords in Your Website Page Titles
- Make Changes to Your Meta Descriptions
- Focus on Your Links
- Add Alt Tags to Your Imagery
Let’s go over each step each one by one:
Know Your Keywords
The first step is determining which keywords are relevant to your industry and target audience. Knowing who you’re trying to reach and what services you offer, you can start experimenting with different keywords to see which will yield the best results.
Begin your SEO keyword research by going to Google and typing key phrases that you believe prospective clients are looking for. As a florist in Germany, you might type in “Germany floral design,” but you’ll soon discover that “Germany wedding florist” gives you the best chance of ranking. It varies by industry, but after experimenting with the Google search function, you can look at tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to learn more about how much competition there is for your keyword, how many people search for it each month, and more.
Include Keywords in Your Website Page Titles
Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords, you can begin incorporating them into the titles of your website’s pages. Because this is typically the first thing a visitor sees when searching for a solution on Google, you must make a statement. You can be clever and use all caps in your website page title to catch their attention. Instead, use clear and concise keywords in your titles to inform visitors exactly what they will find inside.
Suppose you are a wedding invitation designer who only works with clients in Asheville, NC. In that case, you may want to have a page title like “[Your Name Here]: Asheville Custom Wedding Invitation Designer,” while other pages may speak to your design style, process or approach, and other keywords you can include.
Make Changes to Your Meta Descriptions
After you’ve updated your website page titles and ensured that they contain a high-value keyword, you can begin to write a meta description for each page. When considering how to write your meta description, remember that most SEO experts recommend keeping it between 120 and 150 characters. See? Isn’t that a short time?
You’ll want to use these characters wisely, just like a tweet on Twitter. Try to include specifics about your location, who you serve with your business, what you offer, and anything else that feels relevant to the page as you write your meta descriptions.
Assume you are a wedding planner looking to optimize the page on your website about your day-of-coordinating services. You won’t need to include keywords related to your other services (such as event design or styling) because you want to focus on the most relevant keyword.
Then, optimize each meta description to contain the same keywords as your page title but with more information about what someone will find when they click your page.
Focus on Your Links
You’ll want to be aware of a few different linking strategies in terms of SEO. The former gives you some control over the outcome, while the latter does not. Both will impact your SEO, so let’s look at them separately.
When you link to other website pages within your website, you are increasing the value of each page. You’ll notice me naturally linking to other blog posts I’ve written. Google interprets this as you providing additional educational resources to your readers that are of high value.
You have less control over external linking, which is still very important. Someone else linking to a page on your website or a blog post is what it means. If it is a reputable website, this can help your SEO, but if it is a spammy website, it can hurt your SEO.
The same is true for email requests from unknown people offering you money in exchange for a link to their website. It may appear flattering, but they most likely need a high-quality website if they pay for links. It is a bad SEO practice, so stick to the old-fashioned way of connecting: one-on-one conversations on social media and beyond.
Add Alt Tags to Your Imagery
It is especially important if you are a wedding photographer! When you upload an image to your website, customize its alt tag. If you’re wondering what an alt tag is, it’s a small snippet of text that informs search engine bots about the photo. It is because bots cannot see your photograph. Instead, what you write in the alt tag determines what the photo is.
One common misconception about alt tags is that they should repeatedly fill with the same keywords. It could be a better SEO practice because creating unique alt tags for each photo is preferable. Because no two photos are alike, your alt tags should also be unique.
A good way to do this is to take a collection of photos you might want to include in a recap blog post and create separate alt tags for each photo. You’ll write something different if one of the photos is a sunset portrait of the bride and groom and another is a photo of the bridal party striking a pose. Include your keywords as much as possible in the imagery without trying to optimize for too many of them. Then you’ll be on the verge of keyword stuffing.