Frustrated you’re not getting more traffic to your website?
With an increasing number of people who use the internet for selling their services and products, search engine optimization (SEO) is a term which you might have heard being thrown around more and more by marketing experts. You may wonder, “What does this have to do with wedding planning?”
BUT… SEO is not just for marketing experts!
By understanding the basics of SEO, ANYONE has the power to grow their brand profile and book more brides like this…
photo credit: Cory Ryan Photography, wedding planner: The Simplifiers
Put simply, SEO is the process of modifying a website to match the keywords that your potential consumers enter into search engines like Google and Bing.
When SEO is done correctly, your page will appear higher up the search rankings.
This is important as the majority of search engine users click on one of the top five suggestions. Therefore, if you are in this top five, it will result in more targeted traffic being driven to your website! Simple.
The basics
Whenever you search something on a search engine such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. the order in which the results are displayed are calculated by complex algorithms (don’t worry, this won’t turn into a math lesson!) These algorithms assess a number of factors about your website in order to decide how high up the rankings your page deserves to be.
This information about your site is recorded by ‘spiders’. A spider is a piece of software that crawls the internet, following links while indexing all readable content and adding it to search engine databases.
SEO focuses on:
- Ensuring that search engine spiders are directed to your page as much as possible
- When they get to your site, they are able to find this content easily.
Now you know how it works, it’s easy to start putting some basic SEO into practice…
- Make sure your URLs are search engine friendly by keeping it simple and including keywords, ensuring that everyone knows what to expect from the page. You can find more information on how to structure URLs here.
- Keywords aren’t only important in web domains. Appropriate keywords should also be included throughout the website, in titles, page headers and content. HOWEVER, be careful not to overuse keywords, as spiders as programmed to ignore sites that are guilty of ‘keyword-stuffing’.
- Links are important as they direct spiders to your page – therefore it is essential to have a variety of external and internal links to take them there. As links from external pages are more difficult to come by, they are given more ranking power. Though, it is still beneficial to have internal links on your website in order to drive traffic to individual pages.
- Most SEO sites recommend that content is king. This is very true, a website which is constantly updated with fresh, new and original content is considered favorable by search engines, as well as giving website users a reason to keep coming back to your blog and website. We recommend empowering your interns to write blog content for your firm, maybe design trends or vendor spotlight posts!
These are just few SEO tips to start you off in your quest to book more brides…
In the following weeks, we will look in a bit more detail about aspects specific to wedding planners, including how you can use images to boost your SEO. In the meantime, Google have provided a starter guide for SEO, so you can find out some more tips to help you boost your site, straight from the horse’s (or spider’s) mouth!