4 Ways to Improve Your Weddings Website & Online Reputation 

Now’s the time to turn your attention to online marketing for your wedding business. Over the last few months, we’ve seen the wedding industry (amongst many others) take quite the hit due to COVID-19. You’ve spent weeks, even months creating some brilliant new concepts to help make a little income to keep your family and business afloat but now’s the time to turn your attention back to your passion; the business.

We’re sharing 4 easy and effective ways to improve your website and online reputation to help ensure your website is in the best condition to represent you and attract new enquiries. The best news, whilst money is a bit tight, all these recommendations can be actioned completely free.

1) Working on your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

As couples start to look for venues and suppliers for up and coming wedding celebrations, you need to ensure they can find your business on search engines like Google. Through using SEO practices, you can improve your websites ranking position and generate more organic traffic. The most important thing you need to implement immediately is keyword optimisation. Search engines and users need to understand what you have to offer instantly. Here are two key places you need to describe your business for effective SEO:

• Title Tag & Meta Description

Title tags are displayed on SERPs as the clickable headline and meta descriptions are the short descriptive paragraphs underneath.

Each page on your website can have its own title tag and meta description, the most important one being your home page which sets the theme for your entire site. If your title tag currently includes the word ‘Home’ or is simply the name of your business, this should be updates, quick! Check your title tag using this tool.
Title tags are displayed on SERPs as the clickable headline and meta descriptions are the short descriptive paragraphs underneath.

Take a deep breath and think about how users should be discovering your website when they search online. This will guide your keyword research to give you a better idea of what users are searching most frequently. Are you a ‘wedding venue in West Sussex’, ‘castle wedding venue’, ‘wedding florist in Oxford’, ‘wedding photographer in London’ or do you sell ‘rustic wedding decorations’ or ‘bespoke wedding invitations’? These are all examples of keywords that users may search for to find business like you.

Plan out the title tag and meta description for every page on the website, it’s important to be accurate and concise about what the page, service or product is or offers. Once you’ve planned the best keywords to optimise those pages for you can apply them to the site. Whether you use WordPress, Wix, Squarespace most CMS (content management systems) will easily allow you to apply your optimisation.

• Page Content

It goes without saying your website should show off exactly what you do but you’d be surprised just how many websites do not include the keywords users are searching for in the content of their site. Take this opportunity to review your content:

• Does it mention the keywords you’ve been researching, including the locations you service?
• Does your website provide enough detail to give a true account of just how fabulous your business is?
• When was the content last updated? Search engines love to see a regularly maintained site. Whether your adding some more information, changing images, adding a new blog post – these are all great signs that your website deserves to rank.

If your stuck on what content you should be including on your website, take a look at some competitors from search engines using the terms you’ve found from keyword research. The competitors that rank highest for these keywords will likely have good quality content to inspire you.

WARNING: Never copy content, this is a BIG no, no for SEO.

You’ll come across some great content and think it would sound great on your website but it’s no use copy and pasting if your aim is to improve your SEO. In fact, your website may be penalised if search engines think you’ve copied content. Write your own, unique content or ask for some help, there are some really great content creators out there.

2) Improve site speed

What’s worse than waiting for a website to load? Staring at a blank screen or watching an image appear bit by bit. This is no good. A recent study found

53% of mobile site visits were abandoned if a page took longer than 3 seconds to load.

That’s a huge about of potential customers that just moved on because your website was too slow. The wedding industry is beautiful and you probably have a huge number of images of your website showing off your business; but these images may be the leading cause in slow website speeds. Large file sizes are a common issue but can so easily be resolved. Tool like PageSpeed Insights by Google will tell you exactly how long it takes for your page to properly load and the issues with it, including those culprit images. If you’re a dab hand at photoshop you’ll be able to resize your images and reduce the file size, often without compromising the quality. If you’ve never touched it in your life, don’t fear, there are free online tools which will help to reduce the file size of an image.

Remember to check every page on your website starting with the most popular pages (home, service, about us, gallery etc) and recheck once you’ve changed the images for the new file size. If your page still loads in over 3 seconds, consider asking a professional for help. They’ll be able to run a test and advise you of the main issues which may be your hosting, the amount of resources that need to load, or your website may be outdated with excess code which will be slowing down its performance.

3) Building authority to your site with new links

Backlinks are invaluable to building your website’s authority with search engines. Links pointing from another website to yours is like a signal that others vouch for your content. Over the years this backlink building had become a highly spammed SEO technique and as Google develops its algorithms any link building activity must be done with extreme caution. Learn more about backlinks here.

One of the most effective ways to increase the number of backlinks to your site is to conduct some research into unliked mentions. Using this strategy, you’ll be able to find websites which may have referenced your services or product but have not included a link to your website. The great news is the website owner has already made a reference to your business, so take the opportunity to ask the website owner to link to your website help gain that valuable website authority boost.

4) Improving Your Online Reputation

Google My Business (GMB) Optimisation & Reviews

Google My Business, is absolutely fundamental to your business, especially if you’re in a set location or you offer services in a specific area. GMB is a profile of your business on the biggest search engine. If well optimised, you can be found at the top of search engine results with instant visibility to images, reviews from customers, contact information, descriptions of your offerings and more.

Hopefully, you’ve already claimed your listing, have a few images and started to collect reviews, but there’s so much more you can do. At the minimum, you should be ensuring your GMB listing:

• Includes the correct contact details – name, address, phone number and website.
• Has a range of images/videos that showcase your offerings and ideally include your store front or venue and your team. Add more images regularly to keep everything up to date.
• Includes a description of your offerings, and don’t forget to include those keywords you researched earlier! There are also opportunities to add more in-depth descriptions about the services offered.
• Ask for and collect reviews as frequently as possible. Once you’ve received them, reply to your customers to give thanks. There is no such thing as too many good reviews and these are invaluable to your local ranking position.
• Add featured posts to your listing including promotional activity.

Take a look here for more ways to optimise your Google My Business listing.

We’ve teamed up with some great online marketing agencies who’ve already help us improve our website performance but are also offering free initial consultations and GMB health checks. Please contact sara@naturallyrusticweddings.co.uk for more information.