More than ever, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical in order to attract couples to your wedding website. The fact is that even if you invest time and money in creating a beautiful website, all of your efforts may be in vain without proper SEO, as your wedding website won’t rank on search engine results pages (SERPs for short). Proper SEO is then more critical than ever to the overall success of your website, as most couples will start with a Google search when looking for vendors for their big day. 

However, considering that SEO is constantly changing, it can feel overwhelming trying to ensure that your wedding website is properly optimized to attract customers. In fact, if you are relying on SEO strategies you learned years ago, you may actually be doing more harm than good, as outdated tactics such as keyword stuffing can actually negatively affect SEO. It is then essential to the success of your website that you stay up-to-date on the latest optimization strategies. To help ensure that your wedding website is actually reaching its intended audience and bringing in organic traffic, here is a look at a few simple steps that you can take to optimize your Wedding website search engine optimization.

Update Your Content Regularly

While having quality content on your wedding website is critical to SEO, it is just as critical that you keep this content updated. Adding new content to your website regularly helps show search engines that your website is relevant and is trying to provide readers with value. Regularly updating your website with fresh content on a set schedule should then be a key component of your SEO strategy. 

While it can be difficult as a business owner to find the time to create new content for your website, it is critical for SEO that you try to incorporate regular blogging into your schedule. Adding new content once a week or so will ensure that readers keep coming back, boosting your SERP ratings. When trying to figure out what you should blog about, think about the most common questions you answer on a regular basis. You can then turn these questions into guides and how-to blogs couples can look to for answers when making important decisions about their big day.  

Produce Long, Value-Rich Content

In order to ensure that your wedding website ranks highly on search engines, you also need to make a point of creating long-form content that provides value to readers. Recent data has shown that long-form content is more popular than ever, with content over 3,000 words getting significantly more traffic and shares than short-form content. While this does not mean that all of your blogs have to be this long, your goal should be to create content that is at least 1,000 words long. If you are blogging about a wedding and will be incorporating a lot of pictures a shorter blog may be fine, but you should never post a blog that is less than 300 words, as this can negatively impact SEO. 

In addition to being long, your content should also provide value to readers, as your goal should be to ensure that people stay and read an entire blog post on your website. The more time people spend on a page, the more likely it is that your wedding business will rank highly on search engines. You then want to ensure that you are providing scannable, value-rich content that will keep readers engaged until they reach the end of the page. Making sure that your paragraphs are shorter, and breaking up content with pictures, are great ways to keep readers engaged with your blog.   

Make Sure that Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

If your wedding website hasn’t seen an overhaul in a while and it is not mobile-friendly, this is a critical SEO mistake. The fact is that more people than ever are accessing the internet solely from mobile devices, with an estimated 75% of internet users expected to access the internet solely via mobile devices by 2025. Thusly, if your website is not easy to use on mobile devices, you could be losing a significant portion of your potential viewership to increased bounce rates. 

Not only will a website that isn’t mobile-friendly turn off a large number of couples, but it will also negatively impact your SEO, making your website harder to find. What many businesses do not realize is that Google has been using mobile-first indexing since 2019. This means that the search engine looks primarily at a website’s mobile version when ranking content, as this is considered to be the primary version. 

If your website is not optimized for use on mobile devices, this could then have a serious negative impact on your Google ranking. Fortunately, Google provides tools that make it easy for businesses to find problems with their mobile website and find solutions to improve their website’s usability and SEO.     

Improve Your Website’s Speed

Also critical to both SEO and conversions is your website’s page speed. The fact is that when someone visits a website and a page takes forever to load, they are likely to press the back button and find another website to use rather than wait for yours to load. This means that if your wedding website is slow and outdated, you could be losing out on valuable business. Additionally, page speed is a significant factor Google takes into consideration when ranking websites, so having slow load speeds could also hurt your SEO ranking. If your website is slow, it is then imperative that you make taking steps to improve page speed a part of your SEO strategy. 

While SEO can be confusing at first, taking the time to optimize your wedding website for search engines is critical in order to improve your rankings and bring more couples to your website. Feel free to contact us to learn about additional steps that you can take to improve your website’s SEO, as well as to find out how we can help you optimize your wedding website.