Local SEO for Your Wedding Planning Business: How to Get More Leads from Local Organic Searches

Typically, wedding planners work locally. Owning a wedding planning business (even if you’re the only employee) is a great way to share your passion for love, planning, and helping others have the best “big day” possible. However, you can’t rely on passion to get your business discovered. That’s where local SEO comes in. 

Local SEO for wedding planners is a critical part of marketing and outreach. It’s part of the greater optimization strategy that embraces using keywords and building your online reputation to create a sense of authority for your brand. This will ensure that your business is more likely to be returned in results on the SERP (search engine results page) and that local couples can easily find you when they need a quality wedding planner. 

What is local SEO? 

The effort of local optimization is to improve the visibility for a local business. This is done using best practices for local SEO to ensure that businesses improve their organic traffic. Search engines may also look for local content, links, and social profiles to help gather more information and deliver the most relevant results to the user. Therefore, it is going to be up to your organization to optimize your local SEO so that you become part of those results. 

Local SEO tips and insight 

Your local SEO strategy should be a branch of your larger SEO plan that includes all the different aspects of optimization that need to be addressed. Just as it is important to use the right keywords and get quality links for traditional SEO, it is important to do the same for local searches. Here are some of the best practices and tips to keep in mind. 

Create local content

Content is still king in the marketing world and the case holds true with local SEO. You need to take the time to create value-added content for your audience based on your location. You can use local keywords such as “City” + Wedding Planner, for one example, but don’t just start making up keywords. Do your homework and find out which local keywords are ranking. Then, optimize for those. 

You should create local content both on your website and elsewhere online. Consider submitting guest blogs, joining local forums or business directories, and so forth. Any content or connection that can let people know you are local to them will help boost your rankings. 

Optimize your Google Business Profile

Formerly known as Google My Business, this profile is a must-have for any local business. You can’t just sign up and create a profile, either. You need to fill it out completely, optimize it like the rest of your content, and make sure that all the information is correct and consistent. If you have different information about your business in different places, that could cause issues. 

We’ll cover more on consistency in your listings below. For now, just understand that you need to maximize your Google profile to appease the local search gods. 

Perform an SEO audit

Instead of scrapping your existing content, why not perform an audit on the content that’s out there? You can use an SEO audit to check through all of your existing blogs, website content, and any other online presence to ensure that you’re optimizing for the right keywords, including local ones. 

SEO auditing tools are available to assist with this—you don’t have to start scouring the Internet and making notes of all the content and listings you have floating around out there. Even better, you can partner with a marketing team that can handle all of the SEO auditing and local optimization for you. 

Engage on social media 

Part of your local search ranking is based on your engagement and how personable your business is towards its customers and potential customers. You need to create social media profiles and make sure that they’re engaged with regularly. Share posts and specials, answer questions, get involved in other groups, and so forth. Google looks kindly at businesses that commit to being social brands first. 

Check your NAP 

This might be one of the most overlooked, and yet most damaging things, for your local SEO. Your name, address, and phone number (NAP) need to be identical on every single listing. From your website to social media to event planner forums and directories, there cannot be one single variation in your contact details, or it could negatively impact your optimization efforts. 

Optimize everything 

You can’t just optimize the new content that you create and put your business on directory listings. You have to optimize every single aspect of your on-page and off-page SEO efforts, including meta tags, titles, descriptions, headers, URLs, and more. Use local keywords where you can and keep URLs simple to help boost your likelihood of getting results. 

Design a mobile-first website 

Today’s customers are performing mobile searches for local needs. As many as 46% of all Google searches have local intent, which means that people want to be able to find your business on the go. Make sure that your wedding planning website is mobile-friendly and agile so that it renders easily on any device. This is going to make the user experience better and also boost your SEO. 

And finally, consider a partnership with Smith.ai to help your outreach and field all the leads

We know that you’re busy running a business. While getting more interest is the goal, you might not yet have the means to deal with all those leads. That’s what the virtual receptionists at Smith.ai can do for your wedding planning business, from offering a 24/7 answering service to ensure that you never miss an opportunity to handling lead intake, scheduling, and even the outreach campaigns that you’re using to drum up new leads. 

To learn more, schedule a consultation to discuss what the 24/7 virtual receptionists at Smith.ai can do for your wedding planning business. You can also reach us at hello@smith.ai.

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