Marketing Your Wedding Venue Series by VenueApp : Search Engine Optimization

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Well, there are a number of effective ways to broadcast your brand. In VenueApp’s new marketing series, we’re going to show you how to make the best use of the most promising strategies. Our series will focus on topics like Search Engine Optimization, Google AdWords, print, bridal and wedding shows, blogging, Facebook, newsletters, video, industry alliances, and, of course, the mobile applications that tie all of these strategies together. It’s an expert marketing series that we hope will become your wedding venue’s roadmap to success.

In this first installment of our new marketing series, we’re going to talk about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. SEO refers to the techniques that make your wedding venue show up near the top of a Google search. Since Google is the largest player in the search sector, and since so many of today's brides and grooms using Google to find wedding venues, we need to start here.

First, remember that Search Engine Optimization is a marathon, not a sprint. Successful SEO always begins with a site that applies good practices, meaning the site isn’t laden with hidden words and phrases than can cause search engines to ban your site.

Now, without further ado, here are The 5 Things You Can Do Today to Improve Your SEO:

1. Submit Your Site to Google: This may seem pretty obvious, but many people are even accessing Google’s free webmaster services. You can submit to Google Local, Bing and Yahoo, too. 2. Develop Your Key Word Strategy: Decide the search terms you want your venue to be associated with by thinking about what your customers are likely to Google online. Typical search terms might be the city or state where your business is located and your specific industry. (For example, “Miami wedding venue” or “New York wedding locations.”) It might be difficult to compete in search engines with broad terms and locations, so try and use terms that are specific and local. Refer to Google’s search-based keyword tool for help. 3. Consider Your Site Title: Your site title should reflect the key terms that you want to be searched for. The title should be minimal, specific, and straightforward. Search engines compare your site title to what people search for and pull you up that way. 4. Capitalize On Your Site Description: Your site description should relate to what you display on your site. Use your key terms in the beginning of the description. This is your chance to convince a searcher to click on your site instead of the others the search engine pulls up. That’s because the site description will most likely be the snippet included with your listing that Google displays on the results page. 5. Analyze Your Results: Use Google Analytics to measure your results. These analytics will allow you to see how people arrive at your site, what pages they view, how long they stay, which pages they leave, and which search terms brought them to your site. Understanding this information will help you make small adjustments to your strategy that can make a big difference.

Bonus: An anatomy of a Google search result for French’s Point Since your site should allow you control over its title and description in your CMS, you should easily be able to change these as your strategy unfolds. The following is a break-down of the successful SEO strategy for the wedding venue French’s Point in Stockton Springs, Maine.

wedding venue seo

  • Website title: Venue Wedding in Maine Destination Locations: Wedding in Maine...
  • Website: http://www.fpmaine.com.
  • Key words: venue, Maine, wedding, destination, wedding in Maine, Maine wedding locations, ME reception, destination wedding venues, Maine wedding venue, Maine…
  • Titling the site: For this venue, “Venue Wedding in Maine Destination Locations: Wedding in Maine,” is the website’s title. French’s Point has their key term listed first, Venue Maine Wedding, to maximize searchability.
  • Describing the site: For French’s Point, we plugged in the description, “Venue Maine wedding destination, wedding in Maine, Maine wedding locations, ME reception, destination wedding venues, Maine wedding venue, Maine...” Again, notice the top search terms are placed at the beginning of the description.

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