What your designer may have missed.
Design by Rebecca Rose Events. Photo by Nancy Ray.
“Engagement season” refers to the period of time each year when the most wedding proposals happen. In the United States, it runs from Thanksgiving (fourth Thursday of November) until Valentine’s Day. For many other locations, it starts just a few weeks later, going from around Christmas to Valentine’s Day.
The most popular days for engagements are currently Christmas day, Valentine’s day, New Year’s Eve, Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, and New Year’s day – in that order.
Just like most good publicists will start prepping and pitching their clients’ Christmas campaigns in early Summer, wedding pros’ prep for engagement/proposal season should ideally already be underway. However, if you, like almost every wedding business owner, have been juggling a zillion things, the next best time to start is now.
For the month of October, I’m going to be mostly discussing the things you can do get your business ready so that yours can be the company they most love once the ring is on their finger.
One of the most overlooked aspects of wedding SEO is your website and blog’s photos. You’ve nailed the copy, you blog quality posts consistently, yet your photos may be named in a way that doesn’t help you get found by potential clients at all.
Since most brides and grooms will use Google to search for wedding pros to interview and for wedding ideas to add to Pinterest, your photos should be titled with the search terms that reflect what you do and what you want your brand to be known for.
To do this, think of the words a potential client would type into Google at the beginning of their search when they know nothing about wedding planning yet. Name your photos that. If you are focused on your local area, include local cities and landmarks. If you’re focused on destination weddings, include the far-flung places you’ve worked. Keep the titles short yet descriptive – don’t overstuff keywords and stay away from using industry jargon (“tablescape,” “creative partners,” “month of coordination,” etc.)
Photo titles that are beneficial for SEO:
blue and white wedding decorations (color combos get searched a ton, so pay attention to what is depicted in each photo you post)
affordable wedding venue in Houston
best wedding cake in Des Moines
romantic luxury resort for honeymoon in Capetown
modern wedding bouquet ideas (variations of ‘wedding ideas’ are popular search terms for Google, while variations of ‘wedding inspo’ get searched more on Instagram)
Photo titles that may be helpful for your behind-the-scenes organization, but are NOT beneficial for SEO:
IMG021418
JohnSally-106
rebrandheaderimage1
Headshot Color WebRes
ValentinesPromo2020
In many cases, you will need to rename your photos and re-upload them to your site in order to make the changes. You cannot just edit the alt text in Squarespace, Wordpress, Showit or whichever web software you use (though you should definitely fill these out, too!). If you had a web designer create your site, you should still double check that everything is good to go – many are not well-versed in SEO and may have overlooked your photos even though they optimized the rest.
Yes, this type of admin work can be tedious, but it’s not difficult, and it WILL be worth it.
Splendid Pro Tip: Once you’ve edited your photo titles and re-uploaded the images to your site, submit your pages to Google Search Console, part of Google Webmaster Tools. This will tell Google that you’ve made changes so they know to re-crawl and re-index your site, allowing your new terms to show up in search results more quickly.
