As the owner of a highly successful event planning business for ten years, one of the biggest keys to my success was good SEO strategy (search engine optimization strategy). When potential clients would search for a wedding or event planner in my area using different search phrases online, my planning company would show up on the first page of the search results. By using SEO, my planning company regularly received over 300 inquiries a year. I can’t stress enough how important it is for all small business owners to learn about SEO.

In this post, we are sharing common questions about wedding planner SEO along with answers from Liz Lockard, an SEO strategist.

Q: What is SEO and why is it important?

A: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization but really it’s just the art of getting found by more of the right people on sites like Google.

One of the things I love about helping clients develop SEO strategies that attract more of their ideal clients is that once SEO is in motion, it’s *way* less time and *way* less money than other marketing activities can take. It is available to all forms of business, whether you’re a law firm or clothing company. 

Q: What are the benefits of SEO?

A: I think the BIGGEST benefit to having a solid SEO strategy in place is that it consistently attracts more of the right people to your site – which means more prospects & customers – which in turns means (and this is my favorite) – more time FOR YOU to spend doing what you’d much rather be doing. Whether that’s more time on the actual event planning of your business or more time away from your business. 

Q: How much does SEO cost and are the costs one-time or recurring? If I were to budget this in monthly or annually what do I need to take into account?

A: Once you have an SEO strategy in place (which maybe you’ve developed on your own because you took a solid course or maybe you’ve paid someone to help you do this for you), it’s just a matter of who will be doing the implementing. A lot of the day-to-day bits of SEO come down to things like making sure you have the right words in the right places on a new blog post or product listing and then doing some emailing around building links to your site.

Once your strategy is in place, this could be 5-10 hours a month. You could do this yourself or you could have a tech-friendly assistant do this for you (the same person who could upload content to your website for you).

Q: How long does it usually take to see results from SEO? How will I be able to tell if it’s working?

A: This one is hard but I’ll do my best 🙂

You’ll be able to tell if it’s working if you’re seeing more traffic coming to your site from an analytics tool like Google Analytics (which is free).

As for how long… this really depends on how new to SEO you are. Have you had anyone look at your site before from an SEO perspective? Have you done any SEO at all in the past? If you’re really new… you can usually start to see results within 3 months or so. If you’re not, it might be more like 6-12 months.

A frustratingly vague answer I know – but here are a few reasons why:

(a) your competitors could be really active in SEO

(b) Google could make an update to its formula that favors your competitors

(c) you could be slacking on actually taking consistent action based on your strategy

…All of this is why I help clients come up with “forever” SEO strategies that are based on their ideal clients. Everything we focus on is based on SEO actions that aren’t chasing some Google loophole or trend. Solid strategy + consistent action will get you results no matter what. The Google + competition factors will control by how much.

I can’t promise specific results but I can share what’s possible – a recent SEO client of mine was able to more than double her traffic from about 35,000 monthly visits to over 75,000 visits in 3 months of our work together. Another client who took my Your SEO Roadmap course saw about a 32% bump in just a month after taking the course.

But again – nothing is guaranteed and it is largely dependent on what you put into it. I’ve also had clients see no results but that’s because they weren’t able to implement anything.

Q: If my competition is doing super well with SEO, how can I make my website stand out?

A: I looooove this topic!

So the one huge thing you have going for you is you & your competition may have different ideal clients. Any worthwhile SEO strategy is based on what your ideal clients are saying about the problems you solve. So standing out by focusing on your ideal client’s language is one way.

Another way is to take a look at the search results for a particular phrase you’re trying to get traffic for. Look at all those blue headlines in the results. Are they all the same? Here’s where you can stand out — come up with a more exciting, or at least different, headline that still includes your target phrase. That blue text is usually pulled from what’s called a “title tag” on your site – if you don’t have specific SEO settings available on your website, it’s usually the same as wherever you enter your title or headline of the page.

That’s one of the big secrets to dominating search results without being in the #1 slot (shhh don’t tell anyone ;))

Q: Is it possible to take part in SEO without having to pay for ‘clicks’?

A: YES!

So one thing that gets confusing for a lot of people is the whole pay-Google-for-traffic thing and is that SEO or is that not.

The paying-Google-for-traffic thing is actually called Google Adwords. This is unrelated to SEO except for that the fact that they like to insert themselves about the “natural” search results.

Ads at the top of the search results = paid Google Adwords ads.

Search listings below the ads = unpaid SEO results.

The thing linking them is that they both might be going after the same target phrase. But you absolutely do not *have* to do Google Adwords – I only suggest it to clients who are looking to increase traffic by a certain deadline (for example, looking for more clients for this immediate upcoming wedding season) while waiting for the snowball effect of the SEO work we’re doing to come into play.

Q: Doesn’t my website, for example, Squarespace, take care of SEO for me?

A: Mostly no.

There are 3 important pieces to any SEO strategy:

(1) Keyword stuff (what words you’re using where on your site)

(2) Tech stuff (can Google see all your pages, are you confusing Google with seemingly duplicate content and more techie things to appease the Google robot)

(3) Offsite stuff

Your website platform (like Squarespace) can do nothing to help you with #1 and #3 << those are both up to you.

The part that your website platform has a part to play in is #2. And mileage does vary on each platform’s ability to take care of this out-of-the-box. Squarespace, in particular, is pretty good. WordPress.org is even better. But you don’t have to wait to have the perfect tech pieces in place before getting started with SEO. The only thing that REALLY matters is that you have your website name. So instead of yourwebsite.squarespace.com or yourwebsite.wordpress.com or yourwebsite.blogspot.com, you have what’s called a self-hosted domain name of yourwebsite.com.

Q: What words of advice or encouragement can you provide for event planners who have investigated SEO in the past but found it too complicated?

A: Ohhhh man. I’ve spoken with so many people in your shoes.

My advice would be to take your eyes off the tech stuff – that piece is what I think gets most people’s SEO headaches going.

Keep it simple. Find out what your clients are saying about the topics you want to write about and make sure that content has those words in it. Find out what sites your clients are hanging out on and see if you can find a way to get featured on that site. Then maybe hire someone to fix the tech stuff for you (usually not something you have to think about more than once unless you go through a redesign).

This is a guest post from Liz Lockard. Liz is an SEO and conversion nut who loves helping small businesses get more of the right kind of traffic and turn more of that traffic into subscribers and sales. She has been featured in places like The New York Times, Social Media Examiner, The Rise to The Top and more. You can find her on the web at www.lizlockard.com.