4 SEO-Friendly Web Design Features For Wedding Professionals
Have you recently spent a lot of time, money and energy on building a pretty website for your wedding business? Or maybe you’re in the process of redesigning your website to match your overall brand feel and aesthetic. Let me tell you something - if you’re only focusing on the visual elements of your web design and not its search engine friendliness, you’re leaving TONS of website visits and wedding enquiries (in other words £££) on the table. Yep, that’s right - web design without any consideration for SEO is just a hefty cost with no return on investment.
The design of your wedding business website can honestly make or break your organic traffic (and business success). If you’re wondering ‘how I can make my website SEO-friendly’, you’re on the right track! Ready to see your wedding enquiries fly? Make sure to implement these 4 SEO-friendly web design features to boost your SEO and watch your website rank higher and higher on Google.
What is SEO-friendly web design for wedding businesses?
Before we dive deeper, let’s look at what we mean by SEO-friendly web design. Having an SEO-friendly website means Google (and any other search engine) can find your website easily, understand its content clearly and show it to relevant couples on the search results.
Considering many wedding professionals use web design platforms, such as Squarespace, Show It and WordPress, for Google to find your website is not really an issue. Understanding your content and services to show your website to the right couples, on the other hand, can be tricky. And that’s where SEO-friendly web design choices come into play.
By utilising certain design elements, we’re trying to make it super easy for Google (and your website visitors) to navigate your website and understand your offerings.
Must have web design elements for wedding professionals
You probably came across tons of web design tips for wedding businesses. Keep it clean and simple, use your brand voice, reflect your brand aesthetic and style, have stunning imagery, get personal, choose easy-to-use templates…
These are all great advice but not going to do anything to boost your SEO, unlike these 4 design choices.
1- Showcase Your Testimonials Throughout
Let me start by saying this: the more written content you have on your website, the better it is.
I know you like to keep it simple and plain, with lots of beautiful imagery and minimum writing. But it’s super important to have clear and meaningful text that is laid out beautifully. Clear, so that your visitors and Google can easily understand what you’re offering. For example, if you’re a wedding photographer but you’re writing ‘creative design studio’ instead of ‘wedding photography studio’, you’re going to struggle to increase your organic enquiries. ‘Cause, what does that even mean??
This is where having testimonials throughout your website becomes important. It’s highly likely that you already have a separate page for your testimonials but not many people bother to check that page. Instead, when you have testimonials nicely dotted around your website on every page, you’re effectively providing social proof, while adding meaningful written content.
If you can, try to use testimonials that are relevant to specific services and pages. Let’s say you have a testimonial from your full wedding planning client that mentions how amazing you were throughout the whole planning process. Use that on the full wedding planning page. And if you have another testimonial from your design-only client, then make sure to use that on the wedding design service page. This way you will be providing social proof specifically for that service while using keywords naturally in your copy.
2- Create individual service pages
I just hinted at this in the above section, but if you missed the clue: create individual service pages for each of your service offerings.
Imagine you’re in the mood for an authentic, wood-fired pizza and you found two restaurants on the same street. One is offering all sorts of Italian food with a small pizza section on its menu, while the other one has a dedicated pizza menu detailing its process, fresh ingredients and custom-made wood-fired oven. Which one do you choose?
It’s the same for your wedding business. If you have a general service page where you’re listing all your different wedding services, you’re speaking to multiple audiences but not giving enough detail to any of them. It makes it really hard for Google to understand who or when to show that page. But if you have dedicated pages for each of your services, it’s much easier for Google to show that page to the right couples. You will also automatically increase your conversion rate, resulting in more wedding enquiries because you’re directly speaking to your target audience for that service.
And once you have those service pages, make sure to link back to them from your homepage and your menu to clearly showcase your services, provide easy navigation and give each of those pages a nice SEO boost.
3 - Have a Fully optimised website footer
The website footer is the bottom section of your website that is repeated on every single page. This is where you mostly see business addresses and contact details. It’s a super effective and important design element that many wedding professionals fail to take advantage of. There are a few elements that you want to add to your footer to help with your SEO including a short business description and links to your important pages.
When you add a short business bio using your most important keywords, you’re making it ‘really’ clear to Google what is it that you do, as it’s repeated on every page. And because it’s repeated throughout your website, every page you include on your footer also gets a nice SEO boost. So pick a small set of links that you want to highlight and add them to your footer. Ideally, you should have links to your homepage, about and contact as well as a few service pages. It’s also always a good idea to add a clear call to action to encourage couples to get in touch with you.
This is not only important for your SEO but also to increase the number of your wedding enquiries. People are lazy. When they scroll down, they are expecting you to give them something to do rather than scrolling all the way up. So don’t leave them hanging. By adding links to your different pages, you’re giving them the option to continue exploring your beautifully designed website, discover your wedding services and have a chance to get in touch with you.
4- Focus on a Mobile friendly website design
I saved the most important feature to the last, so pay attention. At least 40% of your users are going to be browsing your website on their mobile, therefore having an optimised mobile site is literally going to make or break your wedding business. And as this is not enough reason, Google looks at your mobile version rather than your desktop version. Yep, that’s right. If you want to come up on that shiny Google results page, you need to focus on your mobile website design.
And no, having a responsive template doesn’t ensure a mobile-friendly website. When I start working with my done-for-you SEO clients, almost every time I find some issues with their mobile websites. Many wedding professionals invest their time in building beautifully designed websites on desktops and forget to check them on mobile. Don’t be one of those! Make sure to check your website on mobile screens every time you make a change.
The good news is all website platforms have a mobile view option to allow you to make design tweaks specifically for mobile. But even then, go and check your website on your phone to make sure it’s user-friendly and has all the features that it's supposed to have.
More SEO Advice & Tips
If you would like to learn more about SEO to grow your wedding business sustainably and network with like-minded wedding business owners, come and join us inside The Wedding Pros Community Facebook group - free and open to all wedding industry professionals. A safe place for wedding biz owners to ask questions, learn from each other and grow together! You will also get instant access to all previous SEO trainings, including the ‘SEO Friendly Web Design Choices’ where we talked about it in much more detail. Did I mention that it’s all free?
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ABOUT THE BLOGGER
Hey there! I’m Nergis, wedding SEO consultant and my superpower is simplifying SEO with easy-to-understand language. My passion is teaching wedding business owners how to do SEO to have a sustainable business growth, so they can focus on the things they love (without having to worry about generating more wedding enquires or posting daily on Instagram).