9 Top Tips for Optimising Your Venue's SEO
Marketing your hotel venue is a competitive game, and so finding cost effective ways to increase the online visibility of your wedding venue and conference hire facilities is a high priority for most hotel and wedding venue marketing managers.
Here we list some of the important search engine optimisation techniques that can help improve your venue listings in Google, drive more visitors to your venue website and aim to increase weddings and conference hire bookings.
1. Relevant content
Google wants to deliver relevant results to the people searching, there are a number of ways it identifies whether the results are relevant. The content on the page is one of the main ways, and the good news is this is the information that you want to tell your venue website visitors anyway.
This doesn’t mean stuffing your page with keywords, nowadays Google is more intelligent than that. If you have a wedding venue page, the good news is that you naturally will have content which relates to weddings. Phrases such as ‘Everything you need for your perfect Hampshire wedding’, ‘We are licenced for Civil ceremonies and weddings’ and ‘Our chefs will create a bespoke menu for your wedding breakfast’ are all relevant for the website visitor, as well as also telling Google that you offer weddings in Hampshire.
In addition, by including relevant information on the pages, you are more likely to have visitors stay on the page and spend time reading the content, they might continue around your site, looking at sample menus and photo galleries - this time spent on your site is another indication to Google that your site is useful and engaging, as people are sticking around to read it.
2. On-page technical SEO
Behind the scenes of your website there are certain technical elements that Google will look at to see the purpose of sites and its pages. Metadata includes the H1 and H2 tags (these are like the headlines of the pages content), the meta description - this is a concise description of the page’s content and the alt-text - this is the text that relates to images on the page. The structure of the URL i.e. the web address of each page is also important, using hyphens between words and keeping the characters to a maximum length of 100, all help the page name be understood by the search engines, for example www.hampshireweddingvenue.co.uk/wedding-ceremonies
Just with the content, the metadata is another good opportunity to optimise on the relevant keywords, especially when it comes to local search e.g. Hampshire Wedding Venues.
3. Page Load Speed
The speed of your website is one of the critical factors to affect your search engine rankings. Google doesn’t want to promote slow sites and if your website takes anything longer than 2 seconds to load it is considered slow by web users.
Having a site that loads quickly and effectively is now a must have for SEO. Optimising large images and videos are a common way to help speed up your site’s load time.
4. Mobile Optimisation
What percentage of your web visitors use mobile as their primary device? More than half? Multi-device journeys are becoming more commonplace and users expect a seamless experience no matter what device they are on. Google’s mobile first indexing now prioritises the mobile version of websites as the primary version. If yours doesn’t provide a good experience, then this will affect your search rankings.
5. Google My Business
To manage how your wedding venue is listed on the world’s biggest search engine you need
to set up and manage your Google My Business page. It helps you control how your venue is presented and can increase your brand presence for local searches.
6. Backlinks
According to Moz, a leading SEO thought leader, link signals are a key factor in local search. Gaining links from other local websites, blogs and publications related to your venue will demonstrate that you have quality, relevant content worth sharing. Whether you invite journalists to review your venue, or your venue is featured in a wedding publication case story, the references and links will add value to your SEO efforts.
7. Citations
Relevant directories listings can add value, but as with all inbound links, it is more about the
quality of where the link comes from, rather than the quantity of links. Consider listings in wedding and venue hire directories as well as directories such as Yell.com. It is vital that your contact details remain consistent across all directories.
8. Different page for each service
Creating separate pages for each service the venue increases the opportunities to rank. You can then use metadata, URL, alt text and content to specifically target that service. For example it is better to have a single separate page targeting ‘weddings in Hampshire’ rather than a more generic ‘Venue hire’ page whose content is competing for ‘weddings in Hampshire’, ‘private dining’ and ‘Hampshire conference facilities’.
9. Social Media
Social media helps to increase reach and drive traffic to a website, which in turn sends signals of quality relevant content. A benefit of marketing venues, especially wedding venues is their visual appeal - this is a great asset for platforms like Instagram.
Originally published on the DotLabel website