The Importance of Local SEO

Your wedding photography target audience can largely determine which aspect of SEO you’ll need to focus on for best results: traditional (organic) SEO or local SEO.

Whether your wedding photography business only operates within a small geographic area or serves clients all over the world, search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical component for business sustainability.

In this post, I’m going to show you:

• What is local SEO?
• The difference between local SEO and traditional SEO
• The importance of local SEO for wedding professionals
• What you can do to improve your local SEO rankings
• How to set up Google My Business
• Why reviews are so good for SEO
• Create a direct link to your Google My Business reviews for clients

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO is highly effective for all wedding photographers and wedding industry professionals that want to book clients in specific locations.

Traditional, or organic SEO is largely focused on optimizing content in order for the business’s website to catch general Internet traffic. “In traditional organic SEO, search engines are looking for relevant and trusted content.” In contrast, “for local SEO, search engines are seeking out relevant and trusted locations.”

Organic SEO is great for photographers and other wedding professionals wanting to get destination weddings around the world. whereas, local SEO needs to be implemented when shooting weddings in your hometown.

What’s the difference between building local SEO and traditional SEO?

One difference is in the way your business builds credibility in the eyes of Google.

As far as traditional SEO is concerned, backlinks are the currency of the Internet. Each backlink to a website can be compared to a “vote” for its credibility and authority. In general, the more backlinks to a site, the higher the Google algorithm will rank it in its search results.

However, local SEO places more emphasis on citations.

Citations are simply references to your business’s name, address, and phone number. These citations are commonly found on sites like Google, Yelp, and Yahoo!.

While backlinks are still helpful to boost your company’s reputation, citations increase the geographical relevance of your business. This is important because approximately 65% of customers are just looking for the most relevant information.

Citation management, or the process of ensuring that your business location appears in a local search on Google, is one aspect of local SEO. Other aspects include online ratings and reviews, and marketing or engagement initiatives on locally-driven social media.

The Importance of Local SEO for wedding professionals

Why is local SEO so important for wedding photographers?

For wedding photography and other wedding industry businesses that only operate within a relatively small geographic area, capturing local Internet traffic is a crucial factor in attracting customers.

When someone is searching Google for a ‘wedding photographer’, he or she is actively looking for this type of vendor for their wedding and is thus more likely to book in the near future. If your business is near the top of the Google listing, then it can benefit from this.

Exactly how large is the pool of customers to which we are referring? According to Main Street ROI, some 86% of customers use the Internet to find local businesses, and 72% say that using Google is their first choice to investigate a local merchant or business in which they’re interested.

Clearly, a high local SEO ranking is essential for any wedding photographer to stay competitive.

What Can I Do to Improve My Local SEO Rankings?

There are several ways to improve your local SEO rankings. However, this article will focus on 2 methods:

• Google My Business
• Reviews

Google My Business

A great way to boost your local SEO is to create a Google My Business listing.

Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool from Google that allows business owners to have more control over their online presence. A listing with Google My Business does not replace your website but rather complements it by providing your business with a public identity linked to Google.

This is great because Google will put your business in the “business listings” section at the top of a google search, and then you have the possibility to be placed in the organic search section.

How can I set up a listing on Google My Business?

Here are 6 simple steps you can take:

1. Search for your business on Google. If your business has been around for a few years, it may already have a Google My Business listing, and you just need to claim it. Otherwise, you will need to enter your business information in the Google My Business page for adding/claiming listings.
2. Navigate to the Google My Business page for adding or claiming listings by signing in with your Google account.
3. When inputting your business’ contact information, ensure that everything is grammatically correct and accurate. 
4. Choose the most relevant category for your business from the available options.
5. Add service area details to help localize search results.
6. After you’ve submitted your listing request, verify your listing (by mail, if possible).

As a wedding photographer, it is vital that you implement local SEO best practices to capture local traffic and boost customer conversion rates. Local SEO can help your wedding photography business to stand out, drive business growth, and increase revenue.

Reviews

Why are positive online reviews so important for local SEO? One reason is how much weight the Google algorithm for local SEO places on customer reviews. It is estimated that online reviews make up approximately 10% of how Google decides to rank search results. This makes sense because customer reviews are often an indicator of a company’s overall reputation, authority, and level of credibility.

What can you do in order to get more positive reviews? You will likely need to establish a review acquisition strategy tailored to your business’ circumstances. This strategy mainly consist of asking satisfied customers for a Google review.

Create a direct link for clients to review you on Google My Business

If you want reviews you have to make the review process easy.

Asking for a review from your clients does not have to be a complicated process, nor should it be a complicated process for them to review you.

You can create a link that directs your brides/grooms to your Google My Business review page without having to search for you and find the reviews section.

Creating a review link will save your customers time, look professional, and will help you collect more reviews.

Your link will look something like this: https://morenocollective.com/review

For this to work, you will need a Google My Business account and a mobile phone with the Chrome browser app.

Here is an easy to follow video on how to create a direct link to review a Google My Business account. For step by step instructions, please read below.

1. On your mobile phone, open a new incognito window using the chrome browser
2. Search your businesses name so that the Google My Business section with your business’ info shows up
3. Click on the “Reviews” tab and click the 5th star under “Rate and Review on Google”
4. A blue page will show that says “Sign in with your Google Account to write a review” – don’t sign in
5. Copy the entire link on your iPhone and save the link somewhere you can also access it on your computer – Email, Notes, or message yourself
6. Now login to your WordPress dashboard and install the Redirection plugin
7. Once activated, navigate to tools -> Redirection
8. Create a new redirection
   • Source URL -> /review
   • Target URL -> Paste the link you copied from your iPhone
9. Save your redirect and test your link!