Introducing our Event Planner blog Series
Photo by Elizabeth LaDuca
Hello there and Happy Tuesday! If you’ve been reading our blog, you might find it strange that there’s a post up on a Tuesday, but here we are. Why? Because we have something exciting to share with you!
Something you might not know about us, we offer mentoring and coaching to planners who are in their first five years of business and need help navigating the wild world of being a small business owner. We’re officially at capacity for our intensive sessions for 2020 and while we do still have a couple of hourly sessions available, we want to continue to serve our community, especially during these times of uncertainty. So…we’ve decided to start sharing our expert tips on how to start and grow your event planning business right here on our blog. Yes, you read that right. Every Tuesday, we will be giving away knowledge so that you can set your business up for success.
If you have a new event planning business, we’re sure you have SO many questions. Many of us get into this industry because we love creating beautiful events…not because we love contracts, Quickbooks, and paperwork. So, it can be a little overwhelming when you are navigating how to run a small business for the first time. Believe us, we get it!
We thought we would kickoff this series with something we used to hate doing. You know, one of those small business tasks that you don’t want to do because it’s a time-suck and seems less important for your business than all of the other things you need to do? We know you can relate. Well, for us, this task used to be the blog. Yes, the very thing you’re reading now used to be our least favorite thing. Why? It seemed silly to take the time to write to an unknown audience, painstakingly pick the right photos, and test links when there were more obvious things we could be doing to improve our business.
We’re here to let you in on a secret that we’ve learned after more than a decade in business: Having a blog is one of the best things you can do for your event planning company. Why? It is one of the strongest ways to increase your SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Now, we could do a whole post just about SEO, but for now, the short and sweet version is that SEO is basically how high your business appears in google searches. You want to have good SEO and appear high in the listings so that potential clients can find you.
So, how do you do that? Enter the solution - your blog. Today we’re going to walk you through three key things you should be doing for your blog to get you on your way to great SEO. If you don’t have a blog yet, stop reading and go get one. We’ll be here when you get back!
Use keywords. Do you know how people are finding your business in internet searches? You should. If you don’t know the answer to this, have a look at your website’s analytics. You can actually see what people are searching when they find you. What are the top searches? You want to include those keywords in your posts. Likely, this will happen organically for you. For example, a wedding planner will talk about weddings in her blog. However, it’s good to be mindful of these words and try to consciously make sure they appear. But don’t overdo it. Google penalizes when so many keywords are used that the post becomes difficult to read!
Link to other blogs and websites. It’s not good enough to just write about a wedding, for example, and not include any links. To simply SEO, you want to have lots of links to other sites coming from your website (and likewise, you want other sites to link to you). If you’re a wedding planner, you might be featured on a wedding blog (that’s a link back to your site). You then could do a post about that feature and link back to them. Even if you don’t have a feature, you could link to the websites of the vendors involved in making the wedding day a success. In general, the more you feature companies and include links on your blog, the more link backs you’re going to get.
Optimize your images. The text isn’t the only thing that matters when you write a blog. The photos can also be optimized for SEO. Often times, an image organically has a serious of numbers as the “title” when you upload it to your site. It could also be a filename that the photographer has chosen, maybe the last names of your couple, for example. In either case, this does nothing for your business. You want to make sure that the images also contain the keywords that are relevant to your company.
We know this seems like a lot, but the key is to just start and then keep going! Regular posting to your blog works wonders for your SEO. One more thing. You might want to consider adding a place on your blog for signing up to your mailing list. We’ll get into the importance of having and growing your mailing list in future posts, but the blog is a great place to offer the sign-up, since you can drive traffic from social media to your posts.
Whew! That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with more small business advice for event planners. In the meantime, we put together a checklist with you in mind. It features our five essential tasks you need to do for your business right away! You can access the checklist below - it’s completely free, so what are you waiting for?!