Part 2: SEO, Your Website, Blogging
As we mentioned in Part 1, having a strong online presence has always been crucial for a successful wedding videography company — but how much of this should be your own website versus a general presence across social channels and directories?
One thing to note: while social can gain you followers and the potential for content to go viral, the channel and audience you're building are ultimately controlled by that channel. We saw our Facebook post reach drop from every fan of our page to a small fraction within days due to a Facebook algorithm decision. Channels have had accounts banned or suspended and their hard work vanished overnight. Putting the work into your own website may yield slower results, but you're in control of the site and the experience visitors receive.
Guest Article Posting for Traffic and Backlinks: writing articles for your own blog, or as a guest blogger for other wedding websites, can position you as an expert in your field. It takes a lot of time to maintain a blog and write articles, but our analytics show our blog articles and custom landing pages drive most of our website traffic and enquiries.
Not all traffic to your website or blog will be from your target audience or even from the UK — worth bearing in mind when reading analytics.
We've also used SEO techniques like creating niche landing pages for popular search terms and keywords — by wedding venue, location, or topic like "cinematic wedding highlights," "live wedding streaming," or "photo and video packages." The more niche the better: if a couple is searching for a specific wedding venue and you have unique information, clips from weddings at that venue, and some free advice, they're more likely to be interested in your packages.
To get these pages ranked by Google you need backlinks from other sites — guest posting and linking to your articles, answering questions on wedding forums and linking to helpful articles, and approaching wedding suppliers to show them your articles. As you build traffic you naturally build backlinks to valuable content.
You could hire an SEO agency to do this for you, but be careful — there are a lot of agencies that will do more harm than good. Our advice: do your research and find a reputable online marketing expert.
We paid various freelancers to write articles for us, and once paid an SEO company (DPFOC, now not a company) over £4000 to promote two of our sites, only to get manual penalties from Google and see all our rankings disappear overnight. We spent 6 months undoing a lot of the "work" they did (removing links) to get the penalties removed. Be warned!
Using your website and blog to attract traffic through writing, SEO and backlinks is time-consuming but effective — we get the majority of our enquiries through our blog, website and online article referrals, tracked via customer surveys and analytics.
10 ways of building backlinks as a wedding videographer: Online wedding directories. Offer to speak at events. Wedding fairs will often also list you on their website. Attend wedding industry events or enter awards. Build a free tool or downloadable resource on your website. Become an industry podcast guest. Write guest posts. Submit real weddings to other blogs. Search for websites mentioning you who haven't linked to you. Participate on wedding forums or groups.
Next we will be talking about the role of video content marketing and social media.