Blogging Tips For Event Planners: Search Engine Optimization

I wanted to share blogging tips for event planners because if your blog isn’t bringing in new clients, it’s not working like it should. There’s seldom enough time to sit down and write, right? But I’d like to share a few tips to make blogging truly worthwhile for your event planning business. Maybe I’ll even inspire you to start blogging regularly.

And sure, blogging about recent events takes time and has little to show for it. But if you structure your event planning blog for search engine optimization, you’ll find the payoff does exist in a genuine, measurable way.

Now, I’m not going to give you writing tips, at least not precisely. This post is going to focus on the technical search engine optimization and how your blog can push your business higher in search engine results.

How Blogging Can Drive Business

To understand the purpose of blogging for your event planning business, we first need to discuss Google’s search engine and the concept of intent. In many cases, maybe most, event planning businesses are location-based. That means “local search” tactics are relevant, and that’s good news.

See, when a potential client searches for something, they use words that signal the intent to Google. Then, Google tries to make sure they get the best result to meet that intent and answer the searcher’s query. Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say I’m a potential client. If I’m recently engaged, I might be looking for someone to help me plan my wedding. I might type one of the following queries:

Springfield event planners
Springfield wedding planner
Help plan a wedding in Springfield
Wedding planners near me
Find me a wedding planner

But, what if I don’t know that I need an event planner? What if I know what type of wedding I want, but not much more than that. I might search for:

Rustic wedding in Springfield
Rustic wedding venues near me
Rustic venues in Springfield
Country-style wedding Springfield

Okay, I think that’s enough to move on.

Your blog, if written with search engine optimization, can position you as the perfect result for the above queries. All of them. Not in one post, but over time, you’ll train Google to understand the following things about you:

You’re a wedding planner.
You’re work in and around the Springfield area.
You know how to plan rustic weddings.

And yes, this applies to all event planners. Corporate, private, or wedding planners can all leverage these ideas to get clients. And the best part is that the same blog post can work again, and again, and again.

Your Search Engine Advantage

You’re a local business, so hopefully, you’ve set up a Google Business Profile account for your event planning business. Google knows where your business is and which locations you serve. For the most part, Google already knows you’re relevant to our first batch of queries like Springfield wedding planner. But you want to make sure you show up for the niche stuff too.

The advantage is that if someone near you is actively looking for a rustic or country-style wedding, well, with some good blogging work, you’ll beat out any competitors are well as the more general searches about rustic weddings.

Google wants to discern the searcher’s intent. They want someone searching for local-centric information to find answers.

Your blog will set you up as that answer. Here’s how.

Blogging Tips For Event Planners: Keywords

Create A Content Strategy For Your Event Planning Blog

Creating a strategy sounds hard, but don’t stress it. The plan will be quick. Like, twenty minutes, tops. See, you already know all about your clients, and you probably have an idea of some trends in the event arena. If not, I recommend checking out Pinterest for some event trends.

First, think up 5 to 10 event styles for you’d like to rank in Google Search. Don’t worry about synonyms yet. For example:

Rustic wedding
Garden wedding
Catholic wedding
Jewish wedding
Lakeside wedding
etc.

Those will be your keywords. You can get way more niche and granular. You’re more likely to rank higher the more niche you get. In SEO parlance, we call that the “long tail.”

Over time you’ll want to write blog posts about each of these and more but start with a handful. You might start with one topic. Personally speaking, I try to never focus on more than five.

Then, try to plan two or three blog posts about each keyword. Let’s stick with Rustic Weddings. Your blog post titles might be something like:

Rustic weddings in Springfield – this one will be a general guide to rustic, country-style weddings in Springfield.
Decor tips for rustic weddings – here you’ll share tips and inspiration.
Top Springfield venues for a rustic wedding – and you’ll write about the best local venues that would suit a country-style wedding vibe.

So, with a few keywords and a few blog post ideas for those keywords, you’ve got a content strategy! You’re already halfway there.

Now, let’s talk about actually writing the blog post for SEO.

Search Engine Optimization Blogging Tips for Event Planners

Okay, now, write the blog post. Pretty straightforward, right? Yes, but there are a few tips and specifications when it comes to blogging.

Length is a good place to start. There isn’t any definitive answer here, but I’ve heard that the ideal length of a blog post is longer than 700 words and less than 2000. So, let’s say between 700 and 1500 words long. That’s not too bad. We’re near 900 words at this point in my blog post right now.

Then, you want to have the keyword, say, rustic weddings in the title of the blog post. So, the title of our blog post might be “Want a Rustic Wedding in Springfield? Here Are the Best venues.”

Then, you’ll also want to include the keyword a couple more times in the first 100 words or so. You’re just ensuring that google knows that you’re an answer to any queries in Springfield about rustic weddings.

Then, throughout the blog post, try to shoehorn the keyword in a handful more times. Don’t sacrifice readability, though. It’s generally better to write for a human than for a search engine web crawler.

Meta Descriptions and Title Tags Matter When Blogging For Event Planners

The title tag and meta description gare little bits of HTML code that give Google even more information about the blog post. If you’d like to learn more, read 4 Steps To Great On-Page SEO for Event Planners. I cover it in more detail there.

With each blog post, you want to make sure the title tag and meta description contains the keyword.

I’m assuming your blog is running on one of the more popular blogging frameworks like WordPress, or you’re using a website builder. If so, here’s how to make sure your title tags and meta descriptions contain your keywords.

On WordPress, use the Yoast SEO plugin. It’s free. And it will handle the title tags automatically. It also gives you a place to edit the meta description and guides you to the ideal length too.

GoDaddy Website Builder has an integrated SEO tool that will help you handle all of this.

Wix also has internal SEO tools, and so does Squarespace. Squarespace handles title tags automatically and also allows you to add and edit your descriptions.

Mobile-Friendly Design Is Critical To Your Event Planning Blog

Most Google Searches are now on a mobile phone. So your event planning blog needs to be mobile-friendly. Google rewards blogs that look great on a mobile phone and penalizes those that don’t.

In this same area, event planners often upload gorgeous, large, high-resolution imagery to go with their blog content. That’s a mistake. Google wants images with a small file size that will load fast on a slow 4G connection. So, don’t just upload the photo straight from the photographer. I recommend resizing it to a width of 1920 pixels or so. It’ll look great, but have a more reasonable file size than a typical image loaded directly from the camera.

Internal Linking Gives Your Blog A Boost

When blogging, try to link between your blog posts, especially those that are related. So if you’re writing three blog posts with the theme of the rustic wedding, each should link to the other.

The internal linking helps Google grasp the overall relevance of your website to the search queries. It’s one of the best reasons to map out your related blog posts in advance. As an event planner, you know the importance of planning things. Blogging is no different.

Topic Clusters And Your Event Planning Blog

Topic clusters are a similar concept to what I’d described above. If you pick an event-specific keyword and write a few blog posts around the keyword, you’ve already done it.

Hubspot has a great video about this here:

Topic Clusters is a fancy term combining internal linking and related blog content. So if you follow the advice above, you’ll probably end up with topic clusters naturally. However, it doesn’t hurt to consider them when you’re planning your blog content.

Index Your Event Planning Blog

Look, all of this hard work is great, and you’ll probably rank soon enough, but there’s a shortcut you can take. You can make sure that Google indexes your website and blog content. What’s the point in blogging tips for event planners when you don’t actually get Google’s attention, right?

To do this, visit Google Search Console. There you’ll sign up to register your website with Google’s search engine crawler. Then you can simply tell Google to add your website to the index.

It helps if you have something called a site index. If your website is built on GoDaddy or Wix, or any other site builder, you probably don’t need to worry about it. They’ll likely auto-generate the site index. But you should ask their customer support how to get the link for it. If you use WordPress, you can get this from the Yoast plugin.

Then add that site index file to Google Search Console, and you can be confident that the search engine knows your website and content. The more Google knows about your business and blog, the likelier you are to rank for relevant keywords.

Tools and Other Resources That Can Help With Blogging For Event Planners

Here are some great tools and more blogging tips for event planners. These will help you find errors, test your website, and just, generally, know how you’re doing.

The Last SEO Chore – Backlinks

This is the hardest of all the blogging tips for event planners. So let’s say you’ve got everything done up to this point. You’ve sorted out your plan, written blog posts around niche keywords, and created Topic Clusters. There’s one more way to absolutely crush your event planning blog’s SEO. Backlinks.

If you can get other websites linking to yours, it signals to Google that you matter, that you’re important. The caveat is that it’s best if the linking site is relevant to events. So list your website on directories like PartySlate, BizBash, or The Knot. Ask your local paper to do a human interest story about your business. Anything to get links incoming. It provides a massive boost to your ranking.

SEO Is Ongoing

Search Engine Optimization can get quite overwhelming. But you don’t need to do this all at once. SEO is an ongoing process that works over time, which means you can take your time with it. What matters is that with a little effort here and a little effort there, after a while, these blogging tips for event planners will pay off.

Making sure that Google’s search engine is working to grow your business is priceless! And don’t forget about us here at ThymeBase. Our event planning software is also working hard for your event planning business ;).