Thank you so much, Brittany Collier, for having me on the Washington, DC Tuesdays Together chat today! As promised, I wanted to share with you via the Something New for I Do blog what we talked about today. SEO and Wedding PR are two business aspects that are often seen as a someday investment. But, if you invest early on, you’ll find that you are able to speed up the process of becoming successful. And we all want that, right?! Wedding PR has four benefits that can’t be ignored: increasing awareness, boosting credibility, giving you content for social media + increasing SEO power. Today, I’m going to elaborate on how wedding public relations can help your SEO.

HOW WEDDING PR AND SEO GO HAND IN HAND

As a wedding publicist, I work with wedding vendors and lifestyle brands to earn them media attention. What this usually looks like is a real wedding or styled shoot featured on a popular wedding blog or wedding planning expertise featured in advice articles. When it comes to PR for creatives, a lot of time this means securing guests posts for the creative to share their insight, story, products or services. When you get a media placement, the outlet credits you by linking back to your site. This is a backlink!

I’m sure you’ve been hearing about these. Quality backlinks are good for your site and will help you climb those rankings in Google. Similarly, poor quality backlinks from websites with low page ranks can slow the process. So when searching for blogs and online publications to share your work with, do your research and ensure they have a strong page rank. There are some beautiful publications out there that unfortunately don’t have a strong presence.

A WEDDING PUBLICIST’S FAVORITE SEO TOOLS

• Positionly is an online software that costs me about $10 per month. It allows you to track competitors and alerts you when it finds new competitors. Positionly lets you see where all your backlinks are coming from AND tells you the quality of those links. This means you can have the ones that do more harm than good removed. There’s also an app for your phone, which is an added bonus!
• Open SEO Stats is a free page rank checker and Google chrome plugin for your toolbar. It allows you to access the page rank and SEO stats of anyone’s website. If a wedding professional is ranking really well for “Washington, DC Wedding Planner” for example, you can see what keywords, meta tags, H1 and H2 tags, etc. they are using. So, you can get a better look into why they are successful and how you can optimize your site to move up the ranks.
• SEO Edge is a free app for your iPhone or iPad, which makes it easy to track SEO on the go! The app helps you compare where your site stands and who’s ranking above you. Also, SEO Edge lets you monitor if you move up or down a position or multiple positions for a certain keyword. Don’t get discouraged by the daily moves up and down! Focus on slow and steady gains! This is probably my favorite tool because it will alert you that it’s time to update your SEO stats so you can’t forget.

Ready To Learn More?

While Something New for I Do doesn’t offer SEO services as our expertise is wedding PR and PR for creatives, we have some great resources to recommend if you’re looking to hire an SEO expert. Contact us if you’d like to be put in touch with our SEO friends! If you have any questions about PR and how it relates to SEO, I’d love to chat!