Run Your Own Wedding Planner SEO Audit — And Find the Problems Worth Fixing First

The word 'audit' gets used loosely. Some agencies call a 10-minute automated report an audit. Others treat it as a three-month engagement. For a wedding planner, the right scope sits somewhere practical in the middle.

A meaningful SEO audit for a wedding planning business covers five diagnostic areas:

• Technical health — Can Google crawl and index your site correctly? Are there crawl errors, broken links, duplicate content, or indexing blocks that prevent your pages from appearing in search at all?
• On-page content alignment — Does your content match what engaged couples actually search for? This includes page titles, headings, service descriptions, and portfolio context.
• Local SEO signals — Is your Google Business Profile complete, accurate, and actively managed? Are your NAP (name, address, phone) details consistent across directories?
• Authority and backlinks — Do other credible sites link to yours? Wedding vendor directories, venue partner sites, and local press are the highest-value sources in this vertical.
• Conversion alignment — Does traffic that arrives actually inquire? If pages rank but don't convert, that's a finding — not a separate problem.

Most wedding planner sites have issues in at least two or three of these areas. The audit's job is to identify which problems are causing the most lost visibility right now, so you can prioritize fixes that move the needle rather than work through a generic checklist.

Before you start, set a benchmark. Pull your current Google Search Console data — average position, impressions, and clicks for your top pages. That's your baseline. Every fix you make should be evaluated against it.

Technical SEO problems are silent. Your site looks fine to you, but Google is having a harder time than you think. For wedding planners, the most common technical issues we find fall into four categories.

Site Speed

Wedding planner sites are image-heavy by nature — portfolio galleries, venue shots, real wedding photos. That's appropriate for the industry, but unoptimized images are consistently one of the top speed suppressors we see. Use Google PageSpeed Insights and check your Core Web Vitals score. A slow mobile experience is a direct ranking factor, and most couples are searching on their phones.

Mobile Usability

Open your site on a phone you don't normally use. Can you read the service pages clearly? Is the inquiry form easy to complete? Are gallery images loading at a reasonable speed? Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. If the mobile experience is broken, that's the version being evaluated.

Crawlability and Index Status

In Google Search Console, check Coverage reports for errors or excluded pages. A common issue: important portfolio pages accidentally set to 'noindex', or a misconfigured robots.txt file blocking Googlebot from key sections of the site.

HTTPS and Basic Security

Your site should be serving over HTTPS. If any pages are loading over HTTP, that's a trust signal problem and a minor ranking signal. Most modern hosts handle this automatically, but migration issues sometimes leave old HTTP pages behind.

Run your site through Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs) or a similar crawl tool. Export the list of 4xx errors, redirect chains, and missing meta tags. That export becomes the first section of your audit findings document.

Technical issues prevent visibility. Content issues prevent relevance. Even a technically clean site will underperform if the pages don't align with what couples are actually searching for when they're ready to hire a planner.

Page Title and Meta Description Audit

Open Google Search Console and pull the queries you're currently appearing for. Then visit each of your main service pages and check: does the page title include the primary search phrase couples use for that service in your market? A page titled 'Our Services' will always underperform a page titled 'Full-Service Wedding Planning in Charleston, SC'.

Heading Structure

Each page should have one clear H1 that states what the page is about and who it's for. Subheadings (H2, H3) should reflect the questions or concerns couples have about that service. Generic headings like 'What We Do' or 'Our Approach' do very little for search relevance.

Portfolio Page Depth

This is the most common content gap we find on wedding planner sites. A gallery of photos with no text is not a content asset for SEO purposes. Each portfolio entry should include: venue name, location, season, style descriptors, and a short narrative. That context turns a photo gallery into a page Google can understand and rank for specific searches like 'romantic garden wedding at [venue name]'.

Service Page Specificity

Generic service copy — 'We handle all the details so you can enjoy your day' — appears on thousands of wedding planner sites. It does nothing to differentiate you in search. Each service page should answer the specific questions couples have at that stage: What's included? What's the process? What does it cost (or what's the starting investment)? What venues do you work with most often?

After auditing each page, score it: Does it answer a real search query? Does it include location signals? Does it have a clear next step? Pages that score poorly are your content priorities.

For wedding planners, local search visibility — especially in the Google Map Pack — is where a significant portion of inquiries originate. Couples searching 'wedding planner in [city]' or 'destination wedding planner near [region]' are high-intent searchers. If you're not appearing in that three-pack, you're invisible at the moment they're ready to contact someone.

Google Business Profile Audit

Start here. Open your GBP and check every field:

• Business name — Matches your actual business name exactly (no keyword stuffing)
• Primary category — Should be 'Wedding Planner', not a generic 'Event Planner'
• Service area — Have you defined the geographic areas you serve?
• Services section — Is it populated with your actual offerings?
• Photos — Are there recent, high-quality images? GBP profiles with active photo libraries consistently outperform those without.
• Reviews — How many do you have? What's your average rating? When was the last review posted? A profile with no recent reviews looks dormant to both Google and couples.

NAP Consistency Check

Your business name, address, and phone number should appear identically across your website, GBP, WeddingWire, The Knot, and any other directories where you're listed. Inconsistencies confuse Google's local matching algorithm and can suppress your Map Pack eligibility.

Local Content on Your Website

Does your website mention the specific cities, venues, and regions you serve? A planner based in Nashville who works throughout Middle Tennessee but never mentions those specific locations on their site is leaving local relevance on the table. Venue-specific pages or blog posts about local wedding venues are among the highest-use local content investments a wedding planner can make.

An audit that produces a list of 40 things to fix is not useful on its own. The final step is prioritization — identifying which issues are causing the most lost visibility right now and which fixes will have the fastest impact.

Use a simple scoring framework across each area:

• Impact — How much visibility or conversion is this issue costing you? A missing GBP category affects every local search query. A missing alt tag on one photo does not.
• Effort — How hard is this to fix? Updating a page title takes 10 minutes. Rebuilding your site's information architecture takes weeks.
• Urgency — Is this issue getting worse over time? Crawl errors and index suppression issues tend to compound. Content staleness builds gradually.

Rank your findings by impact-to-effort ratio. High impact, low effort fixes go first. That usually means:

1. Fixing crawl errors and indexing blocks
2. Updating GBP primary category and service area
3. Rewriting page titles on key service pages
4. Adding venue and location context to your top portfolio pages
5. Requesting reviews from recent clients

Once quick wins are complete, move to medium-effort, high-impact work: expanding thin service pages, building out venue-specific content, and developing a backlink strategy through venue partnerships and local press.

Document everything. Your audit findings become your SEO roadmap. If you revisit it in 90 days against your Search Console data, you'll have a clear picture of which fixes moved the needle and what still needs attention.

If the audit reveals deep technical issues — site architecture problems, widespread duplicate content, or a history of penalized link building — that's typically the point where bringing in a professional pays for itself. Let our team handle your wedding planner SEO audit if the findings are beyond what you can address in-house.