Local & Organic SEO Case Study | Wedding/Event DJ – Bunn DJ Company

by Brian Lawrence and Matt Campbell

The purpose of sharing this case study was to allow other businesses in the wedding industry to have a roadmap on how they can take action steps to improve their own SEO (Search Engine Optimization – helps your page rank higher on Google and other search engines to drive more traffic to your site). In addition, I wanted readers to understand how much work is involved, much of which is behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, many web designers do not know much about SEO, and often what they do know gets left out because, without the right research, a business owner won’t know what they are missing.

The result of not focusing on improving the SEO of your wedding business has important but not obvious consequences. When potential customers are searching for wedding vendors, by keywords that relate to your business, if you do not come up in the search results prominently, you miss out on an opportunity to win a new client.

So here is a case study of one of the nation’s leading DJ companies:

The Beginning Local SEO Challenge

Bunn DJ Company started in Raleigh, NC, and has expanded to five additional offices around the country. We designed the site revolving around the brand, the prominence of the company itself and could not focus on a particular area on the home page. Owner Joe Bunn wanted us to focus on improving the ranking on the whole site benefiting all the regions but start with a hyperfocus on Raleigh.

Though we did separate local landing pages for each area, because of the competitiveness of the area and major sites like Wedding Wire and the Knot being ranked on top, the Raleigh page was not found on Google’s first page of local organic search results with important keywords such as “Raleigh wedding DJs”, “Raleigh corporate DJs”, and “Raleigh DJs near me”. Joe also wanted to rank better on Google’s local map listings.

Site Structure Issues and Their Impact

In reviewing the structure of the site, with the strong support from my SEO strategist, Matt Campbell (also the owner of top wedding industry site https://www.myweddingsongs.com/) found four major issues holding Joe back from achieving his goal:

The home page was showing up for many searches instead of designated location pages, creating additional navigation for the user and a less than desirable experience. Plus, the site was missing important rankings for its location-specific searches.
Key service pages were generic landing pages and not location-specific. This limited the strong impact of the design of the site by having couples starting without clarity on the location nearest them and having to navigate to another page focused on that location.
The blog featured 750 posts dating back to 2015 but no posts in 2021. There were also multiple posts about the same topic, confusing Google as to which page to rank.
The website’s loading speed was bogged down with large images and lots of 3rd party coding.

SEO Actions Taken To Improve Rankings

Based on these issues, we focused on (1) fixing technical issues, (2) improving the six location pages and adding service and city-specific pages (3) cleaning up and creating blog content, and (4) increasing the website’s loading speed. Each action required several, detail-oriented steps.

Technical Website Optimization

The first order of business was addressing the technical issues impacting the site’s SEO. These “fixes” not only gave Google a clearer path for SEO but also helped enhance the user’s website experience.

Fixed all external and internal broken links and redirects so Google has a clear understanding of the website’s linking structure.
Optimized page titles and meta descriptions that benefit potential clients by using typical, yet important, keywords and including a call to action for a higher click-through rate.
Enhanced headings on key pages and verified each page only had only one H1 heading with the appropriate focus keywords so Google and the user know exactly what the page is about.
Focused the website’s sitemap to include only relevant pages for Google’s crawler and a robots.txt file to let Google know what pages to ignore. The sitemap URL was also added to the robots.txt file so that it is easily found.
Optimized WordPress Yoast SEO’s website settings.
Added internal linking by adding related posts and internal linking throughout the site. When Google sees internal links to pages, the search engine ranks them higher as you view them as important pages. And with internal linking, users will spend more time on a website – which also affects Google’s ranking.
Verified Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager was also installed correctly.
Added HTML sitemap, another Google “touchpoint” that locates important website pages.
Updated footer by giving specific locations with the word “DJs” to give each main location page more importance to both Google and website visitors.
Added more calls to action in a non-intrusive way to increase lead generation.

City Local Optimization

The client has six locations around the country. The goal was to rank for both the local city and services searched (ie Raleigh NC wedding DJs).

Added local business schema to all 6 existing location pages, making it easier for search engines to identify a business, its industry, and exact location.
Added organization schema to the whole website to inform Google about the parent company.
Each location’s Google Business Profile was verified with a consistent name, address, and phone number to match the address in Google Maps.
Embedded a Google business location map on each local page.
Because weddings are the primary source of business for Bunn DJ Company, each location’s URL was updated with the city name + wedding-djs to help individual page rankings within Google.
Links were added from the site’s main wedding landing page to each location page to designate a specific wedding page for each local market.

Through these steps, the site achieved collateral optimization and increased visibility for each location.

The Raleigh location is the flagship for Bunn DJ Company. To improve the Raleigh search engine rankings, we made these improvements.

Fully optimized the Raleigh wedding page by adding content giving local relevance and “authority” to the page.
Created new city landing pages for Wilmington, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Greenville to give Bunn DJ Company local Google ranking in these nearby markets.
Created new stand-alone Raleigh service pages for lighting, party DJs, photo booth, corporate DJs, and school DJs to increase local Google rankings for these services.
Interlinked all Raleigh pages to be in their own “silo”. They do not link out to any other pages within the website. Creating this silo effect helps each of the pages to rank higher and be seen as relevant to the area.
Created a dedicated page for Joe Bunn to showcase his E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trust) and increase Google’s trust in the overall brand.

Blog Optimization

Google trusts fresh and unique content – and so do website users. Stale content hurts the overall “freshness” of a site. Duplicate content issues were also hurting the site’s trustworthiness. These steps cleaned up the blog and helped establish trust with Google – and website users.

Original blog posts with little content and no pictures were redirected to relevant posts. Then, outdated and uninformative blog posts were deleted.
Blog posts about venues (the first decision for most engaged couples) were optimized. Primary blogs were developed and old content redirected. This new format shows Bunn DJ Company’s E-A-T and helps rank the company in many local venue searches.
New blogs were created for popular venues and local activities, giving relevant and helpful information to website visitors.
Key blog category pages were linked to related location pages and optimized.
Author profiles were optimized for E-A-T.
Content about DJing weddings at specific venues was added to reception site posts.

The blog still contains about 220 posts of the original 750, so the process of optimizing them is an ongoing process until this task is completed.

Website Speed Optimization

How fast a website “loads” is important to both the user experience and Google rankings. The home page of Bunn DJ took 8 seconds to load. Typically, if a site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, the user will move on to the next. These steps improved the load speed of the home page to 1 second.

With the use of CDN (Content Delivery Network), images and files were cached for faster loading.
Loading speed was also significantly increased with the use of an on-site caching plugin.
Images were reduced to match the size allotted on the page.
HotJar script was running on the site utilized to collect important data. However, it was no longer being used. Thus, the code was deactivated.
The 16 Raleigh DJs on the main Raleigh landing page, with their content and video embeds, were relegated to their own page to allow that location’s primary page to load much faster.
Pop-up third-party contact forms were replaced with a “contact form page” created for each of the 6 main locations. This allowed for the code to load on those designated contact pages only.

SEO Local & Organic Search Results – Before & After

By addressing technical issues, optimizing existing and building new local pages, cleaning up the website’s blog content, and improving its speed, Bunn DJ Company is achieving its goal of higher Google’s rankings – including page one results.

Organic Search Results

Not only did the Raleigh location page improve its ranking under important keywords, but the service pages also rose significantly. For example, Bunn DJs originally ranked #63 with the term “raleigh uplighting” – now it ranks #4. And searches for nearby cities have improved significantly. Bunn originally ranked #20 with the keywords “durham wedding DJs” – now it ranks #8 with that organic search. And best of all, the company is ranked #2 in organic search with the keywords “Raleigh NC wedding DJs” for local entertainment companies.

I did not start tracking rankings until the beginning of September 2021 vs. March 2021. However, we do know that Bunn DJ company did not show for most local searches. Of note in the below chart, Bunn DJ Company now ranks for many organic local searches. You can see more of a before and after of keyword listing improvements here.

And with the work the Brian Lawrence team did on the other locations, Bunn DJ Company is seeing those pages rise in the ranks – the Boseman, MT, and San Diego locations are now on the first page of Google with their respective keywords.

The other 5 locations benefited from our website improvements with page one rankings!