With the New Year fast approaching. It’s time to update your website with new offerings, featured images, and highlighting your success from the past year. For those business owners in the wedding industry… the next few months will be filled with newly engaged couples looking to book their vendor team! This is a great time to do an audit of your workflow, and streamline your automated emails, and booking process! You want to make sure your website formatting is clean, functional and professional to show off your brand and increase your ideal client bookings! Below I’m sharing my top 5 website updates to make at least once a year!
1. Update Package Pricing
I’m going to bet that you worked your butt off behind the scenes this year. Did you purchase new equipment? Or streamline your client process? What about any investments in education to improve your skills? If you answered YES to any of these, It’s time to raise your prices for the coming year! I always find that giving a price range easily visible on your website will help to eliminate back and forth emails. Being transparent in pricing from the start will help establish yourself as a luxury brand and helps give your potential clients a baseline of expectations to work with you.
I love to include pricing in my favorite hidden web page! Creating a New Inquiry Guide is the perfect way to streamline your booking process. Plus I have it linked directly in my auto responder after clients fill out my contact form! With page sections like investment details and FAQ’s, it will allow you to prime your clients for booking quickly and spend less time in your inbox!
Shop this New Inquiry Guide Template for your own website in the SHOP!
2. Update Headshots & Portfolio Images
Don’t let image updates overwhelm you! When diving into your yearly website refresh, you can typically keep 80% of the images already in use! This is the biggest factor to consider when auditing your website images… Are you sharing the work you WANT MORE OF?
This means you have permission to remove images that do not enhance the ideal client profile you are building! Just because you photographed families and newborn sessions does not mean they need to be featured on your website. Clients often resonate with images where they can see themselves reflected. If you are looking to fill your calendar with diverse bookings, be intentional about using inclusive language and imagery! For any wedding pro’s looking to boost your referrals, include images that feature your favorite vendors, venues, and locations you want to book more of!
3. Update Testimonials & Social Proof
One of the quickest ways to build trust with your potential clients is through testimonials. This helps reinforce the value and unique experience of working with you. Be sure to ask guiding questions that emphasize emotion while collecting testimonials from your clients. Instead of “Share your experience working with XYZ?” You can ask…
“How did you feel before vs. after using our product/service?”
“What problems did our product/services solve for you?”
“What surprised you the most about your experience working with XYZ?”
When it comes to formatting testimonials for your website, be sure they are easily skim-able. The most unique differentiators should be bold or highlighted in a pull out quote. This will allow your website viewers a quick glance at your value!
4. Update Your Blog or Resources Page
The end of the year is the perfect time to go through and refresh your Blog and resource pages. Oftentimes, during the busy Fall season, blogging takes a backseat to pressing client projects. However if haven’t posting new content in months you might be negatively impacting your business. This may cause your businesses to appear in low demand, when in reality you’ve been in such HOT DEMAND you haven’t had time to post.
Here’s a few quick fixes… Post an end of year roundup blog to highlight all of the hustle and amazing projects from the last year. OR simply remove the date text box from your blogs to expand your posts lifespan! This isn’t a forever fix… BUT for that final push through the new year, when booking new projects is BOOMING, it’s a great way to make your current content stay relative!
*If you’re a Showit Website user, simply log into your Blog page and Single Blog post to remove the Date text box!
5. Update Social links
If you are still using a generic app like linktree, you are missing the HUGE benefits of an internal social links web page! You could be hurting your brands effectiveness, by linking to an outside source and missing a key opportunity to boost your website traffic. Learn more about the benefits of a custom links page here!
Update your instagram social link with these key categories:
- Opt-in or biggest sales generator
- Link to your contact form/ email
- Blog or Free Resources page
- Affiliate links for passive income
- Portfolio/ more about you!
Need somewhere to start! Set up your own Social Links Page in under 10 minutes! This template will allow you to easily apply your current websites branding, fonts, colors and custom links to share with your social media followers. The best part… it’s all internally linked within your website to continue to improve your SEO!
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