SEO Basics That Actually Move the Needle for Vendors

Search for local SEO advice aimed at wedding vendors and you will hit the same four numbers within about ten minutes. Forty-six percent of Google searches have local intent. "Near me" searches grew 500 percent. Eighty-eight percent of people who search locally call or visit within a day. Long-tail keywords convert two and a half times better than head terms.

We tried to trace all four back to a primary source. None of them survive the trip. The first comes from a 2018 blog post describing an unnamed Googler's slide at an invite-only event, and Google never published it. Two of them point at marketing agencies whose own outbound links go somewhere else entirely. The long-tail figure has five different publications each presented as the original, with numbers that contradict one another.

That matters, because vendors make real budget decisions on top of this stuff. So we skipped the roundups and went to primary sources: Google Search Central, the Google Business Profile help docs, web.dev, and the platform documentation for Squarespace, Showit, and Pixieset. What follows is what those actually say as of July 2026, including three tactics still being sold that are now completely dead.

Almost nothing you should do about SEO has changed since 2023. Several things you should believe about your own data have.

1. Your Google Business Profile Is Still the Whole Ballgame

Google publishes exactly three local ranking factors, and it has not changed them: relevance (how well a profile matches what someone searched), distance (how far you are from the searcher), and prominence (how well known the business is). Google also says something worth repeating to anyone who cold-emails you about guaranteed local rankings: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

Distance you cannot control. Relevance is mostly category and service accuracy, which is the cheapest fix in this entire article. Prominence is the vague one, and that vagueness is exactly the gap the local SEO industry fills. Worth noting: Google's own SEO Starter Guide contains no local business section at all.

One real change landed recently. Google discontinued the My Business Q&A API on November 3, 2025, saying it is "in the process of updating the Q&A functionality and user experience." Google has signaled that the couple-facing Q&A section is changing too, though it has not published a formal announcement of that part, so treat the second half as a signal rather than a fact.

Practical step: Open your profile and check that your primary category is the one couples would actually search, not the one that best describes your craft. "Wedding photographer" beats "Photographer." Then confirm your service area is accurate.

2. Reviews: What Google Says vs. What Couples Do

Google's entire official position on reviews is one sentence: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." That is the whole thing. Note what is absent. Google says nothing about review recency being a ranking factor, despite recency being treated as gospel across the local SEO world.

Couples, however, care enormously. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, published in February 2026 and based on 1,002 self-reported US adults, found that 74 percent only consider reviews from the last three months. It also found 31 percent will only use a business rated 4.5 or higher, 47 percent avoid businesses with fewer than 20 reviews, and 80 percent are more likely to choose a business that replies to reviews. That is survey data from an SEO software company rather than anything from Google, and it deserves that label. It is still the best evidence available for an argument Google itself will not make.

A photographer whose newest five-star review is from 2023 reads as a business that stopped working.

Practical step: Count your reviews from the last 90 days. If the answer is zero, add a review request to your gallery delivery email. That is one automation, not a campaign.

3. Three Schema Tactics Died. One Is Built for Photographers.

FAQ schema is finished. Google's documentation states the feature "will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026," and Google deleted the FAQ documentation outright on June 15, 2026. It was restricted to government and health sites back in 2023; now it is gone for everyone. HowTo rich results died earlier, removed in September 2023.

Review stars on your own testimonials page were never going to happen either. Google's rule: if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or Organization structured data are "ineligible for star review feature." That explicitly includes embedded third-party widgets, naming Google Business and Facebook review widgets by name. This policy has been in place since 2019, which has not stopped anyone from selling it.

The one that is alive and genuinely suited to this industry is image license metadata. It needs a content URL plus at least one of license, creator, credit text, or copyright notice. Better still, you can do it through embedded IPTC photo metadata instead of writing code: the "Web Statement of Rights" field maps to license, and "Licensor URL" maps to the acquire license page. Most photographers already populate these fields in Lightroom and then strip them on export.

Practical step: In your Lightroom export preset, stop stripping metadata. Set copyright, creator, and Web Statement of Rights once, and it travels with every file, including when your work gets reposted without a link.

4. Speed Is a Booking Problem Before It Is a Ranking Problem

Google measures three things it calls the Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint is how long the biggest item on your page takes to appear, and it should be 2.5 seconds or less. Interaction to Next Paint is how quickly the page responds when someone taps something, and it should be 200 milliseconds or less. Cumulative Layout Shift measures how much the page jumps around while it loads, and it should be 0.1 or less. Each is measured across your real visitors, not a lab test. Interaction to Next Paint replaced an older measure called First Input Delay in March 2024, so any guide still telling you to optimize First Input Delay was written for a different web.

Google is unusually restrained about how much this matters: "There is no single signal. Our core ranking systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience." Good scores "doesn't guarantee that your pages will rank at the top." And the line that should settle the argument: "Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par." Fix your speed for the couple standing in a venue parking lot on bad LTE. Treat any ranking benefit as a bonus.

For image-heavy sites there is one mistake that dwarfs the rest. Lazy loading is a setting that tells the browser to wait and download an image only when the visitor scrolls near it. That is genuinely useful for the fiftieth photo in a gallery and actively harmful for the first one, because your hero image is usually the very thing Google is timing. Google's guidance is blunt: "Never lazy-load your LCP image." On more than 70 percent of pages, that biggest-item-on-screen is an image. Measured across the web, the typical load time was 2.9 seconds without lazy loading and 3.5 seconds with it. Switching lazy loading off entirely is the wrong correction though, because that made pages download roughly two to three times more image data. Turn it off for the images at the top of the page and leave it on everywhere else.

If you are on Squarespace, some of this is already handled for you. It automatically creates up to seven different sizes of every photo you upload and serves a smaller, more modern file format called WebP. The advice there is simply to upload sensible files at around 2500 pixels wide rather than to go hunting for a plugin.

Practical step: Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed checker. Look only at the Largest Contentful Paint number, and confirm your hero image is not set to lazy load.

5. The Platform Settings Quietly Costing You Traffic

Showit users, this one is worth the price of the membership. A sitemap is the file that tells Google which pages your site has, and you submit it once inside Google Search Console. Showit generates two of them, at two different addresses. Your actual Showit pages live at yourdomain.com/siteinfo.xml, not the sitemap.xml everyone assumes. The one at sitemap.xml or sitemap_index.xml is your WordPress blog, depending on which plugin you run. Showit's own documentation calls submitting both "the most important step of the process." If you submitted sitemap.xml and called it done, you submitted your blog and none of your portfolio.

Two more Showit realities. Your blog is genuinely WordPress, sitting at yourdomain.com/wp-admin with the Yoast SEO plugin already installed, while the Showit builder itself only lets you set a page title, a description, a share image, heading levels, and image alt text. Your blog has better SEO tools than your portfolio does. Separately, Showit builds your mobile and desktop layouts as two independent designs, and Google is explicit that a thinner mobile version can cost you: "If your mobile site has less content than your desktop site, consider updating your mobile site so that its primary content is equivalent."

On Squarespace, the thing to watch is alt text. Alt text is the written description attached to a photo, and it matters because search engines cannot see your images, only read about them. Squarespace fills it in automatically for some blocks, using the filename or the post title. For image blocks and auto layouts it fills in nothing at all, so you have to write it yourself. Background images cannot have alt text under any circumstances. Also worth knowing before you spend an afternoon hunting for it: "All Squarespace sites use the same robots.txt file and Squarespace users can't access or edit the file." To hide a single page from Google, go to Pages, then the gear icon, then SEO.

If you deliver galleries through Pixieset, this one is worth five minutes. The Search Engine Visibility setting, under your Client Gallery Dashboard, then Settings, then Preferences, defaults to "Homepage only." In Pixieset's words, that tells search engines to index only your Client Gallery homepage, and "will not index your individual Collections so note that those will not appear in search results." Switching it to "Yes" makes both your homepage and your collections findable. Pixieset also warns that changes "will take weeks to take effect," because search engines have to re-crawl your pages, so this is not a switch you flip the week before a slow season.

Practical step: Showit users, submit siteinfo.xml to Search Console today. Everyone else, spot-check three portfolio images for real alt text.

6. What Actually Changed in 2026: Your Data, Not Your Job

Google published a dedicated guide to optimizing for generative AI search, last updated July 10, 2026, and its answer is that there is no separate optimization to do. "The best practices for SEO continue to be relevant because our generative AI features on Google Search are rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems." Or more directly: "optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

In that same guide Google names and dismisses four of the tactics currently being sold hardest. An llms.txt file, which is a proposed text file meant to tell AI systems what your site is about ("Google Search itself doesn't use them"). Chopping your writing into small labeled blocks ("There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces"). Rewriting your copy in a special style for machines. And adding hidden code to your pages ("There's no special schema.org markup you need to add"). We went deeper on this in What Google Just Told Wedding Vendors About AI Search.

Two related myths are worth killing. Google-Extended is a setting that lets you stop Google from using your content to train its AI products, and a lot of people believe switching it on removes you from AI Overviews. It does not. Google states it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search." The one that genuinely costs you visibility is OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, because OpenAI's documentation says sites that opt out of it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers."

What genuinely changed is your data. Google Search Console now tells you how often you showed up in AI Overviews, and that is all it tells you. No clicks, no click-through rate, no search terms. Which means nobody can currently measure what AI search is doing to their traffic using their own numbers, including the people selling you a fix for it. Separately, around September 2025 Google quietly switched off a setting called num=100 that let tools pull a hundred results at once. Search Console impressions dropped and average position "improved" overnight for enormous numbers of sites that had changed nothing at all. If there is an unexplained cliff in your 2025 charts, that is the most likely culprit.

As for traffic actually arriving from AI tools, it is real, it is growing quickly, and it is currently a few tenths of a percent of referrals in large studies. Worth watching, not worth rebuilding your website around. One thing that is worth five minutes: if your site runs through Cloudflare, check your bot settings. As of July 1, 2025 Cloudflare began blocking AI crawlers by default on new domains, which means you may already be invisible to them without having chosen that.

Practical step: Note any 2025 impression cliff in Search Console as the num=100 change rather than an SEO failure. Then check your Cloudflare bot settings if that applies to you.

The Bigger Picture

Almost nothing a wedding vendor should do about SEO has changed since 2023. Google's own 2026 guidance says so in writing. What changed is the volume of people selling you something new and the quality of the evidence behind it.

The four statistics at the top of this article share one failure mode. A marketing agency gets cited as the source, the outbound link points at a different aggregator, and no primary study exists anywhere in the chain. One of the most-linked local SEO roundups on the internet does this three separate times on a single page. That is the foundation a lot of vendor marketing strategy is resting on.

The vendors who win at search are doing unglamorous things consistently: a correct category, recent reviews, real alt text, a submitted sitemap, and a homepage that loads. That list has been the answer for years. It just does not sell a course.

Sources

Every claim above traces to one of these. Where a figure comes from industry survey data rather than Google, we said so in the text.

• Google, How to improve your local ranking on Google
• Google Search Central, AI features and your website
• Google Search Central, Page experience
• Google Search Central, FAQ structured data (removed)
• Google Search Central, Review snippet structured data
• Google Search Central, Image license metadata
• Google Search Central, Google Images best practices
• Google Search Central, Google crawlers
• web.dev, Web Vitals
• web.dev, INP becomes a Core Web Vital
• web.dev, Optimize LCP
• OpenAI, Bots and crawlers documentation
• Cloudflare, Content Independence Day
• BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026
• Showit, Optimize with a sitemap
• Squarespace, What Squarespace does for SEO

Credits

Photographs from an at-home wedding on White Bear Lake, published on Style Me Pretty in 2026.

Additional credits: Rentals: Milestone Event Rental | Cinematography: A.B. Rich Films | Floral Design: Ashley Fox Designs | Wedding Dress: Elie Saab | Cake and Catering: Chowgirls Killer Catering | Hair Stylist: Tara Readon | Lighting: Phos Events | Band and Musicians: Elan Artists | Groom's Attire: Heimie's Haberdashery | Transportation: Northfield Lines | Coffee Cart: Coffee Cart | Rentals: Collected & Co | Rentals: Girl Friday | Beauty: Jesse Tomme Hair Salon | Rentals: Linen Effects | Draping: Rojas Ceiling Draping | Venue: Private Residence | Rehearsal Dinner Venue: White Bear Yacht Club