A really powerful way for you to spend your time and energy whilst weddings are essentially furloughed, is to evaluate, reevaluate, and evaluate even more, your current business systems and marketing strategies.

I like to view my marketing strategy as a journey, and the end of that journey is when someone “walks into my store” and makes a purchasing decision, and my “store” is my website.

Googling "How to be different"

On a recent Google Office Hours webinar, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller, made this comment on being different to a webmaster who has a ringtones website who was complaining of traffic dropping and their search engine position dropping:

In general, I think with a website that’s focused on ringtones, it’ll be a little bit tricky because our algorithms really do try to look out for unique, compelling, high quality content.

And if your whole website is built up on essentially providing ringtones that are the same as everywhere else then I don’t know if our algorithms would say this is a really important website that we need to focus on and highlight more in search.

So with that in mind, if you’re focused on kind of this small amount of content that is the same as everyone else then I would try to find ways to significantly differentiate yourselves to really make it clear that what you have on your website is significantly different than all of those other millions of ringtone websites that have kind of the same content.

Maybe there is a way to do that with regards to the content that you provide.

Maybe there is a way to do that with the functionality that you provide.

But you really need to make sure that what you have on your site is significantly different enough that our algorithms will say well this is what we need to index instead of all of these others that just have a list of ringtones on the website.

So that’s probably not going to be that easy to make that kind of a shift but that’s generally the direction I would hit.

And that’s the same recommendation I would have for any kind of website that offers essentially the same thing as lots of other web sites do.

We’ve often talked about the power of being different in the marketplace, but it’s important to note that even Google is judging you for being not different.

Take a breath, step back, and have a look at your brand and your position in your marketplace.

Are you different?

Are you one of the ten or more local celebrants whose business and brand name is “Name of Town Celebrant”?

Are you communicating your difference well?

How could you better communicate how different you are?