The Lisa Devlin Column – Time to Dust Off Your Blog?
Imagine they are in the early stages of planning and are still searching for a venue. They find a guide you’ve written to wedding venues in your area. Or they’re planning an elopement to the UK from abroad, and your thoughtful, detailed post appears. Or they search a specific venue name, and a wedding you photographed there comes up.
In each of these scenarios, they have found something genuinely useful. Your expertise – what you know about light at that venue, what the day typically looks like, what couples should be aware of – is valuable information that a couple in research mode is actively looking for. You can share some of that in a social post, yes. But a blog post lets you go deeper, covers more ground and gives them a reason to stay.
And here is the repurposing kicker: nothing stops you posting that content on social afterwards. One blog post can become a carousel, a caption, a reel – as many times as you want. The effort compounds.
One of my Brighton venue guides accounted for around two-thirds of my bookings last year, and I keep reposting sections of it on Instagram. The blog post does the heavy lifting on search. The social posts keep it circulating. That is how you make both work together, rather than treating them as separate channels.
The changing search landscape
There have been significant shifts in how people search online, with AI being the biggest of them. Google now provides AI-generated summaries. Couples are using tools like Claude or ChatGPT to help plan their weddings, asking detailed questions rather than typing in short keywords.
This means that the old approach to blogging – a gallery of images and a quick write-up of the day – is no longer doing much for you on search. What does work is answering the questions couples actually have, not reporting on a wedding for the couple who was in it. You need to be writing about a wedding with the couple who has not found you yet firmly in mind.
