You have a beautiful portfolio and some experience under your belt, but how do you get noticed by potential clients? One proven way of getting seen is listing in wedding directories. Wedding directories are websites that gather all of the basic information of wedding vendors for brides and grooms planning their wedding. They are an important component to any wedding photographer’s overall marketing strategy, and they also help with local SEO rankings.
To help you out and simplify things for you, here is a list of the best wedding directories that photographers should be listing on. Wedding photographers should create a profile on all of the directories that offer free memberships, and they should also consider listing on select directories that charge fees. We’ll provide our recommendations below.
Wedding Wire/Knot
WeddingWire is the largest of the wedding directories, with millions of monthly views and tens of thousands of wedding vendor profiles. According to their website, they have over 500,000 vendors. All photographers should start here with a free profile. The paid membership can run thousands of dollars a year, so do a bit more research on how effective the paid plans are before jumping in. We have heard mixed results and much of it depends on factors like your area, your other options (opportunity costs), your conversion rate (the percentage of inquiries you can convert), and other factors.
Wedding Maps
A new player in this space is Wedding Maps. While they are currently only accepting new photographers by invite, it’s worth getting on their email list to find out when they open up to everyone. The reason we like them is because they are a collection of award winning photographers, so by getting accepted into their directory, you’ll be in good company. They are also creating a huge database of wedding venues, and then displaying the images of their photographers on the venue profiles. What this does is connect engaged couples with photographers by exposing them to photographers’ images taken at the wedding venues that they are interested in. This organic approach has huge potential.
Party Slate
Partyslate is a popular website that puts the power of getting featured into the hands of the wedding vendors. Instead of submitting weddings in an application-type process like many wedding websites, PartySlate allows you to submit your own weddings and tag all of the vendors involved in the wedding. So even if you don’t do any of the uploading work yourself, having a profile on PartySlate is great because you have the potential to be tagged/credited by other wedding vendors that you’re working with. For this reason, a free account is 100% worth it on this site.
Honeyfund Wedding Vendor Directory
The Honeyfund Wedding Vendor Directory is a free directory of wedding vendors that provide “at-home” services for pandemic weddings. These include back yard weddings, elopements, live streamed weddings, weddings via Zoom and more. If you provide these services, it’s worth getting listed here. The only catch is that nobody knows what will happen to this directory once the pandemic is over.
One Wed
OneWed doesn’t quite get the traffic of some of its competitors, but we appreciate the fact that their “free” profile is truly free, with profiles that show up in their search results. While you don’t get a link to your website with the free account, we still believe that it’s worth listing on this site. The process shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes if you have all of your info and images handy.
Other Directories and Websites to Consider
- Wedding Bee – Wedding Bee is a directory and blog with tons of traffic and solid long-standing reputation in the wedding industry. As of writing this article, however, I could not find a way to submit information, so we do not recommend spending time here.
- My Wedding Guide (New Zealand only) – If you’re planning to get married in New Zealand or the Pacific Islands, My Wedding Guide has everything you need for your big day!
- Eventective – Get free listings for event businesses in the US and Canada, but you have to upgrade for more features and visibility.
Note: Originally, we had a list of 10+ websites in this section, but as we reviewed each and tried to apply to each one, we found lots of limitations, pay walls, and other annoying issues with each site. We’ll continue to update this list over time as we find quality websites worth your time.
Conclusion
Listing on each website can take time, so be sure to have all of your information handy. While a single site or directory won’t likely make a huge impact on your business, in aggregate, they should help. As mentioned, directory listing should be just one aspect of your overall marketing strategy. Good luck!
