Venue SEO Case Study:  How Sunset Oaks Books 95-100 Weddings a Year — Without Google Ads

Amber McKinney has never paid for a Google ad (ever).

She runs Sunset Oaks Venue in Tyler, Texas, a competitive market with 100+ venues within an hour of her property. She consistently books 95 to 100 weddings a year. And roughly 50% of her bookings (not just inquiries, but actual booked weddings) say they found her on Google.

I’m excited to share more about Amber’s venue SEO results with our SEO Fix service from Sara Does SEO.

Meet Amber: engineer turned venue owner

Amber bought Sunset Oaks about six years ago. It was an already-operating venue, and, at the time, she was working as an engineer.

She eventually left that career to run the venue full-time.  But the mindset she brought from engineering is still so obvious in her approach, and I love it. She tracks everything: Traffic, inquiries, tours, sources, conversion rates, bookings.

It won’t surprise you that Amber is smart about where her time goes. She considered learning SEO herself and knew she could do it, but she said: “It’s not what gets me insanely excited to actually execute on it.”

So in 2023, she hired us to do it for her.

The Situation Before the SEO Fix

Here’s what I love about Amber’s story.  Most wedding pros reach out to us when they start to struggle– maybe inquiries drop or bookings start to feel slow.

But not Amber.  She reached out when her venue was doing well, knowing she needed to keep standing out.

In her first email to me, she said:

“Even though we are very booked, our market is very competitive, and I have to do things no one else is doing to stay ahead.”

It was 2023, and Sunset Oaks was about to hit their first 100-wedding year.  Bookings and business felt good, but she didn’t assume it would stay that way.

“It felt like new venues were popping up constantly, that there was more competition mounting.  We needed to really stay ahead. I just said, okay, we’re doing the SEO Fix. I would rather just have it done — that way it’s off my plate, I know it’s getting done, and then I feel equipped to maintain it from there.”

Sunset Oaks is outside of Dallas-Fort Worth by about two hours.  Which means she’s working with a rural market and a LOT of local competition. Winning in her market means being proactive.

She had a concern about wedding venue SEO, though: she’d always heard that hiring an SEO agency would cost thousands of dollars a month, ongoing, forever.  She thought it might just be smarter to run ads.

Then she saw how the SEO Fix worked.

“When I saw the cost and how intimately you were tailoring the strategies specific to the wedding industry and to venues… I felt like you guys weren’t doing anything generic.”

She realized the SEO Fix is a one-time project. It is a proven strategy, applied to be specific to her business.  She was ready to jump in.

What We Did in the SEO Fix

SEO Associate Sarah B. started with keyword research across the Tyler and East Texas market — everything from “Tyler Texas wedding venues” to “all-inclusive wedding venues Texas” to “affordable wedding venues in East Texas.”

Sarah chose the final keyword plan for Amber’s Squarespace site and optimized it fully: SEO titles, meta descriptions, H1 headings, image filenames, and alt text. Five pages were optimized in just a week.

She also found some technical issues Amber didn’t know were there, including duplicate content caused by index pages in Squarespace, 25 pages with multiple H1 headings, and blog tags generating dozens of low-value pages.

Sarah also reviewed Google Business Profile.  She gave specific recommendations on how to tighten the description and close a gap with competitors outranking her on the map.

What impressed Amber most wasn’t even the technical work. It was the approach.

“You guys asked questions I didn’t really even expect to be asked. Because you actually asked more in depth about the business and what our goals were, not just assuming — I just immediately felt more confident that we were doing something right.”

The Results

Five weeks later, every single keyword we targeted made it to Page 1 of Google.

But Amber tracks more than rankings. She tracks where her bookings actually come from, and the booking results were good:

“I saw consistently that over 50% of my inquiries and tours booked were coming from Google. That has pretty much remained consistent.”

She also watched her traffic grow. After the SEO Fix in 2023, her website traffic grew to around 4,000 visits a month.

She calls it her evergreen strategy.

“If you have the one-time SEO Fix, it just keeps working for you without you having to do anything. You don’t have to keep posting to maintain SEO.”

And when she thinks about what that means for her marketing budget:

“Rather than beating yourself up about not posting enough on social, or wondering if you need to pay for an expensive listing directory — the SEO Fix is an investment that just keeps paying for itself over and over again. It keeps working even when you don’t.”

Two Years Later: SEO Round Two

We love when we can support past clients again (it doesn’t have to be 7 days and goodbye if you don’t want it to be!), so we were so excited when Amber came back in 2025.

She’d been updating her website from Squarespace 7.0 to 7.1, and she was concerned that she’d changed some of the work from her SEO Fix. She was also seeing a slight dip in traffic when she checked her January 2025 numbers — and as a data person, that was a big red flag.

“I’m sure I’ve messed up some alt text and some file names.  Can you just do a checkup?”

Of course we could!  SEO Associate Holly came in and found a few real issues: the micro weddings page and the elopements page were competing with each other for search traffic. The micro weddings package information was in a PDF — which Google and AI tools can’t read easily. A few broken links. Some image filenames that had been overwritten during the updates.

Holly dove in to fix it. She updated meta data on several pages, optimized image filenames, separated the micro weddings and elopements pages into distinct content targeting different keyword sets, fixed the broken links, and resubmitted the sitemap to Google. She also delivered a content roadmap for expanding into nearby markets: Waco, the DFW area, Lindale, and others.

By October 2025, the SEO update was performing well. 

When Amber’s data tracking sheet compared January 2026 traffic to January 2025:

“It almost doubled.”

Twice as much traffic in the busiest search month of engagement season.  I love to hear it!

Where She Is Now

As of today, Sunset Oaks ranks:

• #1 for Tyler Texas wedding venues, wedding venue Tyler TX, wedding venues in Tyler Texas
• #2 for wedding venues East Texas, micro wedding Texas
• #3-4 for East Texas wedding venues, all-inclusive wedding venues Texas

In total, the venue is ranking on Google for 1,391 keywords.

Amber’s organic traffic is worth an estimated $4,700+ a month in ad-equivalent value.

And she still hasn’t paid for a Google ad.

What She Tells Other Venue Owners

Amber now coaches venue owners through her coaching brand, Vow to Grow. She tells them the same thing she told me:

“The internet is full of people willing to sell you a quick fix or an ad or a software. But over multiple years, I’ve consistently seen roughly 50% of my actual bookings — not just inquiries, but bookings — say that they found us on Google.

Organic search is alive and well. And once you have it in place, you don’t have to keep feeding it.”

She also coaches them on tracking. Because data is what keeps venue owners from panicking in slow seasons, and data is what tells you whether your marketing is actually working.

“We’re going to operate off of data, not just vibes.”

Is the SEO Fix Right for Your Venue?

The SEO Fix is perfect for your venue if:

• You are already booking, but know competitors are gaining ground
• You don’t want to set your whole SEO strategy yourself
• You want marketing that works without you having to maintain it every week

This is exactly what the SEO Fix is built for.

It’s a one-time, 7-day project. We do the keyword research, optimize your main pages, audit your Google Business Profile, and give you a clear picture of what’s working and what’s next. 

For Amber, the SEO Fix gave her a foundation that has brought in 40-50 bookings per year from Google, three years in a row, with no ongoing fee.  That’s an incredibly profitable investment.

Want to connect with Amber? She’s sharing free resources for venue owners — including a venue health tracking sheet — at vowtogrow.biz and on Instagram at @vow.to.grow.

About the SEO Fix by Sara Does SEO

Hey there!  We’re the team at Sara Does SEO, the wedding industry’s experts in Google SEO and AI search.  If you’re a venue or wedding pro, we’d love to set up your SEO for you in just 7 days with the SEO Fix (that’s what we did for Amber!).  Plus, we’ll develop custom content ideas for your business and goals, do a technical audit, and way, way more.  It’s the easiest and most affordable way to get expert SEO help.