Reaching people before they know a palace is an option

The Challenge

Historic Royal Palaces looks after some of the most recognisable buildings in the country, including Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, the Tower of London, Banqueting House and Hillsborough Castle. Every one of them can be hired for weddings, dinners, receptions and corporate events. Very few people know that.

The search data made this clear. Nearly all of the site’s organic clicks came from brand searches such as “Hampton Court Palace wedding” and “Tower of London venue hire”. Those were people who already knew the palaces were available and were looking for the booking page. Anyone earlier in their search, typing “heritage wedding venues” or “banqueting halls London”, was landing on directories and round-up sites like Hitched, Tagvenue and Hire Space instead.

The venue hire pages already ranked well for their own names. What was missing was any presence at the start of the buyer journey, where couples and event planners are still working out what kind of venue they want and haven’t yet thought of a palace.

There was a second constraint. Historic Royal Palaces is a charity with a distinctive voice and strict writing and brand guidelines. Every piece had to read like it belonged on their site: an elevated, heritage, warm invitations rather than hard sells, and no generic “historic venue” copy that could have been written about anywhere.

The Solution

We built an SEO strategy around three groups of keywords: conversion terms (people already searching for a specific palace), research terms (people comparing venues) and informational terms (people planning an event). The conversion pages were in good shape, so most of the effort went into the research and informational stages that the site had never covered.

From there we produced a programme of top-of-funnel content aimed at the searches people make before they know a palace is an option:

• Guides built around venue styles, such as heritage, medieval and garden wedding venues, each showing where the palaces fit
  
• Event planning guides for large and intimate venues in London, answering the practical questions planners ask about capacity, layout and exclusivity
• Longer, more reflective pieces on why a wedding in a place of real history feels different
• A separate strategy for Hillsborough Castle, which is a very different market, leaning on its gardens, its proximity to Belfast and the wider Northern Ireland events calendar

Every piece was written to the Historic Royal Palaces guidelines, spoke about the palaces in the organisation’s own voice and linked through to the relevant hire pages, so readers who arrived early had a clear route to an enquiry.

The Conclusion

The new content started ranking for exactly the early-stage searches the palaces had been missing. Between the strategy baseline in June 2025 and March 2026:

• “Heritage wedding venues” moved from position 30 to position one
• “Northern Ireland castle wedding venues” moved from position 27 to position one
• “Party venue hire London” reached and held position 10
• “Belfast castle wedding”, “royal themed wedding” and “venue hire City of London” all climbed through the rankings

The traffic arriving from organic search was also the right traffic. In March 2026, organic search drove 131 key events, around 80% of all conversions on the site. 

For the first time, Historic Royal Palaces is appearing in front of people who hadn’t yet realised they could get married or host an event at a royal palace.