You have a WordPress site and you know that your SEO isn’t what it should be.
But, where do you start?
I am not an SEO expert, so I phoned a friend and chatted with our friends at StudioHawk US. We partnered up on this article to create a guide on what you should be looking for when thinking about how to implement SEO enhancements on your site.
Start with the basics
Keyword research
The first step in SEO for your WordPress site is identifying the right keywords and phrases that your potential visitors are searching for. These should be relevant to your business, product or service offering. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ahrefs to discover the terms that are most relevant to your business.
On page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing individual pages on your WordPress site. Some of the key aspects include:
- Title Tags & Meta Descriptions – these are critical for both SEO and click-through rates. Ensure your title tag includes the target keyword and is under 60 characters. The meta description should summarize the page’s content in around 155 characters and also include the target keyword were natural.
- Headings (H1, H2, H3): Use headings to structure your content. Your main heading should be a H1 tag (usually the title of your post or page) and subheadings should use H2 or H3 tags to break up content into more digestible sections.
- URL Structure (or “Slug”): WordPress allows you to customize permalinks. Ensure that your URLs are short, descriptive and include the main keyword. Don’t add any special characters or underscores or capital letters. Keep everything lowercase and separated by “dashes” or “hyphens”.
- Content Quality: The quality of your content is always going to be important, and just pumping out AI content isn’t going to help your SEO in the long-term. Make sure your content is high-quality, engaging and informative. Naturally incorporate your target keywords, but avoid keyword stuffing. Always focus on user intent and providing value.
- Internal Linking: Link through to other pages or blog posts across the site. This can help to improve Google’s ability to find different pages across the site, improves navigation for users and spreads link equity.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes elements of your website, which can affect its overall performance and search engine crawling. Some of the key technical SEO considerations you should keep in mind for your WordPress site include:
Mobile optimization
Make sure that your website is thoroughly tested on both desktop and mobile devices so you can see how responsive it really is. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites.
Site speed & performance
Slow-loading sites can hurt your rankings and can lead to a big drop in conversions. Use plugins like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or NitroPack to help improve site speed and performance. You can also optimize images yourself using tools like Smush.
XML sitemap
Make sure your site has an XML sitemap. This is a map of all of the most important pages on the site that you want Google and other search engines to crawl and index. You can check if your site has an XML sitemap by adding /sitemap.xml to the end of your home page. If this shows up blank, then you do not have one.
WordPress plugins like YoastSEO and RankMath automatically generate these for you (more on this later).
Secure site
Make sure your site is secure by using an SSL certificate. Google gives preference to secure sites and it stops your site from being as vulnerable to attacks.
Off-page SEO
This refers to a number of factors that you might do off of your main website that can influence rankings. This primarily means backlinks. Engage in guest blogging, content partnerships, share content or partner with an agency that specializes in link acquisition to develop a healthy number of high quality backlinks to your site.
Tracking & Analytics
It’s important to be able to measure your SEO efforts. Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console as the primary tools to track visitor behaviour, keyword performance and site issues that may occur. These tools are free for WordPress owners to set up.
Are you using your WP SEO plugin correctly?
There are a large number of SEO plugins that are available for WordPress that are designed to make the optimization process even easier. However, it can be a bit of a minefield. There are two tools in particular that are more popular than the others: Yoast SEO and RankMath.
How to use Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a powerful and very user-friendly plugin to help you optimize your WordPress site. There are a few steps to follow to use Yoast SEO.
Install Yoast SEO
Head to Plugins > Add New and search for “YoastSEO”. Then click Install Now. After installation, click Activate.
Set Up Yoast SEO
Once activated, you’ll see a new Yoast SEO Menu on your dashboard. Go to SEO > General to start the set up. This will guide you through basic settings like connecting Google Search Console and choosing your site type.
Optimize Your Posts
When editing a post or a page, scroll down to the YoastSEO section. Here you’ll see different fields like “Focus Keyphrase”, “SEO Title & Meta Description”, and “SEO Analysis”. All of these (except SEO analysis) can be edited by you. The SEO Analysis section will give some suggestions on how you can improve things like your keyword usage, headings and readability.
Improve Readability
Yoast will also check your content’s readability, providing tips on sentence length, paragraph structure and more.
Yoast also does a lot of other things behind the scenes, such as adding Organization schema to your site which can provide more context to Google. However, these 4 steps are generally the most commonly used by WordPress owners.
How to use RankMath
RankMath is a similar tool to Yoast, also designed to make optimization easy for beginners.
Install Rank Math
Follow the same steps as Yoast – From your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins > Add New, search for “Rank Math, click Install Now. Once installed, click “Activate”.
Set up Rank Math
After activation, you will be prompted to run a set up wizard. Follow the step-by-step instructions to properly configure Rank Math.
Optimize Your Content & Improve Readability
Similar to Yoast SEO, Rank Math will provide different sections below your content editor around focus keyword, SEO title & meta description and content analysis, to help you to optimize your content and improve your readability.
Summary
Both Yoast SEO and Rank Math are popular SEO plugins, and the choice is yours on which one you feel is a better interface and offers more functionality for your direct needs.
Is your WP page builder slowing your site down?
For a long time, WordPress did not have a built-in page-building tool. In 2018, WordPress officially released Gutenberg (now called the WP Block Editor) and added native block-based editing to its websites.
Since more than a decade passed between WordPress’ creation and the addition of Gutenberg, several plugins, like those of several other CMSs, added a “drag-n-drop editor experience” to WordPress.
These page builders are robust. They come packed with a lot of features (some more than others). And because of that, they add a varying amount of bloat to a website’s code. The more code that has to load the slower a page will load and impact its SEO performance.
Pagely did an in-depth analysis of five of the most popular WP page builders and how they perform with a basic landing page. While the results of this test are relatively fairly close, it’s good to note that the page that was tested was fairly basic and not indicative of most websites.
In quick summary: the more robust and feature-packed a page builder is, the slower the site will be.
Fairly logical, right? WP Bakery, Elementor, and Divi are the three page builders that pack the most features into their system and end up slowing down a site the most.
Page builders during a website redesign
In your SEO assessment of your current WordPress site, you’re going to be thinking about the future state at some point. It is a good time to reconsider your page building platform when going through a website redesign. If you’re at that point, I want you to consider the following questions:
- What are my site’s metrics using Google PageSpeed Insights and GTMetrix?
- Do I need all the features this page builder gives us?
- What is it about this page builder that makes us want to use it?
- Does this page builder allow us to stay on brand easily?
Responsive web design and search engine optimization
It’s been many years since Google updated its algorithm to a mobile-first index and you are probably not shocked as to how many websites perform poorly on a mobile device still.
Start with a simple user test
Pull out your phone and go to your website. Click around and try to access different pages throughout. Go through different paths through your site that you normally wouldn’t take. During this test, is there any friction that you experience? Chances are, if a real person is experiencing that friction, automated tools that are used to rank your site also feel it.
Check Google PageSpeed Insights
When running Google PSI, the first tab open is for mobile devices. When you’re scrolling through all the diagnostics, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the technical jargon that is on the page. I’m going to go through a few of the most common that impact mobile performance and thus your site’s SEO.
Properly size images
It is very easy to upload an image straight from a mobile device or a stock photography website. However, it is highly unlikely that that image is the correct dimensions or aspect ratio.
Websites have gotten a lot smarter over the years. You can upload any size image, crop it down, and save it away for later use. However, a few things are typically not taken into account:
- Quality: When using basic cropping tools in WordPress, it will save the image in the same quality it was uploaded in. However, in most cases, the quality of the image can be reduced down by 50-60% and still appear identical.
- Aspect Ratio: When thinking about your mobile site, a lot of times images will be cropped different from desktop down to mobile. Before uploading an image, pre-crop it to the correct dimensions so your site doesn’t have to load the full size image when it’s never going to be needed. For example: Let’s say your headshots on your About Us page are all square. Before you upload them, crop them all to be square. This will reduce layout shift in Google PSI’s mobile analysis.
- Dimensions: Unless the image you are using is going to be a background image of a banner, the chance of needing an image with any dimension more than 1,000px is unlikely. Resize the image down to the max you’d ever need, and then upload it. While you’re at it, reduce the quality of that JPG down to Medium.
Serve images in next-gen formats
Know what file type to use for specific images.
- PNG: Only use these for small icons that need to have transparent backgrounds. PNG files are typically have the largest file size and need to be use sparingly.
- JPG: Used mostly for full-color images and is the most common file type. When using JPG, you can typically get away with reducing the quality of the image to Medium or Low and have a minimal impact on what the the image actually looks like.
- WebP: This is smaller file-size sibling to JPG. Whenever possible, use the WebP format instead of JPG as it is automatically optimized for quality and file size.
This is critical for mobile sites as mobile devices are frequently used while disconnected from modern home and business internet. The smaller a website’s footprint can be, the more it can be used while on the move. And Google likes that.
Does your website actually convert?
It’s great to optimize your pages for the best page speed, the right keywords, good backlinks, and so much more. But, it all doesn’t matter if a potential customer doesn’t feel compelled to get in touch with you or purchase your product. The last piece I want to go through on this SEO assessment is what happens when a customer actually gets to your site?
To answer that question for your site, I want go through a few of my checklist items for conversion rate optimization:
What is the one action you want a customer to take?
Before looking through your site, I want you to define the single most important action anyone should easily be able to take across your site. Jot it down.
Every page should have at least one clear button to take this action. And, it should be named the same across each page. For example, at the time of writing, the key action I want people to take on the Classic City website is to Schedule a time with me. There is a big orange button on every page that says Schedule.
And your main action may change over time. That’s OK. Hopefully, when you’re reading this post years down the road, there will be a different core action on our website and you can see how that has changed over time.
Let’s increase conversion on your website.
What is the best way to get a potential customer into your ecosystem?
Now that we’ve defined the main action, I want to define the best secondary action. The bar for this should be much, much lower. To figure this out, ask yourself a few questions.
How can you provide value to a customer:
- Without using their time or money?
- Without using any more of your time or money? (preferrably)
- That isn’t tried-and-true? (ie. everyone has a “newsletter sign up”)
Getting someone to simply “raise their hand” to say they may be interested in the future is better than them not converting. My challenge to you is to think of what that could be for your business and ensure that it’s mentioned across many pages and posts of your website.
For us, it’s a website analysis. Why use your time trying to figure out why your website isn’t converting when you can get an outside, expert opinion on it? The only time it takes from a potential customer is the time to fill out a simple form. It’s virtually no risk.
Talk to your customers
This is a much underrated tool in every business’ toolbelt. Schedule time with segments of your current customers and ask them some basic questions:
- Why do you keep working with us month over month?
- If we disappeared tomorrow, what would happen?
- What problem were you having when you started searching Google for a solution?
- When you’ve worked with other providers in the past, what was missing that we accounted for?
Once you ask those questions, use words and phrases from those conversations directly in your content. If one of your clients was experiencing issues, and felt a particular way, there is a high chance that others are in their shoes. If you can use words that empathize with those problems, the higher the chance you get website visitors to think: “Yes! That does sound like me!”
Conclusion
Now, you are armed with a solid checklist to through for an SEO assessment on a WordPress site. On this list, there are a lot of things that small teams can work on internally without the need of an agency partner. However, if you’re looking for SEO help, you should get in touch with my friends at StudioHawk. And if your website needs some help with conversion, I’d love to chat with you.
