Anyone looking to gain valuable website traffic to their WordPress website needs to start with learning more about SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
For anyone new to SEO that is trying to learn more about it, you know that it is not an easy task. You also know that trying to navigate through WordPress isn’t always the easiest of tasks either, but that’s why we’re here! We’re here to help layout a few tips and tools to help make your life easier when it comes to SEO on your WordPress site!
SEO Tip 1: Keyword Research
One of the most important things to do in SEO is figuring out what keywords you want to rank for on search engines organically. If you skip this step, you won’t have a clear direction and in turn, won’t see the results you want. And how do you do this? A good place to start is to put yourself in the mind of a potential client and do a few searches on Google for what you think they would search in order to find you and write those keywords down!
A keyword is an idea or topic that defines what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called “search queries.”
For Example: Since we are a marketing agency in Milwaukee, WI, one of our keywords we try and rank for is, “Milwaukee Social Media Marketing Agency”.
Put together a list of those keywords that you’ve searched for pretending to be your potential clients, and figure out which ones are worth going after! You’ll want to find keywords that have a lot of search volume on a monthly basis, but you’ll want to make sure that they’re not so competitive that you’ll never rank for them.
Here’s a great tool to do your keyword research.
If what I’m talking about sounds like gibberish, or if you just need more help, we dedicated an entire chapter of our SEO guide to keyword research.
SEO Tip 2: Start a Company Blog
A key component of SEO is making sure your website is healthy. What does it mean to have a healthy website? It means that your website is regularly posted on and updated with quality content. There really is no better way to do exactly that than to have a blog and create content that is relevant to your industry.
For Example: On our blog, we write about common questions that we get from our clients or prospects that can help them out! It can be serious, it can be fun, it just needs to be updated regularly. And by regularly, I don’t mean anything crazy like every day. Once a month is better than nothing!
SEO Tip 3: Download Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a free plugin on WordPress. This is one of the most popular plugins, not only for SEO, but on WordPress in general. That should tell you something on its own.
Yoast does an amazing job of simplifying SEO. Yoast will help you practice proper SEO techniques, give you tips, and makes it very easy to implement, all on the individual pages of your WordPress site.
SEO Tip 4: Set Up Permalinks
This one is pretty straightforward because, by default, WordPress will make your permalinks look really goofy and will be bad for SEO.
A permalink is the full URL you see, and use, for any given post, page, or other pieces of content on your site.
An example of what a permalink will look like by default by WordPress is something like this.
https://www.bestmarketingagencyever.com/2020/05/15/sample-post/
We don’t need the date in there, and there is a better way to do this for SEO sake.
In order to fix this go to:
Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Make sure “Post name” is selected and save.
This will make it so your URLs will be neat and relevant to your page title.
SEO Tip 5: Limit Plugins
This will sound funny after recommending that you download a plugin 2 tips ago, but don’t download too many plugins on your WordPress site! As a rule of thumb, the more plugins you have, the slower your website will be.
Website speed is one of the core things that google measures to help determine SEO rating. If you have a website that takes a long time to load, Google thinks that you are providing a poor user experience and won’t be as likely to rank you well.
There are certain plugins you can’t live without but think twice before downloading each plugin, and ask if you can do what the plugin does without it.
Do you best to not have more than 15 – 20 plugins.
And there you have it! Our top SEO tips and tools for your WordPress website in 2020! There are plenty of great tools and SEO practices out there, and feel free to reach out if you have any questions about SEO!