Optimising your website for SEO is a key component in driving traffic to and increasing the success of your site. But where should you get started to improve SEO on your WordPress site?
Find out how to improve SEO on your WordPress website with tips on WordPress tools and plugins you can use to help optimise your website in this guide.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of search engine optimisation. This involves optimisations you can make on your site to make sure it’s indexable in search engines. Taking steps to optimise your site can help to increase your rankings in search engines, and the higher your website is in search engine results pages, the more likely it is users will click on your site. The best part about SEO? It’s free! SEO is a cost-effective way to generate more leads and gain more visitors to your site.
Why is WordPress SEO important?
WordPress SEO is important to make sure your site gets picked up by search engines and is served in search engine results pages.
SEO can also help to make your site run and load faster, which in turn can improve user-experience.
WordPress SEO best practices:
- Check your visibility settings
- Audit your website
- Check Page loading speed
- Check Core Web Vitals
- Choose an SEO plugin
- Redirect 404 pages
- Create an XML sitemap
- Use a responsive and mobile-friendly theme
- Use tags and categories
- Manage security
- Use a fast theme
- Optimise your content
- Optimise your images
- Develop your internal linking strategy
1. Check your visibility settings
Begin by checking that your site is indexable to search engines. You can do this by looking in Google Search Console.
Inspect your website’s code and search for any ‘no-index’ tags that may be preventing your site’s content from being crawled.
- Check your site is only accessible at one of these addresses:
https://domain.com
https://www.domain.com
Either of these should redirect to one version of the site.
If it’s accessible at both or at their non-secure counterparts (i.e., http://domain.com, http://www.domain.com), this can cause issues.
2. Audit your website
One of the first steps in improving your SEO on WordPress is to conduct a thorough SEO audit, which should cover the technical elements and content aspects of your site. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are the key tools to use to conduct the audit.
Tools including Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or Botify can run a crawl of your site and diagnose any technical SEO issues.
Other tools you can use to conduct an SEO audit include SEMrush and Ahrefs. SEMrush is particularly useful to identify any content issues.
3. Check Page loading speed
Google takes page speed into account when deciding where to rank your site. Page loading speed is a ranking factor on both desktop and mobile, so optimising this can really help to improve your SEO.
You can check your page loading speed using tools like Google Page Speed Insights.
4. Check Core Web Vitals
Google has confirmed that page experience signals including Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor.
Check your Core Web Vitals using the Core Web Vitals test in Google Search Console. There are several things you can do to improve your Core Web Vitals score such as optimising images, stabilising loading by specifying room for images in the CSS, upgrade your hosting to speed up your server, use WordPress plugins such as WP Rocket to optimise CSS delivery, and improve the loading of third-party scripts, amongst other optimisations.
5. Choose an SEO plugin
Examples of SEO plugins on WordPress include Yoast SEO and SEOPress.
Yoast is a useful plugin that allows you to add meta titles, descriptions and more to your post, and give useful insights on readability and keyword targeting.
Other popular SEO plugins include All in One SEO, Rank Math, SEO Press and SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant. Find out more about the best WordPress plugins in our guide.
6. Redirect 404 pages
404 pages are pages where the server has received the request but cannot find the requested page. If the website visitor does not land on a page relevant to their search query when they land on the site, this could cause them to bounce off the site. Redirecting 404 pages to the most closely relevant page can help to improve the user-experience and serve the user the information they expect to see when landing on a site.
Redirecting 404 pages can also help to redirect link equity to important pages on your site.
7. Create an XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is important so search engines can understand the layout of your site and to help them index your site more effectively.
Ways to generate a sitemap include using a sitemap generator which your CMS may offer, use a dedicated sitemap generator tool, or you could even create one manually if you have a small website!
Make sure to include a reference to your sitemap in the robots.txt file so your sitemap is findable to search engines.
8. Use a responsive and mobile-friendly theme
A large part of the success of your site in SEO, is making sure it’s mobile-friendly. This can be achieved through making sure it’s a responsive site.
You can find out more about responsive vs adaptive sites in our guide. But the key takeaway here is that responsive sites are the preferred option to Google. Google ranks responsive sites higher in search engine results pages than non-responsive sites. Over half of web traffic comes from mobile, so making sure your site is optimised for the mobile experience is crucial. Google uses ‘mobile-first indexing’, meaning that they look at the mobile version of your site when deciding what pages to serve in the search engine results pages. Making sure your site is optimised for mobile is key to improve your SEO on WordPress.
9. Use tags and categories
Tags and categories can help to organise your content onsite, particularly on your blog.
Tags and categories not only help improve the user-experience, they also support the navigation of your site, making it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site. Tags and categories are important to help search engines understand the context of your articles and how the articles relate to each other.
10. Manage security
E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
These are the pillars taken into account by Google when assessing a website.
SSL certificates improve site security, in turn improving user-experience and SEO. SSL certificates are an important part of building and demonstrating Trustworthiness.
Using a WordPress plugin like MalCare or Wordfence Security to help protect your website from any malicious threats and provide alerts for security issues.
11. Use a fast theme
The theme you use can help to make or break the rest of your SEO efforts. When looking for themes, choose a fast, responsive, mobile-friendly theme that’s designed with SEO in mind.
Working with a web design agency to create a bespoke website may help you to improve your SEO efforts further.
12. Optimise your content
Optimise your content by including keywords naturally within your website’s copy and meta titles, descriptions and headings. You can find the search volume of keywords using tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs and more. However, avoid keyword stuffing! Ensure any use of keywords is natural, and any content you publish is created for users, not search engines.
13. Optimise your images
Optimising images helps your site to load faster, which in turn helps with your site’s SEO.
Some quick tips on optimising your images for SEO include:
- Using an optimised file name.
- Include alt text with keywords. However, avoid keyword stuffing or use of unnecessary keywords.
- Add structured data to help search engines display images as rich results
- Choose image format carefully. WebP is usually preferable as it can offer smaller file sizes and improved compression compared to JPG and PNG.
- Image size: Resize images to fit the intended display size. Ideally keep the resolution at 72 pixels per inch (PPI) or lower.
- Image compression: Make sure to use the correct compression type for the image type. For example, JPEGs use lossy compression, while PNGs use lossless compression.
14. Develop your internal linking strategy
Internal links are important because they help search engines to crawl your content, and understand each page’s relation to another. They help to establish your website’s site structure and can help to signify priority pages to search engines.
Internal links can help to drive authority and link equity to your priority pages, so the value of high-quality backlinks can be passed from one page to another.
Internal links also help with user-experience by providing website visitors with a quick way to find additional information they may need. Anticipating the website visitor’s next query in this way can also help to drive user engagement.
Don’t forget the importance of anchor text! Anchor text in internal links helps Google to understand a page’s topic by providing context around what a page is about, so making sure this is optimised can help to improve your SEO on on WordPress.
This guide is just a taster of some of the things you can do to improve SEO on your WordPress site. To really supercharge your SEO efforts, consider delegating to a specialised SEO agency.
The SEO process in web design is a multi-faceted one that can help boost your website’s visibility, user experience, and conversion potential. At Yellowball, we understand that by following this step-by-step guide and incorporating SEO into our web design and web development projects, we can unlock the true power of search engine optimisation and lead your website to success in the digital world. Contact Yellowball today, we’re an award-winning web design and development agency based in London, UK.
Read more: The Importance of SEO in Web Design Processes.
