How to Optimise Your WordPress SEO Strategy for Maximum Profits
Today, people can talk about building websites from scratch without batting an eye.
Content management systems like WordPress make sure that anyone, be it a freelancer, student, or full-on web developer, can build a professional-looking website without writing a single line of code.
You can integrate functionality with plugins, modify appearance with customisable themes, and grant design flexibility by supporting codes like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
However, there are several things that WordPress can’t and won’t do for you. One of which is to help you establish a profitable SEO strategy for your website.
Yeah, you’re pretty much on your own in that aspect, but you shouldn’t feel discouraged.
In this post, we’ll help you grasp the fundamental WordPress SEO strategies that can maximise your website’s profits.
Let’s begin.
1. Manage Your Search Visibility
When indexing websites, search engine crawlers travel through links and inspect the on-page content of every page they encounter.
Doing so will enable them to determine the relevance and quality of the page in question, which in turn translate to its rank worthiness.
If you’re still in the process of building your WordPress website, the last thing you need is a Googlebot snooping around and judging your unfinished content. What you need to do is temporarily prevent search engines from indexing your website.
Fortunately, WordPress has a turnkey solution that will discourage crawlers from indexing your website. From the main dashboard, expand “Settings,” click “Reading,” and then select “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.”
That’s it! Just don’t forget to de-select this option once you’re confident with the amount of quality content you have on your website.
2. Optimise Your URLs
The next step also focuses on the settings found in the WordPress dashboard.
In the “General” section of the “Settings” tab, you can decide once and for all if you want to use “www” in your website URL. From there, update the “WordPress Address” and “Site Address” fields and click “Save Changes.”
For example, you could use either:
Why is this important? Because search engines like Google treat both URLs as two different websites.
In other words, you don’t optimise both sides and expect their results to add up — what you’ll get are two different websites ranking independently of each other.
3. Improve Your Loading Speed
It may sound like a small issue, but your website’s loading speed actually has a huge impact on your rankings.
According to statistics, 40% of online users tend to abandon a website if it takes more than three whole seconds to load. This leads to two things:
- High Bounce Rate
Always remember that a search engine’s best intention is to provide users with the best content possible. A high bounce rate, however, indicates that most users find your content relatively useless, which is a red flag in the eyes of these search engines. - Lower Conversions
Of course, bounce rate also directly affects your website’s conversion rate and overall profitability. And if your slow website is actually putting off 40% of your traffic, then your website’s profit potential is essentially nearly halved.
The good news is, boosting your WP speed performance doesn’t have to be difficult. There are plenty of tools and plugins you can use to make this process almost effortless.
WP Smush, for example, is a straightforward plugin that automatically implements lossless compression to everything in your media library. This allows you to quickly achieve faster loading times, especially if you happen to build visual-heavy pages.
For more specific steps on how to improve your website’s loading speed, you can use Google PageSpeed Insights to quickly identify issues that cause slowdowns.
To use PageSpeed Insights, just enter your website URL, click “Analyze,” and wait for the results. Both the desktop and mobile versions of your website will be assessed by the tool:
PageSpeed Insights will also provide you with actionable recommendations on how you can speed up your website.
4. Research Focus Keywords
At this point, it’s time to step away from the WordPress platform for a while and focus on your target keywords.
Remember, keywords make sure your SEO efforts make you visible to the right audience. Without targeting them correctly, you could end up wasting thousands of dollars on content and link building for organic traffic that won’t convert.
To look for lucrative keyword opportunities, one of the best tools you can use would be Ubersuggest. Unlike most other keyword tools on the market, it doesn’t require you to pay or surrender your email address in order to work.
Ubersuggest works by expanding seed keywords into long-tail variations, which are easier to rank for in SEO and target a narrower audience. All you have to do is enter your seed keyword and click “Look Up.”
To help with your keyword research, take note of the following tips:
- If applicable, use “filters” to find keywords with transactional terms, such as “hire,” “buy,” “services”, “for sale,” and so on.
- Look for keywords with a keyword competitiveness rating of 0.4 or less, which encompass all low-medium competition keywords.
- If you run a local business, be sure to set the proper language and region before you look for keyword ideas.
5. Add Keywords to the Right Places
Now that you have profitable keywords in mind, you need to get back to WordPress an inject them in the right places.
To do this more effectively, it’s recommended to use the Yoast SEO plugin, which conducts a real-time review of on-page SEO factors. It then proceeds to give you a checklist of objectives that will help optimise your content:
Yoast SEO will also give your content “Readability” and “SEO” assessments found in the “Publish” section of the editor, which should turn green if things look acceptable.
However, see to it that every problem and improvement suggestions on the Yoast SEO plugin are duly addressed. If you really want to reach the top spot of Google, you need to exploit every opportunity to improve your website’s rank worthiness.
Conclusion
There you have it — how to optimise your SEO strategy and the proper way to execute WordPress SEO for more conversions.
Of course, what we’ve discussed so far are on-page SEO strategies. You still have a long way to go if you want your website to claim one of the top spots in search engine results.
If you’re curious about the next step, check out more posts on SEO by clicking this link. Good luck!
Originally published at optimiseandgrow.online on April 17, 2018.
