WordPress SEO Best Practices for Higher Search Engine Rankings

WordPress is one of the most reputed content management systems, which helps you stage your business among the online audience. But are you aware of the fact that there are specific SEO practices over WordPress that can help scale your website’s rankings to the next level?

If you didn’t know about it, now is the time to leverage the potential of it. WordPress can be optimized with best practices in order to improve the SEO ranking and enhance the website’s performance. There are specific steps and methods involved in the process, which will help you optimize the content and take necessary actions outside the platform to promote positive results. 

So, if you seek WordPress development for a responsive website, which you intend to rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and attain more traffic, this article is here for you with some of the best practices. 

Here are the Best Practices Available For You to Enhance WordPress SEO

WordPress is itself SEO-friendly, which enables even non-tech-savvy people to implement easy optimization techniques. It is evidently great news for all small and medium businesses. 

If you have already invested in quality WordPress development services, but are lagging on a budget to invest in SEO improvements to rank higher, then there are specific practices for you to count on, which include:

1. Content Optimisation

The content you upload onto your WordPress website is considerably the most crucial asset for you to gain your audience’s attention. You ought to have a brilliant site structure, responsive web pages, enhanced security, and much more to create a brand impression in a competitive industry. 

But beyond all of these aspects, you need to ensure your content is beyond excellent and provides value to what your audience is looking for. You need to first look out for the pain points of your audience and then specify how your products or services can solve their problems. 

It is no rocket science, but you need to understand this simple theory deeply. You can use your products or service solutions as a compelling content niche. Create blog posts, videos, eBooks, infographics, and other types of content to keep your audience engaged with your brand. Let them know that you are the one providing them with effective solutions.

When you have the best content in hand, the next step is to implement on-page optimization by using some WordPress plug-ins, such as Yoast SEO. With Yoast SEO, you will be able to assess the SEO parameters of your content and optimize the same to meet the criteria.

Word count, keyword occurrences, meta tags, paragraph length, readability and other such factors will be taken into consideration to ensure that your content is SEO-friendly. Once you have optimized the content as per specified SEO guidelines on the Yoast plug-in, you can go ahead and format the content for publishing it ahead. 

2. Speed Up the WordPress Website

One of the biggest drawbacks to SEO is being caused by the extended loading time of the WordPress website. In the SEO world, the websites that get a high bounce rate due to their loading time aren’t mostly ranked by Google or any other search engines. Responsiveness should be a prime consideration in the WordPress website development process. 

It is because the attention span of users is very less. And they would switch to your competitors instantly if they don’t find your website or web page loading within three seconds. Site speed is one of the most crucial technical ranking factors that every WordPress website would need to surpass the competition. 

When you hire WordPress developer, you will be educated on some impactful techniques suggested for a better SEO ranking. To help you better understand it, here are some recommended techniques with which you can expect to speed up the loading efficiency of your WordPress website are:

Compressing the Large Images

The larger the image files are, the more will be your loading time. They are the biggest offenders responsible for slowing down the website. You must use plug-ins such as WP Smush for compressing the images and optimizing them without hampering their quality and visual appeal. In this way, your images will load fine, whereas the website’s speed will be enhanced as well. 

Clean Up the WordPress Theme

You must get rid of outdated page elements such as unnecessary functions, JavaScript, database calls, and others. Remember to delete the old themes, as hackers might use them to gain unauthorized access to your website. In accordance with that, the older themes backed up in your website’s server will slow down the performance as well. 

Use Caching Plug-in to suppress the Server Load

Caching plug-ins will create the state HTML versions of the dynamic pages, which will effectively reduce the server load times. There are various options out there for you to consider, which include free tools such as W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache. If not, you can also avail of some paid options, WP Rocket, to avail outstanding features. 

Don’t Integrate Too Much Plug-In

There isn’t a plug-in for everything you expect to attain from your WordPress CMS. But, you should stick to just the plug-ins that will provide you with enough value for the website. Do not go crazy behind plug-ins and add unnecessary ones, which will slow down the website. To enhance the plug-in benefits, you can invest in website audit software to analyze on-page factors and get suggestions on speeding up your site.

Also Read: 10 Proven Strategies for Creating an SEO-Friendly Website Design

3. Optimise Your WordPress Website for Mobile

It is undeniable that a lot of your potential leads are searching for products or services that you offer through their mobile phones. Due to this, Google algorithms start crawling through the mobile sites on priority, keeping the desktop counterparts as a second preference. Thus, mobile optimization is of utmost importance today than ever. 

There are a few things that you can do to improve the mobile version of your WordPress website. You must focus on the on-page speed, image compression, and other such adoptions to make things work. Here’re a few things you should try and implement:

Make Use of a Responsive Theme

First, you must ensure that the WordPress theme you have integrated is responsive. It should optimize the content well to fit onto all mobile devices. 

Design Specifically for the Mobile Visitors

There’s a wp_is_mobile() built-in function, which helps the WordPress CMS detect various devices over the server level. It helps create customized experiences for all your mobile site visitors. 

Introduce A Mobile Application

You can also launch a mobile application that will replicate your business offerings in a more sophisticated manner. This way, the users will have a more streamlined way of engaging with your products or services. 

Develop Accelerated Mobile Optimised Pages

The accelerated mobile pages are considered very fast in terms of design meant specifically for mobile devices. WordPress has its own default plug-in for you to create such pages, which will be listed on the top of SERPs when users search for them with relevant keywords from their mobile devices. 

4. Integrate Your Google My Business Profile to the WordPress Site

Google My Business profile brings together a lot of your key company information onto the local rankings. For instance, information such as user reviews, business descriptions, and physical addresses is listed over the Google My Business profile. Thus, these details impact a lot on your business website’s position over SERPs. 

Once your Google My Business profile is set, you can add your WordPress website to the profile, alongside other details, including operating hours and business description. Following that, look for specific widgets and plug-ins that will allow you to transfer your key ranking signals, such as business maps, photos, customer reviews, and others, from the My Business profile to your business site. 

You should also integrate a plug-in that can allow you to showcase the Google My Business profile reviews on your website. You might have to use the Google Places Reviews plug-in to make it happen. Thus, it will enhance the trust factor among the customers about your business offerings. 

To add the cherry on top, you can consider adding an interactable map over the website through a widget or plug-in. For instance, Google Maps Builder can be of great help to it. Using this, customers will be able to find you and their convenience is what would help your website rank higher in the SERPs. 

Conclusion

These are the four outstanding techniques that you can impose in order to make your WordPress website rank higher in the SERPs. You might feel like it is a daunting task to implement all of these measures, but believe it or not, it is worth the effort. Following these measures, there are a lot of other things that one should do to make the WordPress website SEO-friendly. 

If you are a business owner and have a WordPress website that is falling short on SEO implementations, you can take the help of professional adaptations to scale the ranking efficiency. To help you with the needful, Midastouch Infotech, a renowned WordPress development agency, is here with core SEO services for optimizing your website to experience a widened outreach. 

With us by your side, your WordPress site will get enhanced exposure from the target audience, which will help you record numerous sales and generate high revenue. So, get in touch with us today to learn more about our WordPress SEO services!