SEO is sometimes seen as a bit of a dark art.
Whilst it can seem quite complex, implementing WordPress SEO on your site is more a case of being pragmatic, covering the main areas, and ensuring everything is correct.
You’ll notice that this is a long post – and it needs to be as there are many different factors to consider when optimising your WordPress site.
This is one of the main reasons that it can be more effective to outsource your WordPress SEO to an expert.
Optimising your WordPress install.
Just how well you can optimise your WP site will depend largely on how it’s built.
A bespoke build will be easier than an off-the-shelf theme, the number of plugins installed can affect this too and your hosting also plays a big role. I’ll cover each of these below.
In this section we’ll look at:
Your WordPress theme.
There are some amazing off-the-shelf themes out there. Some are well optimised out of the box and others need a little work.
Before you start on any on- or off-page SEO you must make sure your site is technically optimised as much as it can be.
If you don’t do this, you are simply going to hinder all the other SEO work you do.
Typically I use tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights, GT Metrix and Chrome’s Lighthouse to get a balanced view of how the site is performing from a technical perspective.
These tools will all give slightly different results so it provides a good comparison to use all three.
How to optimise your WordPress theme.
You are going to need to start with some form of caching plugin.
Personally, the ones I use the most are Autoptimize and WP Rocket.
I use the free version of Autoptimize and I have a developer licence for WP Rocket.
Autoptimise is easier, and WP Rocket is a bit more of a faff, but if I have a preference for a WordPress caching plugin, it’s WP Rocket.
There is no one rule for all sites.
As every site is different, WP Rocket does require some fine-tuning.
You may find that switching everything on and checking all the boxed to combine and defer files may break your site, especially if it is very reliant on Javascript.
If you have a theme that tries to do everything, you a likely to encounter issues, likewise, if your site has lots of active plugins, this might be an issue.
You may have to use WP Rocket to exclude certain Javascript files from the cache to get things working correctly.
This does take some time and a little technical know-how, so if you need a hand – get in touch.
To really optimise your site, you need to inline all your above-the-fold CSS.
No matter what you do, if you don’t inline all the CSS used above the fold on your site, you are going to get render-blocking penalities.
This is actually something that, in my opinion, Autooptimize does a little better than WP Rocket, but then WPR does have a great tool in beta which removed unused CSS.
The jury is still out on which one is best here, and you can use both AO and WPR on your site, but that can get a little complicated.
Google Page Speed and the other tools are also going to tell you that you need to optimise images on your site – this is always the case, but I will cover this in image optimisation.
Be prepared to compromise.
Sometimes, you can try all you like with technical optimisation and it simply will not work.
A poorly built theme or one that relies on loads of JS and other files can make it impossible to get the results you want without breaking your site, so you may have to settle for less than perfect results unless you are willing to rebuild your site.
If you find yourself at this point, you have to choose from one of two options:
- Crack on, hoping that your content will be so much better than other sites you don’t need to worry about poor technical optimisation
- Rebuild and simplify your site, doing it right this time on a lightweight and bespoke WordPress theme
Optimising your WordPress plugins.
Plugins form an important part of your WordPress install, but they can also cause problems when trying to optimise your WordPress install.
The simple rule of thumb here is to not install loads of plugins on your site.
I see many sites where there are so many plugins installed, the site owner no longer knows what they do.
This causes issues as it can become impossible to work out what plugins are required and which ones can be removed.
Be aware of what plugins do.
Every time you install a plugin on your WordPress site, it adds functionality.
What it can also do is install Javascript, font files and other stuff that you might not be aware of.
One example of this is a recent Responsive menu plugin I installed on a site, only to find it was loading several Google fonts and an icon library onto the site, even if I elected not to use these fonts and icons.
This type of thing can really impact your page load times and make your WordPress site slower than it should be, for example, a plugin can load several fonts on the front-end of your site that you don’t even use.
This can cause render-blocking and speed issues on your site that you don’t really need.
Your DNS.
Slow DNS can cause your site to be slow.
Not on the load time, but the actual time it takes to connect to your site.
Personally, I think Cloudflare is the best place to use for DNS as it can actually speed things up and it has the additional benefits of extra security and its own cache, which further speeds up your site.
Again, this is not without some setup and for some, changing nameservers can be problematic.
It also means an extra layer of cache, which means when you are editing your site, you have to clear another cache to ensure code and CSS changes are reflected on the front-end, but WP Rocket can connect to your Cloudflare account to allow you to flush the Cloudflare cache within your WordPress install.
Cloudflare has a free account so you can try it and plans then start at $20 a month, so it won’t break the bank.
Your website hosting.
This is often one of the main things that can cause a slow website.
Cheap hosting on shared servers with 100s of other sites can really slow down your site.
The main problem with cheap hosting is that your website performance is subject to the activities of other sites on the same server.
If a site hosted with you eats up all the CPU, it’s going to slow your site down.
The other main issue with cheaper shared hosting accounts is that you really don’t know when your site is running slow. It could be fine when you check it, but 10 minutes later, it could be running slow.
As the server performance is affected by sites other than your own, it can be hard to ascertain if your site is consistently poor, fair or OK unless you check it constantly.
On-page WordPress optimisation.
This is basically the optimisation of the content that’s on your WordPress posts, pages and custom post types.
This is what most people consider to be SEO, and it’s the most accessible of all types of SEO as you can do it yourself.
In this section we’ll look at:
Optimising your WordPress URL structure.
This is something that is often overlooked when optimising WordPress sites.
Such is the excitement in building new sites that people often forget to check the basics first.
Every site should start life on a spreadsheet.
If your site is already live, export all the URLs to a spreadsheet (crawl it using Screaming Frog and upload it to Google Sheets).
The URL structure of your site is crucial to how well it gets indexed, how Bots understand it and how it ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is going to get complicated.
There’s an entire library of posts that can be written about this single optimisation stage, but I will cover the basics here.
Why you should plan your site on a (shareable) spreadsheet.
I use Google Sheets to plan all the sites I work on.
If it’s a new site, I add tabs to the sheet for top-level pages, child pages, posts, custom post types, categories, tags and archive pages.
This allows you to get a good view of your site and allows others to comment on rows in the sheet with questions, comments and tasks.
Doing this will allow you to see from the get-go where you might have holes in your content.
Too many top-level pages, too few posts, too many categories and so on.
You can also add columns for the title, meta description and focus keyword for each page or post – it’s just easier to manage it on a spreadsheet than in the WordPress admin.
Plan your entire site out this way, initially brainstorming the content you want on there and then using the sheet to fine-tune everything.
Using a sharable sheet means that other people can contribute and comment on it – keeping all notes in one place.
If you already have a site.
If you are looking to optimise a site that’s already live, grab all the URLs from the site and get them into a Google Sheet – generally I create a new tab for each section of the site.
I define sections by the URL:
www.example.com/post-or-page-name/
are top-level pages (or posts, but don’t do that);
www.example.com/parent-page/sub-page/
would be one section;
www.example.com/category-name/post-name/
would be another section.
You can basically split your entire site up using the URL structure to get a great overview of your permalinks.
The structure of your site’s permalinks helps AI understand your site, so keep it meaningful and simple.
Making it easy to understand.
This may be a little pedestrian, but I approach site structure as follows:
Your URLs should read as they point to something.
So don’t have:
www.example.com/the-name-of-your-service
Instead have:
www.example.com/services/the-name-of-your-service
To use a real-world example, on my company’s main site, we don’t go for short-tail URLs, we make the URL tails longer so they make more sense to AI.
www.toastdesign.co.uk/services/annual-report-designers rather than www.toastdesign.co.uk/annual-report-designers.
Subtle, but very different.
The URL in the first example is ‘saying’:
We are Toast Design and one of the /services/ we offer is /annual-report-designers/
The URL in the second example is not ‘saying’ that it’s a service. It’s left open to interpretation.
Both of the above a valid, but the difference to AI, in my opinion, is that we are trying harder to help it understand.
Note the other subtle difference here – in the above example, Toast ranks for Annual Report designers ABOVE Annual report designs.
Search intent comes into play here in the permalink decision: people searching for Annual Report Design are likely to be looking for examples of designs of Annual Reports. People searching for the ‘designers’ on the end are more likely to be looking for an agency to design an Annual Report.
In my mind, URL structure should work like this:
Imagine walking into a library where there is just one long row of shelves.
You know you are looking for is a ‘service’, for example, but this means you have to walk all the way down from A to S to find what you are looking for.
Now imagine that the library is organised into 26 rows – one for each letter.
It’s going to take you far less time to walk across the rows to ‘S’ and down that row to find what you are looking for.
Basically, what I am talking about here is about curating your content so it’s easier to understand from both a human and AI perspective.
Note that this is simply an opinion, but it’s worked time and time again.
This sort of structural optimisation can make a huge difference to your site, but proceed with caution if you try to implement this on an existing site that ranks in the search – it needs to be done properly.
Get help with your URL strcture
Optimising your WordPress page and post content.
Once you have your permalinks sorted, you can focus on the on-page content.
I am a big fan of Yoast for doing this, but Rank Math is also looking like a serious contender in the SEO plugin sector.
Whichever you use, they both do similar things: analysing your content to check against the use of your focus keyword and so on.
Yoast uses a traffic light system for your post and page content to check that all the required stuff is within your content (keywords, internal and external links, copy length etc), so I am not going to go into all the details here, just install the free version of Yoast and do what it tells you.
If you want to get more into your internal links, Yoast Pro can help you with this, or you could try a plug I’ve created with colleagues called Internal Link finder. This free plugin lets you find potential internal links from the front end of your WordPress site by scanning your posts and pages for potential anchors to internally link from.
Whatever tools you use, you need to have the right keyword in the first place, so before we start looking at the on-page, we need to find the right keyword.
Keywords.
There are loads of tools that do keyword research, but I mainly use:
These tools will give you insight into the keyword data you need to target a keyword to go after.
I’m not going to get into all the details of keyword research here, but simply put, the more competitive the keyword, the harder it’s going to be to rank for it.
I use the LSI graph in a slightly different way as it gives different data that should directly influence the copy on your page.
LSI shows you a list of the top-ranking sites for the keyword you are researching and then shows you the sorts of words and phrases are present on these top-ranking pages.
This should directly influence what you write for your copy.
I look through the list of generated words and carefully pick terms to weave into my content.
The simple idea here is that you have great content that ‘speaks the same language’ as the other top-ranking content.
Your permalinks.
Once you have your keyword, this should be reflected in your slug (permalink).
There are differing opinions on how you should do this.
Short-tail URLs are talked about a lot, so your-domain.com/post-or-page-title.
Long-tail URLs are also valid, so your-domain.com/something-here/post-or-page-title.
Personally, and as I have outlined above in this post, I prefer longer-tail URLs as I think they make more sense to AI.
Keep your permalinks pretty, so don’t use permalinks with dates or make them overly long.
Approach it simply; how can my permalink structure best explain my content and the structure of my site.
Use the Permalinks section in the WordPress admin: Settings > Permalinks to update your URL structure to something that makes sense, and if you are changing things on an existing site, be careful – you’ll want to identify any existing URLs that rank and approach any change to your permalink structure carefully.
Look at permalinks as a way to curate and structure your content. Think like a librarian and make stuff easy to understand and find.
I’ll discuss this more in the custom post types section below as you can further enhance your SEO using custom post types.
Optimising categories and tags.
This is one of the most overlooked things when it comes to WordPress SEO.
Remember: every time you create a new category or tag, WordPress creates a new URL and if that URL is not optimised, you are going to be creating more URLs for Google to index that don’t do you any favours.
The most important thing to avoid here is creating duplicate content by having too many posts that all have the same category or tag.
If you have categories ‘X’ and ‘Y’ and you categorise a lot of the same posts under both categories, you are going to end up with archive pages that are the same.
Avoid the above and also make sure you have category descriptions that output on the front end of your site.
Write a unique category or tag description for each and every category and tag you use on your site – this will help make the page content unique and avoid duplicate content issues.
Also, make sure you use Yoast to optimise every category and tag too – unique titles, slugs and meta descriptions to help the search engines understand what you are trying to do.
Optimising archive pages.
Archive pages are simply pages that list all the posts under a given category or tag.
I’ve covered the main points in the above section, but there are other things you can do on archive pages to optimise them further.
Create custom templates for each category or tag.
This is a lot of work, but you can use breadcrumbs, Yoast and category descriptions to automatically make these pages unique.
You can also build templates in WordPress for each category or tag – this helps to create more unique pages – add calls-to-action, custom text, different page headers and so on.
The more you customise your archive pages, the more interesting they are to the search engines.
Advanced Custom Fields (one of the best WordPress plugins ever) allows you to add custom fields to your taxonomies: images, galleries, related posts and so on – you can do anything using ACF, and whilst it can be a little tricky to code it all into your templates, it’s well worth it.
One of the main issues with archive pages is that it can be difficult to get enough content on the page as well as the list of posts. Using ACFs will allow you to add new text sections for each page and turn them into more of a landing page for your archive rather than just a list of post titles, excerpts and buttons.
Any additional note here on buttons that link from archive pages to the single post page – don’t simply use READ MORE as the anchor text for every link – add anchor text that is descriptive of the content that you are linking to.
Optimising custom post types.
Using custom post types in WordPress makes managing a large site easier.
Rather than having everything within posts or pages, CPTs allow you to create new types of content, make them follow a page or post format and assign custom taxonomies to that content (categories and tags).
There are lots of benefits to using custom post types:
- They make it easier to curate your content
- They make it easier to optimise your site (SEO and speed)
- You can have a single post template for each CPT
- You can also have custom archives
- You can have custom category archives
- You can have custom tag archives
- Advanced custom fields can be created for each post type
Virtually every site I build uses custom posts types.
If you do nothing else with them, it’s down to the simple organisation of content and building a site that’s easy to manage.
In terms of SEO, they bring more to the party.
Custom post types can have their own permalink structure and archives, giving you extra ways to make your post URLs make sense to the search engines.
They can also have their own archives which again give you an opportunity to create some content-rich archives with links to relevant post content.
If you get into Custom Post Types, with custom taxonomies for categories and tags, you are going to need to get deep into your theme templates and ACFs to optimise these additional site sections, but the SEO benefits can be huge.
Optimising media.
Two things to cover here:
- The size of your media library
- The files you upload
Your media library.
Every image you upload to your media library should have an appropriate title and an ALT tag.
Make sure these two are sorted every time you upload an image.
If you don’t, you’ll have loads of image files that are not optimised and going back through them when there are 100s of them is can be a real pain.
It’s always best to optimise any image before you upload it to your WordPress site.
Resize images BEFORE you upload them – it’s not great to upload 20MB files to your server as they will ultimately slow down your installation.
The files you upload.
WordPress can do a good job of resizing the images you upload to your site, but make sure you don’t upload images that are too large.
If your media library gets too large, it can put a strain on your server and ultimately slow down your site.
Even if you host your site with a cheap service that promises unlimited server space, you are going to cause problems if your library gets too big.
Off-page SEO.
Whilst you have easy access and direct control over the on-page aspects of your SEO, off-page SEO can be a little harder to manage and can take significantly longer to implement.
The off-page techniques listed below should be carefully considered: if you do some of them wrong, you can end up doing more harm than good.
Below we will look at some of the key elements of off-page SEO:
Backlinks.
Arguably the most significant off-page SEO technique for improving the overall SEO of your site.
Simply put, a backlink tells the search engines that another site has decided to link back to your site and it counts as a ‘vote’ towards your site (overly simplified explanation, but there you go).
It’s very easy to do backlinks wrong, which can harm your site, so proceed with caution when getting backlinks and don’t get too many too fast.
Getting good backlinks is also very easy to say, but very hard to do in terms of the time needed to get them, so you may want to reach out to a third party service.
So how do you get good backlinks?
Organic backlinks are often considered the best, but these can also be problematic. You have no control over who links to your site, so you can end up with 100s of links from poor quality sites with content that is not related to yours.
You can use Google’s disavow tool to remove these. Heed the warnings on that page.
Good organic backlinks are:
- From sites that are relevant to your content with;
- High domain authority, so Google knows they are quality sites that have;
- well written articles related to your content;
- and non-spammy anchor texts
That’s a big ask as sites that match the outline above don’t freely give up backlinks to everyone: you’ve got to have some awesome content that is worthy of a backlink.
Another method is to pay someone to get you backlinks.
There are 100s of companies that now specialise in getting backlinks to your site. Some are good, many others are spammy, so if you are going to look at buying backlinks, make sure you use a reputable company and not someone that emailed you randomly.
I have used The Hoth and Fat Joe in the past, both to good effect as they have built relationships with quality sites to get backlinks from.
Obviously, this will cost some money, and you may be surprised at just how much, but done properly and sensitively, it does work.
Backlinks also help to increase your domain’s authority which also means that they can give a boost to your own on-page SEO work.
Most importantly.
Backlink acquisition must be done carefully and slowly – too many links too fast and you will look spammy to Google, which can then penalise you.
Name, address and phone number.
Your NAP profile helps Google to understand that your business is legit.
You simply need to make sure that wherever your company is referenced online, you use the same name, address and phone number.
Directory listing sites are the most common places where these details are listed, and they need to be consistent and match exactly with your Google Business Listing (if you have one) so Google finds the same information everywhere.
Again, this sounds simple, but takes time – best to get a company like Fat Joe to do your NAP profiles for you (and even then it will all need checking).
NAP profiles are commonly more associated with local SEO, but it does not hurt to make sure they are done correctly if you are looking at national or international SEO too.
Commenting.
This one is a little old school, but some people still see this as a worthwhile process.
It’s simply commenting on blogs where comments are allowed and making sure your profile link in the comment links back to your website.
If you carefully pick the sites you comment on, these effectively build an index of related sites with no-follow backlinks to your site.
Personally, I think this may have passed its sell-by date, but it’s an option.
Forums.
So you post up in a forum and you give yourself a backlink.
That’s about it, and the jury seems to be equally split on whether this is beneficial or a waste of time.
Again, the relevancy of the forum counts here, as does the quality of the article and whether you need to be logged in to view it etc, but there are some that argue that this is still a valid method of improving your off-page SEO and potentially your domain authority.
Forums are also well aware of this technique, so many require you to post a certain number of times or reach a certain level of membership before they will allow you to link or add a link in your bio.
Influencer outreach.
This is another time thief.
Don’t even bother considering outreach to influencers unless you have something unique and with a real point of difference.
The time that it can take to build the relationship and get an influencer to endorse your product or service can take an age, and even though you may be paying a lot of money for this type of off-page SEO, influencers don’t just promote anything, they have their reputations to consider, so approach this carefully and really consider if this is the best option for you, your business and your product or service.
Guest Author.
Ultimately, what you are doing with Guest authoring is writing great content for someone else’s website in return for a link back to yours.
This is an approach that can work for some types of websites, but not all.
I get at least 4 requests per week for guest posts across the sites I look after, but I never engage with the idea of posting someone else’s content on my sites.
This does serve to get exposure, and if you are an individual rather than a business, it can be a good way to get your name out there and improve your reputation as a blogger or content creator, but for businesses, it might not work for you.
Broken link building.
Another time-heavy process whereby you find a site or blog in your niche with an external link to a site that’s broken (so the link ends up on a 404 page).
You reach out to the site owner and respectfully point this out to them, offering up a link to a page on your site that is a better resource than the original.
Site owners don’t want external links landing on 404 pages, so the idea here is that you have done them a favour and they change the link to your site: link juice for you, fixed 404 links for them.
This can be seen as a mutually beneficial approach to off-page SEO for you, and on-page SEO for them, so in theory, it works well, but you have to invest the time in doing this.
Content Marketing.
If you’ve ever come across HubSpot, this is basically what they used to push all the time.
Produce a killer piece of content, but instead of writing it as a blog post, put it on a landing page and as the visitor for their name and email in return for getting the download.
One of the key things to remember here is that in order to get this landing page with the download ranking, you already need to have a relatively high-ranking site.
This is part of the myth with content marketing – the successful sites tell you that it’s easy, but that’s because it’s easier for them – it wasn’t to start with and they had to build up domain authority and rankings before they could then say content marketing was easy.
Personally, I think if you have great content nowadays, publish it as a page or post and trust in your expertise (and Google’s algorithm) to get this content ranking in its own right (even if your domain authority is not great).
Locking content down behind a give-to-get or a paywall seems a little out-of-date.
Newsletters.
Not strictly SEO, but a good way to drive traffic to your site.
Offer a sign-up on your site, collect opted-in emails and send them interesting stuff.
Some simple rules to follow here:
- NEVER send marketing emails to people that have not opted-in to your list.
- ALWAYS send your list something of value – and this does not mean information about a sale or a coupon discount.
- SUPRISE your email newsletter list with things they don’t know that are relevant or helpful to them.
- DON’T SPAM – one email per month is more than enough, for you and for them as you have to make sure what you send out is going to engage your list membership.
There’s not much more to say about that.
Types of SEO content.
On and off-page SEO can simply be a list of ‘things to do’ to improve your site, but one thing that often gets missed with SEO is making sure you are doing the right type of SEO on the right content of your site.
Top-level pages on most sites (who we are, what we do etc) – obviously optimise the content, but don’t try and over-optimise these pages, they are generic.
Product and service pages – these want to be optimised with plenty of internal links back to them.
Blogs, articles and case studies etc – are the pages where you can really get your teeth into writing content specifically for SEO.
If you want to really SEO your WordPress, you are going to need to produce content designed specifically for SEO.
This is one of the mistakes that a lot of people make in terms of SEO, so don’t build a 10-page site then optimise it, build a 50-page site, with 10 main pages about your business, team, about etc, and then create 40 blog posts around this content to link back to it.
If you are struggling to identify the types of content you could be posting on your WordPress site, here are some examples and explanations:
Case Studies.
Case studies about what you do and the problems you solve are a great way to build out the content on your site.
Search intent (the reason the user is Googling) is something that is important here, as is your ability to produce great content quicker.
When people search for certain stuff, they are looking for an answer or a solution to their problem.
Case study posts provide a good way in which you can provide a solution to their issue.
Case studies are (should be) easier to write as they are documentation of a solution that you have already provided for another client.
What makes case studies also easier to write is that you are simply documenting something you have already done – this is not creative writing that you have to spend longer planning and considering, it’s something that’s already in existence that you can simply document and demonstrate, together with a customer review and great images.
In order to make a Case Study post or page rank, you still need to do your keyword research, but it should be niche and targeted at longer search strings – this is all about the specifics and the detail.
By writing a great case study, you are looking to rank for people that have the same problem or issue – the more niche you offer, the easier this becomes.
Write at length, include images and videos where possible and weave lots of broad-match keywords into your post.
For the right click-through, this content is exactly what they are looking for, as they have the same problem, so ensure you also include calls-to-action or forms on your post so people can convert right on the page.
Skyscraper posts.
This is an older technique, but it still works, and I am going to take no credit for this – it’s from Brian Dean over at Backlinko.
You can read more on the link above, but a condensed version of this is:
- Find a post or page that ranks with a list of ‘top-ten tips for XXXXXXX’
- Write your own post or page that lists the ‘top-twenty tips for XXXXXXX’
That’s it in a nutshell, but there is a little more to it than that as explained in Brians’s post (linked above).
Glossaries.
An A-Z list explaining every word and phrase about your produce or service niche.
A glossary will allow you to great lots of content around all of the keywords for your product or service.
What you should look to try and achieve with a glossary is not to overly sell, but to help.
If you can make your site a go-to resource for information about your sector, then you can try and get it ranking as a resource with good dwell time (time on page).
For example, if someone is not in a current position to buy your services, but they are researching them and the Google a term and find a glossary page on your site that details the term in-depth, they are likely to spend a lot more time on your site reading the content.
This may not result in a sale, but it will help your rankings overall and when the visitor moves into a position where they are looking to buy, your site should be something they recall.
Glossaries have to have good content – you can’t just write 50 words for each word or phrase, so this is going to take some time, but the results can be good.
Facts and Figures.
Not too different from Case Studies above, but with a slightly different intent.
Again here, it’s all about your niche, and what you are looking to do here is get backlinks from other sites looking for a reference website to include as their external link.
How to do this:
Lets’ say your site is all about ‘widgets’ (as a generic example).
What you do is to find as many industry facts and figures that relate to your niche and write posts about these facts and figures.
- The Top Twenty Widget facts for 2022
- How many people in the UK use Widgets
- The 10 most popular widgets of all time
- How many people are using Widgets for XYX
This content matches the sort of search terms people will be hoping to find answers for in your niche.
Produce a well researched and written article around this sort of thing and you will attract traffic from the SERPs and natural backlinks.
General blog posts.
These types of blog posts are the quickest and easiest to write.
Generic content that documents stuff.
- Good examples of landing page design
- What is the best way to improve your website?
- Do modals annoy website visitors?
Are a few examples that I could write for my site in around 30 minutes with about 600 words.
I am not looking to get these pages ranking, I am using them to bolster the internal page rank of other content on my site.
So using ‘Widgets’ again as an example product or service, I want my main Widgets page to rank in the SERPs, so I am going to give it an internal page rank boost by writing posts around it and then having a broad match anchor text on the blog linking back to my ‘Widgets’ main page (that ranks in the SERPs).
This content still needs to be well written, but it should be easier and quicker to produce.
Service explanations.
Kind of similar to the above, but these are blogs that dissect your services into separate posts that go into a lot more detail and link back internally to your main service page.
What you are doing here is again, generating a lot of associated content with a good internal link.
The key thing to watch with this type of content is not to cannibalise keywords for your main ranking page.
Good for creating internal linking, but if not done in a considered way, you can create content that competes with ranking pages.
That’s a lot to take on board.
And that’s why most people outsource their SEO to the pros!
If you need help with SEO, no matter how large or small your site or where you are on your SEO journey, get in touch to arrange a free 30-minute WordPress consultation call about how I can best help you.
No BS or sales banter, just an upfront chat.
Social Media.
I speak to a lot of people that swear they get all their business from Social Media, but when asked to show the data, they are unable.
Having social media profiles and spending hours posting to them does not mean your website traffic comes from them.
Social media is transient and temporary, so whilst you might get likes and follows, be sure to close the loop here and match your social media activity to your leads.
As Social media is one of the easiest things to use, anyone can create and post content, but the real metric to measure is how much traffic it delivers to your site.
Likes, engagements and so on mean nothing if they don’t ultimately end up in conversions.
If you are a lifestyle brand, then, without doubt, Social Media is the channel for you, but if you sell Ground Source Air pumps, for example, other off-page activities might be more suitable.
I am not against Social media in any way, and all those mentions and so on can be linked to building your brand, but do people really use social media for anything more than lifestyle-related click-throughs?
We seem to be at a point where Social Media Marketing relies on big data, so if your posts get liked by simply your own staff and a few random other accounts, question whether it’s right for you.
One of the things social media channels do very well make you think that if you are not on there, you are in some way missing out, so they have almost become something that companies simply must do.
Remember that Social Media is not a ranking factor in SEO, but social profiles and content can rank in their own right, so who knows really.