19 May, 2021

5 Actionable WordPress SEO Tips to Boost Your Organic Traffic

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WordPress is one of the most popular and widely used content management systems or CMS globally, supporting 40% of websites that are live today. One of the advantages of choosing WordPress as your CMS is that it offers a host of tools and plugins that can help boost your site’s performance and search ranking. However, there are more steps you can take to improve your WordPress SEO further and attract more visitors. 

Here are some tips from our SEO experts here at Springhill Marketing to help you boost your organic web traffic. 

1. Strengthen your site’s Core Web Vitals

With the Core Web Vitals becoming a Google ranking factor in 2021, you must determine how your WordPress site performs from a user experience standpoint. Fortunately, you can quickly do this by checking out the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console. 

The report measures three essential factors, namely:

  • Largest Contentful Paint – the amount of time it takes to load the page’s main content.
  • First Input Delay – the time it takes visitors to interact with page elements.
  • Cumulative Layout Shift – how a page loads and how shifts on its layout cause visitors to click on other page elements. 

Depending on how your webpages perform, the report will grade them as:

  • Good
  • Needs Improvement
  • Poor 

Certain Google developer tools can help you in case you receive a “Poor” or “Needs Improvement” rating from the report. For instance, you can use Lighthouse or Google PageSpeed Insights to determine what’s causing your pages to perform poorly. 

After making the necessary adjustments, log on to your Google Search Console and click on the “Validate Fix” button to re-evaluate your pages. 

2. Verify your domain preferences

When choosing a domain name for your WordPress website, you need to consider a few important matters. 

a. www or non-www?

You’re probably wondering if you should add “www” to your domain name or not. Some people believe that your choice has a bearing on WordPress SEO. However, the truth is having a “www” in your domain name doesn’t affect your search ranking. 

That being said, it doesn’t mean that you should immediately change your domain name to a non-www, especially if your site has been around for quite some time. You should set up proper redirects first to ensure that your visitors won’t get lost on their way to the page they are looking for. 

b. Duplicate URLs

Regardless of your domain preferences, make sure that your WordPress site doesn’t have duplicate URLs. Having duplicate URLs forces Google’s search bots to crawl different versions of the same page. It also dilutes your website’s authority. 

To avoid duplicate URLs, you should have redirect rules in place. This will ensure that visitors to your site will land on the correct version of a webpage. You can also add canonical tags to your site to help Google’s search bots identify which page to crawl. 

3. Use WordPress plugins

As mentioned earlier, WordPress is already equipped with useful SEO tools. However, there are additional plugins that you can install to have full control of your site’s SEO. 

Yoast SEO, in particular, is a handy optimisation tool. It is free, and it comes with several features that allow you to: 

  • Perform page and keyword analysis to create better content.
  • Optimise your meta descriptions.
  • Generate XML sitemaps on auto-pilot.
  • Use breadcrumbs.
  • Incorporate social and schema markup in your site. 

4. Create accessible permalinks

WordPress is known for creating permalinks or URL structures that are hard to read. When you upload a new webpage or post, the URL will look something like this by default: https://yoursite.com/2021/03/11/page-name/. 

Since Google favours URLs that contain relevant keywords, you should modify your permalinks by using the title of the page or post.  For example, let’s say you’re a plumbing company and you’ve created a page for your services. The webpage’s permalink or URL should look like this: https://abcplumbing.co.uk/northampton-plumbing-services. 

Not only is it good for your WordPress SEO, changing your webpages’ URL structure makes your permalinks look cleaner and more accessible. To change your URL structures, access your WordPress dashboard and then click on “Permalinks” in the Settings menu. Click on “Save Changes” after making the necessary adjustments. 

5. Choose the best image file names

Besides adding alt text to your web images, there are other steps you can take to optimise them for search engines further. Here are a few essential things to keep in mind: 

  • Name your image files with actual words before uploading them on WordPress. For example, instead of using the default DC00001.jpg, set the image’s file name to northampton-plumber.jpg.
  • Use your target keywords whenever possible.
  • Use lowercase letters to keep your image URLs clean, consistent, and organised.
  • Insert hyphens in between words to make it easier for Google to crawl your images. 

Start Optimising Your WordPress Site

Out of the box, WordPress is already fantastic with SEO. However, there are things you can do to make your site more search engine-friendly. By making the necessary adjustments, you can obtain better search rankings and attract more organic traffic to your site. 

If you need help implementing the strategies discussed above, we at Springhill Marketing are happy to assist you. Please contact us today, and let our team of SEO experts create a digital marketing plan tailored to your business.

Drive Your Business Towards The Best Results.

Talk to us about how we can help.

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