WordPress is a Content Management System that can allow you to post content much more effectively and efficiently. However, with just this tool you are not guaranteed great SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you are looking for easy tips and tricks that you can implement to boost traffic to your site we got you covered!

Here is a list of actionable tips that can help you drive traffic to your site and beat out your competition.

Keyword Research

No matter how beautiful and impactful your content is, the most important goal is to have your content be seen by the right people. It may be tempting to just think of an important topic to write about in your niche, but great SEO experts are able to make their content work for them instead of them working for their content.

Keyword research can be broken down into 3 main steps

  1. Figure out your customer profile: Who are the people that will come to your website? How do you provide them value? What do they expect when they are looking for this product?
  2. Find the ideal keywords: What are these customers searching for? Which keywords have low competition but high traffic? This can all be done on free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Ubersuggest.
  3. Deliver content: Why are these people searching these keywords? How can we create content that gives them exactly what they are looking for pertaining to this keyword? How can we engage with them and have them interested in reading more?

If you are able to answer all of these questions you will have an excellent keyword research strategy that will greatly improve your SEO.

Build High-Quality Backlinks

Whether the year is 2002, 2020, or 2200 there will always be authority that comes with quality backlinks. However, just having links to your site is no longer sufficient. In the past, some SEO “experts” would try to rank highly by spamming their site with thousands of backlinks as well as using other frowned upon tactics like “keyword stuffing”. These tactics are all now obsolete, and the only tried and true method is to have quality backlinks that will bring authority to your site. Find sites in your niche that YOU respect, and try to have them backlink to you. If a site is reputable it will help your SEO much more than a site that is not widely respected.

Remove Zombie Pages

A zombie page is a page that is either no longer relevant or doesn’t serve a purpose anymore. By removing these pages you can give visitors to your site a better user experience while also improving your site’s loading time, which is very important for SEO.

SEO-Friendly WordPress Theme

After successfully installing WordPress, you will find a bland theme that will deter customers rather than attract them. It’s very important to find the best WordPress theme that displays the originality of your site as well as the user-friendliness of your services. Most users of WordPress are aware of how to make a site aesthetically pleasing, but less are aware of how to make your site more SEO friendly.

There are several aspects of a site that can impact SEO, and some of them may not be so obvious. If you are constantly working and updating your site from your computer, you may not pay attention to how your site looks on mobile. A constant trend over the last few years is that mobile traffic to sites is growing year by year. In fact, Google has officially announced that a site’s mobile-friendliness is a large part of how a site is ranked on Google. By picking a WordPress theme that pays special attention to mobile user experience, you can ensure that your search optimization is not hurt by something simple as a button not working when visited by phone.

Another aspect to pay attention to when picking a WordPress theme is the site’s loading speed. If the theme is clunky and uses several third party applications, you may notice some slight delays when refreshing the page. While it may not seem like a deal-breaker, Google has also stated that site loading speed is an indicator of how highly a site is ranked. You can check the loading speed of your site by going to Google’s PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom Website Speed Test tool. While load speed will help with SEO, having a fast and responsive site will also help with user experience which will also be great for your business.

By paying attention to these details, you can have a site with the exact same content rank much higher purely by giving Google signals that your site is responsive and mobile-friendly.

Conclusion

As you learn more about SEO, you will see that there are always steps to take to improve your rankings. On top of the things mentioned on this list, you can also work on your meta tags, permalinks, etc. However, heading into 2020 these are the tips that we believe will be the most valuable and have always been strong ranking factors for the past decade or Google has specifically announced are important for SEO.

Best of luck with your WordPress site, and if you have any questions feel free to leave them down below!