Search engine optimization continues to shift with consumer behavior and Google algorithm trends, making it essential to stay up to date. This is especially true if you’re organic traffic is less than stellar. Luckily there are a few traffic boosting SEO tips you can easily employ for any WordPress website.
Whether you’re developing a WordPress site for a client, or if you’re a business owner looking to generate more conversions, here are four tips to get you moving in the right direction.
- Maximize Keyword Research
Keyword research is still an important factor when it comes to increasing your WordPress site’s organic traffic. You can have the greatest website in the world, but if no one sees it, it is kind of pointless.
To capitalize on keywords in SERPs, you need to conduct detailed keyword research. You can use a number of online platforms like Moz, SEMrush, or good old-fashioned Google Keyword Planner. Many SEO pros recommend using a combo of keyword tools to get the best data.
A few strong keyword factors include:
- Search volume (how many times a keyword is searched for monthly)
- Competition (the sites you’ll need to outrank for that specific keyword)
- Long-tail vs. short keywords
- Voice search keyword optimization
For instance, if you’re in the women’s health space, the keyword “women’s health” will have a high search volume, but the completion will be fierce. You’ll need to outrank high domain authority (DA) sites, like womenshealth.com, WebMD, and other sites.
Instead focus on keywords with medium search volume with low competition and sprinkle in more than one or two specific keywords to generate more overall monthly organic traffic.
- Maximize Site Content
Maximizing your WordPress site’s organic traffic means you’ll need to develop and post high quality, authoritative content. Expanding on keyword research, your website content needs to incorporate keywords in the right places, and at the right amount.
Interestingly, filling up your landing pages with lots of keywords isn’t needed anymore. To maximize content for increased online visibility and CTR, you need to place keywords once or twice in your site’s “above the fold” content, in section headers, and once in “paragraph” text.
Moving from keywords to content types, think about searcher intent. When someone Google’s something, Google will chose the best content/pages, to fulfill that query. Your content should be of quality, and even actionable to make online users and Google happy.
Content also needs to be the right length, well, word count. Research from HubSpot found that longer content netted more organic traffic. In fact, the study showed that 2,000 words to 2,500 words is the organic traffic sweet spot. However, be mindful of how you’re implementing content, because page speed can be negatively impacted.
- Maximize Page Speed
One of the strongest ranking signals search engines, like Google, use to rank WordPress websites is page speed. The reason for this is that Google wants to ensure that the content they provide to fulfill searcher intent delivers a stellar user experience.
There are a few tips and tricks to optimize your WordPress website for speed. But the first thing to do is identify the pages that may be a bit slow. You can identify these pages on your site using Google Analytics. By tweaking these pages to be faster, you can lower your overall site speed average.
Once you find these slow loading pages, it’s time to make a few adjustments:
- See if your hosting server is providing enough power to keep your site speed optimized
- Ensure your WordPress site is updated
- Optimize images that may be causing load issues
- Embed your videos from YouTube instead of uploading a video file to a page
- Check your CSS
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Maximize Mobile User Experience
The number of mobile searches have surpassed desktop searches and this is worth paying attention to for WordPress website optimization. If your site is mobile-friendly and satisfying Google’s Mobile-First Index, you can increase your ranking in SERPs and thus drive more organic traffic to your site.
How do you maximize your website to provide a powerful mobile user experience? First, bring up your site on your smartphone. How does it look? How is the navigation? Is everything loading quickly and correctly? These are important questions to ensure the site is mobile-friendly for users.
If you notice some issues, you’ll need to dive into your WordPress dashboard to fix them. Many site owners believe that simply having a mobile responsive WordPress theme is sufficient, but this is not the case. Look at the font, the menu, the page load times, and adjust as needed.
Wrapping Up
It is absolutely vital to the success of your business, or your clients’ businesses to build a website customers love. SEO is an important element to doing just that. Implement a few of the above tips and track progress. You will be pleasantly surprised at the jump in organic traffic you’ll see. What SEO tips helped you net more organic traffic?