What is WordPress SEO?
What is WordPress SEO?
SEO is what makes your WordPress site more visible in user search results on Google and other search engines. Doing SEO the right way means that you’ll be able to increase the quality and quantity of your site’s organic traffic.
In order to gain a full understanding of SEO, it’s important to know exactly how SEO for WordPress works.
Google has a process of listing or indexing, the websites that it will show in user search results. But because the list is constantly changing in real-time, it would be impossible for a team of people to maintain the index of websites manually.
As such, Google uses proprietary algorithms and programs called web crawlers to systematically crawl the Internet and run updates on website indexes.
Not only do Google’s crawlers gather information about what information is contained on each website, but they also organize the information accordingly. Because of this, when you conduct a Google search on just about anything, you’ll immediately be presented with millions of possible results.
Google states that their crawlers pay close attention to new websites, dead links, and changes to existing websites. As such, it’s not necessarily required for you to tell Google that your website exists in order for it to show up in user search results.
In fact, the vast majority of websites that you see listed in search results weren’t manually submitted to Google for inclusion. Rather, the sites are found automatically by the crawlers that are always searching for new web content.
But why does this matter to you?
When you understand how the major search engines collect your site data, you can use that information to help your site rank higher in search results.
When you rank higher in user searches, you’ll start seeing an increase in organic traffic from qualified users that are looking for your exact content.
At the same time, if you’re doing SEO the wrong way, the search engines may demerit your site and bury it deep-down in user search results.
Is WordPress Good for SEO?
Now that you have a high-level understanding of SEO, your next question is probably how SEO on WordPress differs from SEO on other platforms.
First of all, SEO on WordPress is very simple to manage.
You’ll want to inspect the current performance and settings of your WordPress site and resolve as many SEO-related issues as possible before you do anything else.
Fortunately, the WordPress platform makes this quite simple if you know what to look for.
An SEO Checklist To Improve How Your Content Performs
2022 will be a year where it’s important to revisit the way we approach SEO. With the number of new optimization points to now consider, it’s no longer effective to keep doing things the way you have in the past.
Because of this, it’s critical that you organize a solid plan for your site SEO that leaves no stone unturned. And this SEO checklist will get you going.
After going through the checklist, you’ll have a powerful plan for your SEO strategy, and will rank much higher in the SERPs moving forward.
1. Check Your Meta Tags
Two of the most basic steps for on-page SEO are checking and optimizing the meta tags you use. This is because it contains one of the most vital ranking factors, which is the title tag.
When you optimize your title tags, ensure that the keyword you’re targeting is present, while also strategically placing it within the engaging copy.
This will help you drive more clicks.
When you optimize your meta tags, you’ll also want to optimize the meta descriptions. Even though these aren’t considered in your overall ranking factor, they’re very important for click-through rates.
Unfortunately, many site owners forget to check the meta robots tag attribute. This can often lead to unwanted critical errors. For example, a “noindex” tag will ruin a page rank because it tells the search engines to avoid showing the page in search results.
To resolve this, use a robots exclusion checker extension that will efficiently check a page’s meta robots attribute without you needing to dig into source code.
2. Resolve Issues With Duplicate Content
Having duplicate content on your website will cause two problems.
First, search engines like Google could flag your duplicate content as spam.
Second, duplicate content can dilute the keywords you use throughout your site.
Keep in mind that duplicate content isn’t specific to the body of an article or other pieces of the published content. In fact, duplicate subheadings or meta tags can also impact your rankings in a bad way.
If it’s not possible to avoid duplicate content in certain situations, such as two different product pages for identical items but they are different sizes, use the canonical tag to help avoid a drop in your rankings.
3. Consider Intent
Search engine intent is the next big thing for 2022. This is why it’s so important to optimize both your new pages as well as existing pages.
Check the list of keywords you’re targeting. Look for ones that aren’t yet on the initial page of search results in spite of your best efforts.
Then, search those keywords on Google. Take a look at who Google is rewarding for using those keywords. This is one of the best ways to help identify what the intent of the keyword is that you’re trying to target.
Once you’re confident that you understand the correct intent of your chosen keyword, go back to the page you’re trying to improve and adjust the content.
Do the top results on Google show images of products? Then you should probably be showing products on your pages, too.
Of course, keywords in your post (and the overall word count) are incredibly important. But if the content you produce doesn’t satisfy a user’s search intent for the keyword, you’ll be consistently outranked by the sites that do.
4. Optimize For Page Experience and Core Web Vitals
Page Experience and Core Web Vitals were SEO factors that were integrated into the 2021 Google algorithm. Because of this, it needs to be on your SEO checklist for 2022 and beyond.
Several metrics make up the Core Web Vitals. They are:
On the other hand, Page Experience consists of the most widely-used SEO factors. Google has grouped them all together under the Page Experience umbrella to help them better understand UX (user experience) on websites.
This includes:
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Core Web Vitals are included in Page Experience and are a huge topic that requires its own guide.
To assess how your WordPress site performs on these SEO factors, there are several different tools that Google provides. A few of these include Google Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, and the Core Web Vitals extension on Chrome, to name just a few.
5. Update Old Posts and Pages
Augmenting old posts and pages that you published over a year ago is a powerful part of your SEO checklist that will quickly begin boosting traffic. The way to do this is by looking for your posts and pages that were performing well in the past, but have now dropped off.
In most cases, you’ll find that the posts lost their high SERP rankings because they now contain outdated info. And the new posts on other sites that use the same keywords have now outranked you.
This is something that a lot of WordPress site owners overlook because they’re so focused on publishing new content. But using these existing assets can save a lot of time and improve your site SEO.
The process of augmenting your old posts will vary. For example, there will be posts that will need complete overhauls and those that only require a few minor updates. But no matter the case, it’s a great strategy that will bring in more traffic if you take the time to do it.
6. Schema Markups
While structure data still isn’t a SERP ranking factor, don’t underestimate the overall value that it brings to your WordPress site. In fact, when you properly apply schema markups on your site pages, you make them eligible for Rich Results from Google.
And this will definitely boost your click-through rates on Google search results.
Many site owners overlook structure data. This is because it’s not a direct ranking factor. And it does take some time, and often a lot of effort, to apply schema markups. Fortunately, there are several tools that will help you automate the otherwise manual process.
For WordPress users, there are a wealth of different plugins for this purpose. Or, you can use schema generators that are free to use.
Doing this will make creating your schema markups much easier. Even better, you won’t need to have any development knowledge.
7. Use AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
When you use AMP on your site, it automatically strips down a page to the bare minimum. Only the header, content, and post images remain.
This process provides your mobile users with the best possible UX because it makes your load times extremely fast.
Many site owners still don’t understand how AMP contributes to SERPs. While Google confirms that using AMP is not an overall SEO ranking factor, they also say that site speed is a factor. And AMP does make your site load much faster.
Installing AMP on your site isn’t too difficult, and won’t require any type of knowledge in web development for WordPress users. All you need to do is install and run the official WordPress AMP plugin, then select the areas of your site that the plugin will create the AMP versions of.
It’s important to know that using AMP doesn’t make sense for every site owner. AMP strips down the design of a page to its bare bones. And the visuals and images you’ve used to help convert users into customers might not show up on an AMP page.
You should also avoid using AMP on product and product category pages if you run an eCommerce site. Instead, put your focus on ensuring that your site is as mobile-friendly as possible without employing AMP
8. Double Check All Internal Links
Internal links are extremely important for your site structure and search rankings. The most important posts and pages on your site should definitely have plenty of internal links that drive to it.
Internal links also help your users properly navigate your site and can help in the process of converting them from users into paying customers.
You’ll also help Google to understand the context of your pages by using anchor text that you use for internal links, much like the process of using anchor text in backlinks.
Another reason to check all of your internal links is that you might be wasting “link juice” by directly linking to the old pages of your site that no longer exist. Or, you may be linking to individual URLs that have redirects.
When you link to URLs with 404 errors, it stops the flow of link juice, and wastes opportunities.
And redirects work to reduce the authority that gets passed on by your links. You’re much better off directly linking to the page where a link currently redirects.
9. Google Search Console Verification
If you’ve yet to verify your site on Google Search Console, this should be near the top of your 2022 SEO checklist.
In fact, getting your site verified on Google Search Console should be one of the first steps you take if you want to appear on Google. And of course, you know you need to.
The process of Google Search Console verification is quite simple. All you need to do is go to the Google Search Console and use your existing Google account to get logged in. Then, follow the steps it provides to verify your site.
And that’s it.
When you’re done, Google will begin crawling your site and indexing it.
10. Submit a Sitemap
After you’ve been set up by Google Search Console, you’ll need to submit XML sitemaps to assist Google in crawling your site. Google prioritizes crawling URLs included in the sitemap, and will more frequently crawl them.
URLs that aren’t in the sitemap will still be crawled, but not with as much priority.
For large sites, it’s best to build several sitemaps to organize URLs more effectively. You should also build an image sitemap to improve your SEO for images.
11. Check for Indexing and Crawling Errors
Gaining access to Google’s Coverage Report is one of the biggest benefits of verifying your WordPress site.
In the Coverage Report, you’ll be alerted to crawling errors that could prevent your pages from getting indexed. You’ll also see the list of URLs that are currently being indexed, URLs that are excluded from SERPs, and URLs with various warnings.
12. Upgrade To GA4
GA4, or Google Analytics 4, is a highly improved version of Analytics. It has more advanced AI tech that will give you smarter (and more) insights into your marketing efforts.
It also gives you the ability to better integrate with Google Ads, while helping you better understand your users’ life cycles.
As we move forward, all new Google Analytics accounts are now automatically GA4. If you’re still using the prior version, you can make the upgrade in your property settings.
It’s highly recommended that you move all analytics accounts to GA4 so you can take advantage of the benefits it provides. While it may take a bit of time to adjust to how the new platform works, there’s no better time than now to adapt to the change and start improving your SEO.