Author: Marine Larmier

Do you own a small business and want to boost your SEO? SEO is short for search engine optimization, which helps your website rank higher in search engine results. Improving your ranking is an efficient way to land more visitors and potential customers! More and more people want to work with local businesses rather than large corporations. Now is the perfect time to prepare your SEO strategy if you want to be found online. 

In this guide, you will learn how to improve SEO performance for small businesses with 8 applicable techniques. 

Let’s dive in. 

Why SEO is Important for a Small Business

Is SEO worth it for small businesses?

Absolutely, yes: SEO is crucial for small businesses to be discoverable by local clients. The ultimate goal is to get your website to rank first to increase your customer base and be well-known in your community. 

It’s a mistake to think you can’t compete with the bigger brands or large companies. When a local SEO strategy is well implemented, you can appear in the first results. Let’s see it in a real-life example. 

An event is coming soon, and we are looking for a local caterer. We want to work with a small business from the area that knows the food specialties, so we can meet with the person and communicate easily. 

• In Google, we put the following query: “catering near Saint-Martin-Du-Var”
• The first Google result: a small business located in the heart of the village.

What Are The Benefits of SEO for Small Businesses?

Often overlooked, SEO is crucial for small businesses on many levels. The 6 main benefits of investing in an SEO strategy for your small business are:

1. Increase traffic, which may result in major sales growth
2. Expand your customer base from new markets
3. Improve awareness amongst the local tribe
4. Open your online business 24×7
5. Rank better than your competitors
6. Showcase your products and services online to convince customers to come to your brick-and-mortar location (greater online visibility brings more traffic to your physical shop).

Implementing an SEO strategy is very important for a small business, and you must know where to start and which tools can be used. We’ve done the heavy lifting for you and listed the best SEO tools.

Recommended SEO Tools for Small Businesses

There are a few SEO tools for small businesses to improve your ranking. Here is our checklist:

1. A crawling tool (e.g., Screaming Frog, Oncrawl, or Lumar)
2. Google Analytics (G4)
3. The Google Search Console
4. An SEO plugin (e.g., Rank Math, Yoast SEO, AIOSEO)
5. A web performance testing tool (e.g., PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix)
6. A caching plugin
7. A keyword research tool (for competitor analysis and to establish a content strategy)

Let’s go over each of them so you can understand how they can benefit your small business. 

1. A Crawling Tool

A website crawler helps small businesses improve onsite SEO by auditing their website for common SEO issues. A crawler inspects the site and reveals if any search engine indexing issues could be holding back the ranking. Crawlers provide data for technical SEO to drive increased ROI and ensure a successful business. 

Best Recommended Crawling Tools:

• Screaming Frog (free version available)
• Oncrawl
• Lumar 

For example, let’s look at Lumar, one of the best crawlers out there that gives you an overview of the top errors to fix. 

Why We Recommend a Crawling Tool:

• Good indicators that flag the urgent issues to fix: you’ll be able to take action on insights easily
• Automated audits that are easy to understand
• Perfect tools for initial SEO audits and quick validation
• Possibility to run the tools only on the pages that will drive conversions or revenue for your small business (so you can focus your budget on what matters)

2. Google Analytics (G4) 

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to monitor your website and know how many people are visiting it, which pages perform best, and your visitors’ behavior. A few metrics need your attention if you want to track your SEO and measure if your strategies are working for your business or if they need some adjustments. 

Why We Recommend GA:

• Check if your SEO strategy works with the following KPIs:
  • Measure organic traffic 
  • Assign money values to organic traffic, so you know which pages make the most revenue
  • Check the user experience metrics: dwell time and bounce rate
  • Identify the top SEO landing pages
  • Top organic keywords and % of new visits
  • Pages per visit by organic keyword
  • Most successful keywords by goal completions (if you set up goals)
  • Site speed overview 
  • Referral report (to check who is linking to you)

3. The Google Search Console (GSC)

A free Google tool to constantly stay on top of your website’s SEO performance, diagnose potential SEO issues, improve rankings and security, and maintain a great user experience. The Google Search Console can help small businesses technical and content-wise.

Why We Recommend Google Search Console:

• It’s free
• It’s an all-in-one SEO tool that tells how people engage with your website. 

We suggest you monitor the following SEO KPIs for your business: 

• CTR (click-through rate): High CTR means that people find what they are looking for on your site. No need to make any changes to your meta title and description, for example
• Average position: Tells you how a page ranks compared to your competitors
• Check the appearance of the title and meta description in the search engine results
• Use the URL inspection tool and information about search queries, clicks, and impressions
• Find the top search queries that lead to impressions and clicks for your website
• Identify slow pages
• Track index coverage and check whether Google crawlers properly index web pages 
• Make sure page experience and Core Web Vitals are performing properly
• Identify mobile usability issues (essential for your clients browsing on mobile)
• Check out if some security issues from Google are marked

4. An SEO Plugin

If you are a WordPress user, we recommend using an SEO plugin to start your ranking optimization journey. They are powerful tools that analyze your site content-wise and provide technical reports. 

Best Recommended SEO WordPress plugins:

• Rank Math (free version available)
• Yoast SEO (free version available)
• All-in-one-SEO (free version available)
• More SEO plugins can be used, check our dedicated post where we list the best SEO plugins for WordPress

For example, Yoast SEO analyzes a page and divides the assessment into three categories: 

• Keyphrase-based assessments
• Readability assessments
• Other SEO assessments

As shown below, the audit is straightforward to understand: 

Why We Recommend Using a WordPress Plugin:

• Easy to use: all you need to do is activate the plugin, and the recommendations will appear automatically 
• Their focus is to improve the visibility of your business everywhere
• By running an audit with a WordPress plugin, you can identify areas where your SEO strategy is effective and areas where it needs changes
• Some of them come with local SEO that helps you to gain website traffic, that’s the case of Rank Math:

5. A Web Performance Testing Tool 

Many web performance testing tools are powered by Lighthouse, a developer-oriented algorithm that collects data from audits that go over everything, from security to load speed. 

It gives you a score between 0 and 100 for mobile and desktop. A high score means your website is optimized for speed and SEO. A low score comes with suggestions on how to improve performance.

Best Recommended Web Performance Testing Tools:

To run your own audit, you can use the two popular tools:

• PageSpeed Insights 
• GTmetrix

They work similarly, simply add your URL in the search box and press the Analyze button.

Why We Recommend PageSpeed Insights:

• It’s free
• It allows you to monitor your Core Web Vitals 
• It comes with a detailed audit section with concrete, applicable tips, so you have a starting point when it comes to performance optimization

6. A Caching Plugin

One of the best ways to improve your website’s loading time is to use a caching plugin that saves a copy of your site on a server. As a result, all subsequent visitors will be directly served with this copy, meaning that the page will take less time to load. 

Page speed has been part of the Google ranking algorithm for many years, so if you want to rank well, you must offer your visitors a fast website and a great user experience. This user experience is measured thanks to the Core Web Vitals, three metrics that measure loading experience, interactivity, and visual stability of content. 

Best Recommended Cache Plugins:

• WP Rocket
• For other cache plugins, feel free to read our article that lists all the best caching plugins for WordPress

Why We Recommend A Caching Plugin Like WP Rocket:

• Caching works out of the box just after you activate the plugin, no technical knowledge is required. 80% of the performance best practices are enabled by default, such as page and browser caching, cache preloading, and GZIP compression. 
• You can solve most of the PageSpeed Insights issues such as “defer JavaScript”, “reduce unused CSS”, “defer offscreen images” and many more. 

7. An SEO Tool for Keyword Research and Competitors Analysis

You need a tool for keyword research so you know what to put inside your website. You also need to be on top of your competitors and check where they rank better than you. 

Keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target according to the most popular queries conducted by your audience. The insight you get from this search analysis is useful in shaping your content strategy.

You can start with a keyword overview with a tool like Semrush to get relevant data for your SEO strategy, starting from the keyword volume, difficulty, and keyword intent.

Another way to get some keyword ideas is to use Google Keywords Planner. You’ll see in the next section how it can come in handy.

Best Recommended Tools for Keyword Research and Competitors Analysis:

Here are the best online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platforms: 

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• Moz
• Google Keyword Planner

8 SEO Tips for Small Businesses (Checklist)

To set up an SEO strategy for your small business and rank better, follow our tips below:

1. Identify and Solve Technical SEO Issues
2. Optimize Your Website for Your Customers
3. Create Content Resonating With Your Audience Needs
4. Run A Competitive Analysis
5. Set Up and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
6. Add Schema Markup
7. Create and Optimize Online Listings
8. Execute a Link-building Strategy

Let’s explain each SEO technique so you can easily apply them to your small business as soon as possible. 

1. Identify and Solve Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO is crucial for your website because it deals with all the techniques that improve your ranking. Optimizing your technical SEO makes your site easy to crawl, index, and understand for search engines.  

Here’s our short checklist you can use to make sure the technical SEO profile doesn’t have any ongoing issues:

Check our guide if you want to have a higher overview of SEO optimization.

Now let’s run a web performance audit for “Le Point Gourmand”, a small caterer based in the South of France. This performance audit is part of the whole technical SEO analysis that starts from your website crawling.

1. We head to PageSpeed Insights and run a first test 
2. Our performance score is 62/100, we have a Core Web Vital in the red and one in the green. Then if we scroll down, we can see the opportunities and diagnostics section. This is where Google tells you what (and how) you should improve your website to rank better.

Improving performance will benefit your ranking, so you must apply most of the PageSpeed Insights recommendations. In our example, what are the areas of improvement that this caterer could follow: 

• Eliminate render-blocking resources
• Reduce unused CSS
• Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy
• Serve images in next-gen formats

How to fix all the warnings?

It looks overwhelming to address all the recommendations from above when you are a small business. Plus, you don’t necessarily have a whole team of developers at your service to optimize the code and the images. 

Luckily, some handy WordPress plugins can do the heavy lifting for you, such as WP Rocket (one of the best caching plugins for WordPress) and Imagify (the easiest image optimization plugin). Both could easily fix our warnings and even move them to the passed audits. 

So here’s a small recap about technical SEO and performance when you run a small business:

1. Launch a crawling of your website and analyze data accordingly
2. Always check your performance and your Core Web Vitals
3. To do so, run an audit on PageSpeed Insights
4. Check your performance results 
5. Install the tools we mentioned (WP Rocket + Imagify) to fix most of the warnings
6. Enjoy a faster site and a better ranking for your small business

2. Optimize Your Website for Your Customers

Customers need to find what they are looking for. It sounds obvious, but there are a few techniques you can follow to optimize your content, including your products:

1. Analyze Your Current Site 
2. Conduct Keyword Research
3. Perform on-page Optimization for Category and Product Pages 

Let’s start with the first essential step. 

Analyze Your Current Site (e.g. with Rank Math SEO plugin)

Understanding the current SEO performance of your site is the first step toward improving your ranking. You can use a WordPress plugin to run a complete audit of your website and offer some suggestions. For example, that’s how Rank Math analyzed our catering site:

It starts with a basic SEO audit that tells you what to improve in priority. For example, more efforts can be made: no H1 on the homepage and no alt attribute on the images. Those recommendations altering SEO, the caterer could easily fix them.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is essential for on-page optimization. Find out which keywords are most relevant to your products and use them throughout your page, including in the title, headings, and meta tags. That will make your pages well-organized and easy to navigate. 

Where to start? 

Use a tool like Semrush to conduct keyword research that matches your business. For example, start with a seed keyword. We enter the term “traiteur” (meaning caterer in French). We can see two opportunities for the topic “marriage” and “Italian”. It may be worth adding to write-up two dedicated pages about both keywords. 

Additionally, you can use Google Keyword Planner to discover new keywords related to your business and check estimates of the searches they receive. If you are planning a Search campaign (paid advertising), this tool also tells you the cost of targeting specific keywords. 

If you want to learn more about on-page SEO optimization, check out our complete guide!

Conduct On-page Optimization for Category and Product Pages 

Category pages are like home pages for a particular product category. Here’s how the wedding dress creator Laure Desagazan, created a category page dedicated to bridal shoes: 

If you want your category pages to rank better in search engine results, follow these techniques to optimize them for SEO: 

1. Improve your metadata, such as the title tag and meta description, with the relevant keywords.
2. Use relevant headings
3. Emphasize category navigation: makes your page easy to navigate
4. Add internal linking for related items or “items you may like” with clear subcategories to enhance your category pages’ SEO.
5. Add header and footer links
6. Use featured content
7. Use e-commerce tags and taxonomies, which allow you to classify products and services online. 

Always remember that an online shopper has limited shopping time. A clear product hierarchy with the right categories (or taxonomies) will help the buyer to choose the right product quicker. 

Effective product hierarchy = improved buying experience = more sales for your small business

Another important thing for SEO is to optimize your product pages. Follow our tips below:

1.  Use the most important keywords in the product name and description 
2. Use good-quality images 
3. Add a zoom feature 
4. A video can also be useful to improve engagement
5. Mark up product pages with “Product” structured data to be displayed in rich snippets. 

How to implement our suggestions:

• Use a page builder that lets you create a custom shop page and custom header (e.g. Divi or Elementor). They make it easy to create your own categories and navigation. 
• Use a WordPress plugin like Imagify to optimize all your image products in one click. This will boost your performance while maintaining a great image quality. 
• Use Schema Pro to implement the product structured data. Below is an example of product structured data with the ratings, reviews, price, and stock status. 

3. Create Content Resonating With Your Audience Needs

One of the solutions to create content that resonates with your audience is to launch a blog. But what to write? Which topics should you cover? You can find long-tail keywords and keywords directly from the Google search box: 

Once you have written your post, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO to ensure your content is well-optimized for SEO. Add your title tag and meta description for a blog post about wedding catering. In our example below, we added the target query, SEO title, slug, and meta description. There is also a preview to see how it will look like on Google: 

Here are 5 tips to remember when you start a blog to connect with your local customers: 

1. Match search intent and perform keyword research
2. Find topics relevant to your audience
3. Create a well-optimized title tag and meta description 
4. Structure content to ensure readability
5. Serve beautiful (but optimized images) to avoid performance issues

4. Run A Competitive Analysis

As a small business, you still need to be aware of what your competitors are doing in terms of products, services, and prices. But what’s even more important is to know how competitors are doing online: who ranks better than you and on which keywords.  

Here are 5 techniques you can follow to start a competitive analysis:

1. Make a list of your SEO competitors – they are websites competing for your wanted keywords in organic search (it could be a different industry) 
2. Investigate how your competitors are getting traffic
3. Cover content and backlinks gaps 
4. “Spy” on competitors’ features snippets 
5. Find your competitor’s broken pages

You can use a tool like Ahrefs to perform a complete competitor analysis, including the 5 techniques we just mentioned. 

For example, here’s how Ahref Site Explorer helps you to identify competitors fast: 

• Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
• Run the search using your domain
• Head to the Organic Competitors report 

5. Set Up and Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

A Google Business profile is a good start to set up SEO for your small business. And extra bonus: it’s entirely free! It helps to showcase products, give information about the opening hours, upload images, and gather clients’ testimonials. It’s a social proof that will make your business trustworthy by the search engines and potential clients. 

An optimized Google Business profile helps people find your business when searching for products or services like yours in their local area.

A Google Business profile can significantly improve your local SEO, as you can see in our example below. 

When we search “catering near me”, the first link coming up is the Google Business profile of our caterer “Le Point Gourmand”! We can also see the pin on Google Maps, which reinforces the idea of proximity, as the “near me” location is clearly visible.

It’s not even the website or the social media that comes up in the first position but the Google Business profile. 

How to Optimize Google Business Profile for Small Businesses

Here are 9 applicable tips to optimize your Google Business profile as a small business:

1. Add your real business name, description, and category
2. Upload HD and clear pictures (and videos)
3. Post regular articles
4. Write compelling descriptions
5. Ask your clients for testimonials
6. Reply to existing testimonials 
7. Make sure your opening hours are accurate
8. List a local phone number to be reachable
9. Activate Google Messenger 

6. Add Schema Markup

With Local Business (LocalBusiness) structured data, you can tell Google about business hours, products, and reviews and even mention a menu if you are a restaurant. By using this structured data, Google will retry all that information directly from your website and be more likely to present it to clients. Interesting for SEO, isn’t it? 

Below is an example of two businesses using a different approach. The first listing looks much more attractive with a picture, a great review, and the average price. As a customer, I’m more likely to click on the first one as it looks more trustworthy. We can also conclude that structured data also improves the click-through rate, meaning more visitors coming your way!

Use the “Local Business” schema type to give your local business a dedicated page in search engine results.

To implement structured data, you can do it yourself by following this local business structured data documentation. For reference, The properties to add to your website look like this: 

If you don’t want to touch any piece of code, there are also WordPress plugins available like Schema Pro that can do the job for you.

7. Create and Optimize Online Listings

Creating online listings on directory websites is an easy way to improve your local SEO. Optimizing your on-page and technical SEO is great, but you should also make sure to be listed on directory sites such as the Yellow Pages, Yelp, TripAdvisor or Foursquare. This will boost your brand awareness and improve your online presence easily.

How to Optimize Your Online Listings

1. Always be consistent and accurate with the NAP (Name, Address and Phone number) and the description of your business because Google values accurate information for its users.
2. Ask for reviews and testimonials and reply to them – this will show that you are a business that cares about customers.

How to Identify the Directory Sites to Be Listed On? 

Hubspot gathered the best 50 online directories you should consider to list your small business. You can contact them or sign up to add your business information. 

There are tools like Semrush that can tell you what to improve and which directory sites you should target to expand your coverage. For example, the caterer Le Point Gourmand should also consider AroundMe, 118000.fr or Yelp. 

Another way to identify the best directory sites is to run a Google search with your competitors and see where they are listed. If you are not sure about the popularity of a directory, you can take its URL to SEMrush and check two things:

1. The domain authority
2. The monthly organic traffic

Why You Should List Your Business on a Directory Site

The major benefit is that you are getting “backlinks” because most local directories allow you to add a direct link to your website. Most of the directories are websites with a high domain authority. By listing your business on these directories, you will indirectly increase your website’s domain authority by getting a “mention” from a popular site.

Pro tip: consider adding a tracking link at the end of the URL on each directory so you can check on Google Analytics to know which one brings you the most traffic.

That takes us to our next point: to execute a link-building strategy

8. Execute a Link-building Strategy

A link-building strategy means to have your website URL mentioned on other websites. It’s a powerful SEO technique that improves the trustability of your business. You can also benefit from targeted referral traffic, and Google will find new pages on your site faster, meaning a better ranking for your small business. 

Let’s take the example of the caterer (Le Point Gourmand) and one of his competitors (Le Crystal). From the SEMrush dashboard, we go to the backlink gap and hit the Find Prospects button.

Do you want to learn how to optimize your blog for SEO? That’s a crucial skill because, as a blogger, you want your articles to be read by your audience. SEO is about creating relevant online content and capturing the most suitable website or blog traffic through search engines. Thanks to this guide, you will learn 8 main actions to perform SEO optimization on your blog and ultimately rank better.

Why SEO is Key for Your Blog

SEO is crucial because it makes your blog more visible and increases traffic through organic (non-paid) search results. For content writers, SEO is key because it helps your content to be seen and found by an audience that is actively searching for it. What’s more, if you want to monetize your blog with advertising, affiliations, and sponsored content, then you need to be able to show impressive demographics and marketing data (such as number of visitors, average time on page) to conclude the partnership. 

Most SEO tactics go under three categories: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SO. Here are the main impacts of the different SEO activities on your blog: 

Technical SEO 

All the elements directly impact how search engines index and crawl your site. To optimize your technical SEO, you must review the blog structure, robots directive, canonicalization, broken links, site speed optimization, XML sitemaps, duplicate content, and structured data. 

On-Page SEO 

To be findable by your audience and keep your reader interested, you must focus on the content and use engaging blog post structures. 

Off-Page SEO

If it’s well-written and easy to read, people will be more likely to share it on social media, meaning more backlinks and mentions on other sites. 

Technical SEO, on-page, and off-page optimization are interconnected and are essential strategies to improve your blog’s ranking on search engine results. It can also help you to outrank your competitors and increase brand awareness. Let’s go over 8 SEO best practices you can follow to optimize your blog for SEO.  

8 Best Practices to Optimize Your Blog for SEO 

Here are 8 best practices for a blog you can follow to get more organic traffic coming your way:

1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of analyzing and finding the best terms and topics to include in your blog according to the most popular queries made on the web. Regarding keyword research, the first step is to identify the user’s search intent, then find a targeted keyword for each post and create a detailed outline. Let’s break down the three steps of action to add a list of useful tools to complete each. 

Step 1 – Find User Intent 

To find the user intent, you can use tools that gather all the Google searches made around the world, such as:

• Answerthepublic.com –  a powerful tool that summarizes the queries made on Google. It’s available in 16 languages for the most popular countries.
  • In our example, we searched for “hotels paris”, in the US, in English: 

Here are the most asked questions in the US around this topic which could become some topics for a next blog post: 

• Best Paris hotels 
• Best areas to find the hotels
• How much are Paris hotels

• Google Trends – to identify the trending topics and see how Google is being used in specific countries. ​​

Step 2 – Find a Targeted Keyword for Each Post

Targeted keywords are usually small phrases, not individual words (as opposed to main keywords) used when searching for information. Your targeted keyword should appear in your introduction and be included in the H2/H3 of your article. To find a targeted keyword, you can use one of those tools:

• Google Keyword Planner –  A powerful research tool from Google that lets users discover new target keywords and get search volume and forecast for specific phrases.
• SEMRush (Keywords Magic Tool) and Ahrefs– Both powerful SEO tools that (amongst other actions) help build a target keyword list that fits your website. They give invaluable tips to improve your site SEO by auditing and analyzing your website and competitors from different aspects: keywords, content ideas, backlinks, and ranking.
• Look at Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes – they will help you find the best topics for your audience.

There are three main elements to pay attention to when conducting keyword research: relevance, authority, and volume.

Step 3 – Create a Detailed Outline

Based on our previous keyword research, you should create a plan from a unique angle. Your content should stand out from your competition and resonate with your audience. 

For example, let’s say you want to write about how to make an apple pie like a Chef. Then, interview a famous chef to make your content stand out! Then, use this angle to show your audience that your recipe is special because it came from this famous Chef. This type of angle reinforces trust and credibility, encouraging users to click on your blog instead of the competition. 

2. Focus On On-Page SEO

On-page SEO (also called  “on-site SEO”) is the process of optimizing the content of a web page for search engines and visitors. The most popular on-page SEO practices include optimizing title tags, headings, content, internal links, and URLs, but make sure you complete all the optimization tasks below to appear higher in search results:

1. Identify Target Keywords 
2. Optimize the Title Tag 
3. Write Your Headline in H1
4. Mark Up Subheadings with Header Tags
5. Use Internal Links to Improve Navigation
6. Write a Meta Description that Makes Users Want to Click 
7. Add Target Keywords to Your Content 
8. Review Your Content Readability
9. Apply Schema Markup
10. Check the URL Slug 

Bonus: Work on your technical SEO

1. Make Sure Your Page is Mobile-Friendly
2. Make Sure Your Page is Indexed 
3. Increase Page Performance

Best Tools to Optimize On-Page SEO

The best tools to optimize your on-page SEO on WordPress are plugins like RankMath, Yoast SEO, All in One SEO. You can also use tools like the Google Search Console, Lighthouse, Growthbars, or Screaming Frog to get a detailed SEO audit of your blog.  

For example, this is how RankMath analyzes your content and allows you to improve the On-Page SEO:

3. Create an Easy-to-Read and Compelling Structure

To write an SEO-friendly blog post, it should start with a title, an introduction, paragraphs, sections, and relevant images and finish with a conclusion with a final call to action. You can create many types of articles: the how-to, the listicles, the comparison, the expert round-up, or the interview. 

SemRush provides amazing SEO-friendly blog post templates that you can use for your next writing project. 

Also, keep in mind the pillar strategy to improve your blog SEO. A pillar page is like a hub that focuses on a key topic, with many other related articles related and links to it.  

Once the structure is well-defined, don’t overlook content optimization. You should write for users and search engines. That includes the following 10 actions:

1. Optimize the introduction with a catchy beginning and the target keyword
2. Include targeted and semantically related keywords in the body content
3. Establish your structure with efficient keywords (low difficulty but high volume)
4. Manage keywords density, avoid randomly adding the keywords just for the sake of it, and try to limit the occurrence to 10/20 depending on the length of the article
5. Cover the topic like an expert to stand out from the competitors, what can your article cover that they don’t?
6. Interlink for bots crawling and visitors who want to navigate easily through your content
7. Update your blog post content regularly, including the title (e.g., 10 fast themes in 2023, in 2024, etc.)
8. Use engaging images and videos (we recommend you optimize your visuals to find the perfect balance between quality and page loading speed).
9. Use appropriate H1, H2, H3 etc. headings
10. Use a table of content to help visitors to jump to the topic they are the most interested in

Content optimization helps your content rank higher and generate more leads.

4. Take Advantage of Internal Linking

Internal linking is crucial to on-page SEO optimization, which helps users and search engines navigate your blog better. When implementing the strategy, always keep those 4 elements in mind: 

1. Use descriptive anchor text (see our example below)
2. Link new posts to old posts
3. Check for broken links
4. Open the link on the same page

To implement your internal linking strategy, you can use one of the big three plugins (Rank Math SEO, Yoast SEO, AIOSEO). They can help you by suggesting relevant pages and posts on your site that you can link to. On top of that, the Broken Link Checker plugin will help you monitor your WordPress site’s external and internal links.

5. Have Backlinks Opportunities in Mind

Backlinks are links from blogs and other online sources that you decide to add to your content on a particular blog post. But what if you want other blogs linking to your article? It’s quite simple if you follow those golden rules:

1. Create a blog post with data-driven studies
2. Design impactful infographics and powerful visuals
3. Write in-depth guides
4. Put together a “resources” page with accurate and up-to-date data
5. Find broken links on pages within your niche and ask webmasters to replace them with your article
6. Perform a link gap analysis to identify sites that link to your competitors but not to you (SEMRush is great for this)
7. Interview or ask for a testimonial, this person will likely share it on their own blog or social media
8. Write strategic guest posts

6. Include Structured Data and Get the Most out of Featured Snippets

Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about your blog post and classifying the page content. For example, a recipe blog could use schema markup to flag ingredients, instructions, cooking time, reviews, and tags like “vegan” on their recipes.

If you prefer not to code, try a WordPress plugin like Schema Pro. It helps you provide clues about the content of a blog post to Google. Use “Article Schema” to help search engines better understand the correct headline, published date & primary image

If you are good with coding, you can generate the Schema Markup with JavaScript and add it to the HTML. Below are the recommended properties by Google when using Article(Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data in your blog. This will help Google understand more about the web page and show better title text, images, and date information for the article in search.

7. Optimize Performance

Since 2021,  Google has officially added three Core Web Vitals to its search algorithm. They measure the user experience through three axes: loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of the page. Anything towards improving those metrics will positively affect your users and your blog’s ranking on search results pages. 

To optimize the performance of your blog post and improve your page loading speed, Google PageSpeed Insights mainly recommend you to:

1. Serve static assets with an efficient cache policy 
2. Optimize your CSS and JS code to eliminate render-blocking resources (e.g., reduce unused CSS; delay and defer JS)
3. Efficiently encode images (compress images to prepare them for the web)
4. Serve images into the WebP format (convert them to the next-gen format created by Google that boosts performance thanks to reduced file size)
5. Defer offscreen images (implement lazy-loading)
6. Optimize your fonts

To address PageSpeed Insights performance recommendations and improve your Core Web Vitals, you can use both WP Rocket and Imagify. 

• WP Rocket – one of the best caching plugins for WordPress that improves your blog’s Core Web Vitals (and SEO). It does all the work for you: it implements caching and GZIP compression upon its activation, optimizes your code and adds lazy loading on images in a few clicks. 

• Imagify – the easiest image optimization WordPress plugin to compress your images and make them lighter without impacting their quality. The plugin also offers WebP compression, the next-gen format Google recommends in terms of compression levels. 

The best thing about Imagify is that it reduces your file size while retaining great quality for the people visiting your blog:

Imagify has a clean interface showing only the most important options when it comes to image optimization:

Here is an example of performance issues fixed thanks to Imagify and WP Rocket:

If you are not familiar with performance optimization and PageSpeed Insights, you can find below a real example of a performance audit that comes with the “opportunities” and “diagnostics” sections. 

Most of the issues flagged by PageSpeed Insights can also be addressed with WP Rocket and Imagify.

Curious about how your blog is performing? Follow our guide that explains how to check performance on PageSpeed Insights.

8. Set up Google Search Console to Track Performance and Reiterate Optimization

SEO optimization is long-term work, so tracking and monitoring your efforts is important. Google Search Console helps you to understand how Google crawls and sees your blog. It shows you how to maintain and troubleshoot your blog’s presence in the search results. The main tabs are:

• URL inspection – checks if your page is well-indexed, allows you to request a new page indexing and see the crawled page
• Performance tab – The Search results page tells you the impressions, CTR, position, keyword cannibalization, and mobile/desktop performance
• Index tab – it helps you identify any potential issues preventing your page from being indexed on Google (see our example below)
• Experience tab – measures the Page experience as the latest SEO ranking factor. It includes performance data on Core Web Vitals and information on mobile usability.

Wrapping Up

Being an excellent content writer is not enough, you also need to follow the blog SEO rules we just mentioned in our article if you want your article to rank. Keywords, content, and performance are the three areas of optimization you should focus on. Ultimately, it all comes down to serving original and structured content to the right audience on a fast website. For the performance optimization side, give WP Rocket a try! It’s a powerful WordPress plugin that implements caching and optimizes your code, fonts, and database in a few clicks. And remember, you take zero risks with our 30-day money-back guarantee. 

The post Blog SEO: 8 Tips to Optimize Your Posts appeared first on WP Rocket.

Do you want to improve the SEO performance of your WooCommerce website? 

If you optimize on-page and off-page SEO, your online shop has a great chance of ranking on Google’s top pages. Our guide explains the main actions you should undertake to implement an efficient SEO strategy for WooCommerce. You’ll also get some useful and actionable tips to boost performance and improve your shop’s ranking on Google. 

Here are 14 techniques to optimize your WooCommerce SEO.

14 Ways to Improve SEO on WooCommerce

1. Run Keyword Research

To improve SEO in WooCommerce, you should start by running keyword research. This will be the foundation of the SEO strategy because, as an online business, you need to know what your target audience is searching for and what they’re interested in. That’s also why keyword research is closely correlated to your content marketing strategy – it allows you to create more relevant content, making you more likely to appear in the top search results according to the queries relevant to your business.

When a potential client does a search on Google, the search engine analyzes all the indexed websites and displays the most relevant ones to the query. That is why it’s crucial to know the search intent and the keywords used by the users, including the long-tail keywords. 

Long-Tail Keywords: What They Are 

Long-tail keywords are handy for on-page optimization. They are usually less popular search terms but provide better detail to search engines by explicitly signaling search intent. They can represent up to 80% of the traffic generated by search engines, and the keywords are easier to rank for as there is less competition. Finally, they bring high-quality traffic, resulting in higher conversions and more sales for your business. 

The Best Tools to Conduct a Keyword Research

You can find long-tail keywords directly from the Google search box: 

You can also take advantage of the Google PAA (People Ask) feature:

You can use premium tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, or Moz to improve your keyword strategy. All you need to do is go to their keyword tool tab, type a “head term”, and see more suggestions showing up.

When choosing a keyword, you can look at the search volume (popularity) and the keyword difficulty (how hard it will be to rank for this specific keyword). You can see an example below with Ahrefs:

With those tools, you can build your content strategy, and you’ll also be able to identify for which keywords your competitors are ranking.  

2. Optimize WooCommerce Product URLs and Slugs

Here’s a short checklist your can follow to optimize your WooCommerce product URLs:

1. Make them user-friendly and use a descriptive slug to describe the content of a page. 
2. Keep them concise because long URLs are hard to remember (we advise an average of 4 or 5 words max).
3. Use separate words
4. Use lowercase 
5. Avoid special characters, including emoji

To optimize URLs on WordPress and WooCommerce, navigate to Settings > Permalink and select the Post name structure.

3. Optimize Title Tags 

Title tags (or SEO titles) allow you to give a title to your product page, which can be found “in blue” on the search engine results pages. Adding and optimizing your product’s title tags is crucial, as they are essential in organic ranking (SEO).

To optimize your title tags, you can use a WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, or AIOSEO. 

For our example, we are taking Yoast SEO, but the steps are similar for all of them.

Go to your WooCommerce product page > Scroll down to Yoast SEO > Add your title tags (SEO title).

4. Write Clear and Engaging Meta Descriptions

The meta description is an element that summarizes what’s on the WooCommerce product page. It’s displayed in search engine results and aims at giving the user an idea of the content within the page. It’s directly related to its search query, so you should write a clear and engaging description that makes users want to click: make your potential customers curious and use the right keywords. 

To optimize your meta description, you can use a WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, or AIOSEO. 

To illustrate our example, we are taking Rankmath, but the steps are the same for all.

Go to your WooCommerce product page > Scroll down to Rank Math SEO> Add your meta description (Description).

5. Create and Optimize Product Categories and Pages

Optimized category pages will make the online shopping experience easier for shoppers and improve your SEO. Categories are essential for several reasons:

1. Capturing traffic from high-volume terms.
2. Helping users discover your products when navigating your site.
3. Helping search engines to understand your information architecture when they crawl your content.

On a WooCommerce site, it’s common to come across two types of category pages: 

1. Category listing pages (CLP) – A global category that lists other categories and targets very broad topics (e.g., Last Chance > Furniture, Home Decor, Home Textiles)

2. Product listing pages (PLP) – Categories listing products that belong to that same category (e.g., Hiking Boots > hiking boots X brand, Y brand, Z brand)

You should consider following the best practices below to optimize your product category page: 

1. Use a large header highlighting the category (H1)
2. Implement breadcrumbs to orientate the users and show that it’s the right category
3. Add filters on the page to allow the user to narrow down the search results

How to Create Categories With WooCommerce

To create categories with WooCommerce, go to Products > Categories and create as many categories as needed. Then, assign the category to the product: 

How to Create a Custom WooCommerce Category Page 

To create a custom WooCommerce category page design, you can use the WooCommerce blocks that come with the WooCommerce plugin. (Automattic developed a dedicated block plugin, but they recently added the block to WooCommerce Core). 

• From your WordPress dashboard, add a new page 
• Add a category H1 title 
• From the WordPress Editor, search for the WooCommerce blocks and choose the Products by Category one

Finally, organizing your categories into a logical hierarchy results in your site is crucial to orient users. 

How to Add Breadcrumbs to My WooCommerce Page

To add breadcrumbs to your WooCommerce site, you can use a WordPress SEO plugin like Breadcrumb NavXT, Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, or All in One SEO (AISEO). For our example, we’ll go with AlSEO. 
Go to General Settings > select the Breadcrumbs tab and enable breadcrumbs.

6. Optimize Product Descriptions

To write SEO-ready WooCommerce product descriptions, you can follow our 9 tips:

1. Before you write, establish buyers’ personas by defining who is likely to read your description so you can adjust your content accordingly.
2. Write a clear description of what your product does using the right keywords (that takes us back to our very first point: select high search frequency and low competition keywords).
3. Use your brand voice – if you use a laid-back tone across your branding, you should also adjust your product description to ensure it reflects your target audience.
4. Mention a specific material that can differentiate you from your competitors (use your unique selling point). 
5. Specify the color and size of your product.
6. Explain the main benefit of your product so the buyer can see the value.
7. Use “daily life” writing – don’t just stick to technical features. Put your product into a real-world situation. 
8. Add reviews (user-generated content).
9. Add a call-to-action button to suggest an action to the user.

7. Optimize Images (Performance and SEO)

Optimizing product images on WooCommerce revolves around two major axes: 

1. Adding the “alt-text” tag on each of your image products to provide a short description of an image for search engines. If the images are not displayed, this tag is also shown to the visitors, so be as descriptive as possible.
2. Preparing images for the web to ensure they don’t slow down your shop. Make sure to serve them in the right format and size without impacting performance. We recommend you upload good-quality images with small file sizes – a balance that can be achieved thanks to the image compression technique.

How to Add the Alt-text on WooCommerce Image Product 

To add the alt-text tag on your WooCommerce image product, go to Media > Library > Edit the image of your choice and go to the Alternative Text box.

How to Compress WooCommerce Image Product

You can use an image optimizer plugin like Imagify or Shortpixel to easily compress your images on WooCommerce without impacting the quality. Such plugins can also help to convert them to WebP, the next-gen format recommended by Google, which reduces the file size even more than the traditional JPEG or PNG formats.

This is how Imagify compressed my product image. The file size went from 424 KB to 230KB, which is a 56% savings! The product image was also converted to WebP. 

You can visually compare both products, one with an optimized image (left) and the other with the original picture. We can’t see any difference in the quality, but the file size got much smaller, which will improve the loading speed of the shop page.

Hint: When it comes to WooCommerce optimization, that’s where the main keyword can be used:  – Once in the URL – Once in the product description – Once in the H1 / page title  – Once in the image alt=”keyword”

8. Implement “rel canonical” for Similar Product Categories

A canonical tag or “rel canonical” is essential to manage pages with almost the same content. This tag tells search engines which URL, among similar ones, should be shown on the page results. Canonicalization is key to preventing duplicate content issues that can harm your organic visibility.

According to Google, a canonical URL should be the “URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages”. Imagine you are selling products in different sizes and colors. You could create a canonical URL that leads clients to the main product page but supports viewing options for each color. 

You can do it manually by adding the <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of duplicate pages, pointing to the canonical page: 

If you don’t feel like adding your code, you can use a WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO to implement the rel canonical tag automatically. And from the Advanced SEO tab, Yoast also lets you change the canonical if needed:

Canonicalization must be done properly otherwise, it will lead search engines to believe your website has duplicate content. 

9. Include Structured Data (Schema Markup) Relevant to WooCommerce

Google indexes and crawls your WooCommerce site with an algorithm that “scans and understands” your overall content. To improve the accuracy of Google’s understanding, it’s recommended to include structured data, which is,  according to Google Search Central – a “standardized machine-readable format for providing information about a page”.  

Structured data is also called schema mark-up, which enables improved search results layouts for different verticals such as jobs, recipes, events, courses, books, and WooCommerce products. (To see the full list, check Google’s elements for structured data).

For example, a product page with valid structured data will be eligible to appear in the following enhanced format: 

Which Structure Data to Include for a WooCommerce Site?

Here are the e-commerce structured data types you can add to your WooCommerce site:

• Local business information (LocalBusiness structured data) – ​​Tell Google about your business opening hours, address, and pictures of the place. For enhanced SEO, you should also list your business on GoogleMyBusiness and the Merchant Center. 
• Product details (Product structured data)- Give more information about your products to Google so the search results can show product details in richer ways with price, stocks, and reviews. There are two types of product results: product snippets and merchant listing experiences.

• Reviews (Reviews structured data) – It helps Google to understand a particular product review and display it in the results. 

• How-to (Howto structured data) – A how-to section walks users step-by-step to explain how to complete a task successfully. It can be a written tutorial or even a video. 
• FAQ page (FAQPage structured data) – A Q&A section can be useful for the users and provide more information about your product. 
• Breadcrumbs (Breadcrumbslist structured data) – To help Google to display the right product category page in the search results.
• Website (Website structured data) – To help Google to understand how the search box works in your WooCommerce site.
• Video Object (VideoObject structured data) – An instructional or marketing video on your product page can help Google present the video appropriately in Google Search results.

All the structured data techniques mentioned above help to get a better CTR (click-through rate) and drive more traffic to your WooCommerce site.

How to Add Structure Data to A WordPress Site?

If you are comfortable with coding, then do it manually by generating the Schema Markup yourself with JavaScript and adding it to the HTML. Google can help you add the data markup.

If you don’t feel like writing a single line of code, try a plugin like Schema Pro. It’s a WordPress plugin that helps you provide clues about the content of a WooCommerce product page to Google.

From the dashboard, it lets you map the product data and add all the relevant custom fields to create a schema markup: 

How to Check the Structure Data of a WooCommerce Site?

To check if your product page includes structured data, run an audit on the Google Search Console > Rich results

10. Use a WooCommerce-optimized Theme or Page Builder

To improve the SEO for WooCommerce products, choose a fast WooCommerce-optimized theme that offers specific features and blocks for WooCommerce. In the previous part, you’ve seen the importance of content architecture and structure data of an online shop, that’s why you should use a theme or page builder that allows you to create an advanced product page with your fields and layout. 

Almost all the most popular WordPress page builders are also WooCommerce builders, as they have the feature to design your product layout, add custom fields and change the entire shop layout. WooCommerce is not enough on its that’s why using a page builder like Elementor Pro, Beaver Builder (with Beaver Themer), or even the Fusion Builder from Avada can enhance the whole experience with dedicated WooCommerce elements: 

If you are looking for a theme, then Storefront (by WooCommerce) or even Astra can be a good choice. Make sure that they offer advanced WooCommerce features to create your design and map your content for SEO.

Looking for a WooCommerce theme? We’ve compared the fastest WooCommerce WordPress themes for you.

11. Create a Sitemap

A sitemap informs search engine crawlers about the structure of your WooCommerce site. It also helps categories to be scanned by Google, allowing you to ensure that your products are being indexed. 

Use a plugin like XML Sitemap Generator for Google to generate your sitemap and improve SEO in WooCommerce. 

12. Create a Top-notch Internal Linking Structure

Internal linking is an integral part of on-page SEO optimization, which helps users and search engines to navigate better through your WooCommerce site. If Google sees that your internal links are pointing to relevant content on your website, then the authority of your site will increase in those key topic areas. You’ll find below a few best practices to keep in mind when implementing internal linking:

Internal linking is crucial to improve the SEO of your WooCommerce site. You can use one of the top 3 (Yoast SEO, Rank Math SEO, AIOSEO) to implement an efficient linking strategy.

Additionally, the Broken Link Checker plugin can be handy for monitoring your WordPress site’s external and internal links.

13. No-index Internal Search Results

The following internal search results pages should not be indexed by search engines, or it could harm the SEO of your WooCommerce site: 

1. A thank you page after a user subscribes to the newsletter
2. The shopping cart page 
3. The checkout page 

To block Google from crawling a page, you can add the “robots meta tag” in the page’s header. This is what it looks like in the code of a page: 

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

If you prefer using a plugin to no-index some of your WooCommerce pages, you can use a WordPress plugin like All In One SEO. It allows you to no-index a page and hide it in the search result in one click.

14. Speed Up Your WooCommerce Site

Page speed is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm and affects your website SEO. To measure performance and the overall user experience, Google uses the Core Web Vitals metrics that directly impact your ranking. 

To improve the speed of your WooCommerce site (and therefore boost your SEO), you can apply the guidelines from Lighthouse below. Each of the recommendations to have a better WooCommerce SEO can be addressed easily with a WordPress plugin: 

1. Optimize your images (e.g., Imagify, TinyPng, Shortpixel)
2. Reduce unused code (e.g., WP Rocket, Perfmatters)
3. Delay JavaScript and CSS that are not critical  (e.g., WP Rocket, Flying Scripts)
4. Consider using a CDN – (e.g., RocketCDN)
5. Implement caching – (e.g., WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, or WP Fastest Cache)

WP Rocket is one of the best caching plugins for WordPress that can help improve the SEO of your WooCommerce site. It does all the heavy lifting for you (and check all the tips from the list above): it allows you to optimize your code and images and improve the Lighthouse score in a few clicks.

GTmetrix recommends using WP Rocket to boost performance and to reduce initial server response time, as you can see in the example below:

Wrapping Up

You should now have a clearer overview of what matters the most for optimizing SEO for WooCommerce. Our WooCommerce guide gathers the best SEO tools and WordPress plugins you can use to start improving your shop’s ranking.

The quality and architecture of your content plus the performance are the 3 axes to consider when it comes to enhancing the SEO for WooCommerce products. WP Rocket is a great start for your speed optimization journey, as it applies 80% of the performance best practices upon activation. The plugin helps you get your Core Web Vitals in the green – a direct ranking factor for Google! You don’t take any risks by trying WP Rocket because you can ask for a full refund if your request is issued within 14 days of the purchase date.

The post SEO WooCommerce Guide: 14 Key Tips (+ Plugins Included) appeared first on WP Rocket.

Do you want to know how to improve the SEO performance of your WordPress site? SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and includes a number of optimization techniques used to improve the position of a website on the results pages of search engines (SERPs). A site is considered well-optimized if it appears in the first positions of a search engine according to specific user queries. 

To show you how important it is for a website to appear in the first results on Google, I’m sharing the research from Sistrix that analyzed over 80 million keywords and billions of search results to understand how users engage with SERPs. They found that almost half of internet users click on the first or second result to find the information they seek.

So, is your website optimized to be found by potential users? Let’s find out how to check its current status and how to improve the SEO performance of your WordPress website with 11 actionable tips. 

13 Ways to Improve SEO on Your WordPress Website

There are two types of action you can take to improve SEO on your WordPress: the first part happens on a technical level, while the second one is more about content optimization with on-page and off-page SEO. In a nutshell, this is how SEO works:

Technical SEO: optimization techniques that improve search engine ranking by making your site easy for search engines to crawl, index, and understand. Content SEO: covers on-page and off-page optimization techniques. It’s about what you write and how you structure that content on your WordPress site.

Before starting any optimizations, it’s crucial to understand where you are starting from. That’s why the first step towards improving SEO should be to audit your WordPress site. 

1. Run an SEO Audit (Content + Technical Audit)

An SEO audit is the first step to check and identify any SEO issues that may prevent your website from performing at its best from an SEO standpoint. You can easily follow your website’s performance on Google, Bing, or any other search engine and identify areas that need improvement.

To run a complete SEO audit, you will need tools that can analyze your content as well as the technical setup of your site. 

Online SEO tools (crawling, website analysis, and keywords research)

• Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, and Botify – they are website crawlers that analyze your website deeply and help you identify SEO technical issues that may affect your organic visibility.SEMRush and Ahrefs– are both advanced SEO tools that provide a comprehensive audit by checking how your WordPress site is performing. They give tips to improve your site in some crucial SEO areas. They are helpful in auditing and analyzing your website and competitors from different aspects: keywords, content ideas, backlinks, and ranking.
• Google Search Console – a web service created by Google that allows you to check the indexing status of your site, the search queries, and crawling errors. It identifies the technical issues that may prevent websites from being visible at their best. From Search Console, you can keep track of the performance related to the Page Experience (part of Google’s ranking algorithm) and the Core Web Vitals. 

The 3 Core Web Vitals are important for SEO because Google made the Page Experience an official ranking factor.

WordPress plugins you can use to run your SEO audit:

• Yoast, All-in-one-SEO, and Rank Math SEO – probably the most popular WordPress plugins that help you optimize your site’s content and keywords. They perform a complete SEO audit of your website and generate a detailed report with the areas of improvement on both the content and technical levels.

After running your SEO audit, it will be easy to identify and fix the areas of improvement. You’ll know what to optimize in your content and adjust on a technical level. The following list provides some useful tips to keep in mind to improve your ranking on Google. 

2. Check What’s Indexable 

Your page is considered “indexed by Google” if it can be accessed and crawled by the “Googlebot” (Google’s crawler). The bot analyzes the structure, the content, and the topic of the page stored in the Google index.  If the pages can be indexed, they’ll be shown in Google search results. That’s why you should ensure that all your relevant and important pages are indexable. You should also define the pages you don’t want to be indexed for specific reasons, such as those you want to hide from users (forum discussion, thank you page, landing pages for ads.). 

How Do I Check If Search Engines Index All Pages?

You can use the Google Search Console tool to check if your pages are indexed. It comes with an URL Inspection tool that tells you whether a page can be indexable.

For example, Ahrefs checked if one of their articles was indexable using Google Search Console, and they found out that it was, as you can see in the message below:

How Do I Set a Page to Noindex in WordPress?

To exclude a page from being indexed by Google, you have to include the noindex rule on the page as a <meta> tag or as an HTTP response header. 

You can also use an SEO WordPress plugin because most of them have the option to noindex a specific page. 

3. Redirect 404 Pages

404 errors happen when a user or a bot tries to access a page that does not exist on a domain. It can happen because the URL does not exist at all or because the page and its content has been removed. In this case, you should redirect the 404 page, especially if it contains links to other relevant pages on your website – otherwise, their traffic may be affected, as well as the overall internal linking profile. 

It’s recommended to redirect 404 pages toward an existing page through a 301 (permanent) redirect. The best practice is redirecting the page toward similar content; otherwise the home page will be your best choice. There are several options to redirect 404 pages on WordPress: 

The manual way – redirect all 404 pages to the homepage.

• Check if your theme has a 404.php file. 
• Create a new file in your WordPress theme folder or edit this file instead using a file manager tool like Filezilla. 
• Once you’re connected, add the following code as the first line in your 404.php file:

• Don’t forget to save the 404.php file and reupload it to your theme directory.

If you are uncomfortable editing the code, you can use one of the WordPress plugins below to add the redirection:

• 404 to Homepage – the plugin works out-of-the-box. It will redirect any link that does not exist to the homepage.
• Redirection – you can use it to set up a couple of redirects to a handful of outdated pages.

4. Create an XML Sitemap

An efficient XML sitemap acts as a map of your WordPress site that guides Google into all your most relevant pages. XML sitemaps are good for SEO because they allow search engines to find your most important pages quickly and let them know that some content has been updated. 

All pages should be included except for the pages that do not need to be crawled by Google, such as a “thank you” page for any users subscribing to the newsletter of your e-commerce site. 

We recommend using a WordPress plugin to create your sitemap. It will help search engines index your website content and tell them which pages and files are important to your site. For example, you can use a plugin like Sitemap Generator for Google. 

Sitemap Generator for Google – this plugin improves your SEO rankings by creating page, news, video, HTML, and RSS sitemaps.

5. Improve Performance and Optimize Your Images

Page speed is a direct ranking factor for SEO because Google rewards fast sites over slow ones (including performance on mobile). Google’s Page Experience, the latest SEO ranking factor, includes the Core Web Vitals, a set of specific factors that define the web page’s overall user experience. You can audit the performance of your WordPress site using Lighthouse on PageSpeed Insights. Most of the time, the main issues that slow down a site are poor code optimization, high server response time, too many render-blocking elements, unoptimized images, and lack of caching. 

To improve the speed and optimize the SEO of your WordPress site, you can use a few plugins that will do the heavy lifting for you. Here’s the toolbox you can use to improve your website speed (and, as a correlation, your SEO performance): 

WP Rocket – one of the best caching plugins that help you improve your Core Web Vitals and increase the speed of your WordPress site. WP Rocket automatically implements caching, text compression and allows you to defer and delay JS, remove unused CSS, implement lazy loading, and much more. 

WP Rocket is recommended by GTmetrix if you need to improve your server response time, optimize your code, and implement caching and lazy loading. 

RocketCDN – a powerful and easy-to-use CDN that comes with a free WordPress plugin and does all the technical setup for you. 

Imagify – to optimize and compress your images without compromising on quality. Imagify has a smart compression mode that allows you to significantly reduce your image’s file size without impacting its visual aspect. 

Do you still need to compare more performance tools that can boost your SEO?  Check our list of the best image optimizer plugins (with data) Read more about the best lazy loading plugins

6. Use a Responsive/Mobile-Friendly WordPress Theme

Responsive design affects your SEO, and mobile-friendly websites tend to load faster than those that are not. Amongst other SEO factors, mobile-friendliness can help give you a boost in search engine results. 

Every page builder on the market (Elementor, Divi, The WPBakery Page Builder, and more) allow you to design your site on mobile, so any themes that support them are a good match. To test if your theme is responsive, you can simply try it on your mobile device or follow a few techniques:

Mobile Optimization Test with Google – it explores the mobile-friendliness of your website.  

7. Use Categories and Tags Properly in WordPress

Categories and tags are the two main taxonomies that WordPress provides to organize the content of your website or blog. Categories are useful for improving your search engine optimization because they help search engines understand your website structure and content.

They are like the “table of contents” for a blog or website, contributing to easy information architecture.

Tags are similar to the index at the end of a book. They are more specific keywords describing the content. For example, a category could be “hotel” with the following tags associated with it: “family-friendly”, “sea-view”, or “swimming pool”. The purpose of tags is to help link posts with related content. 

Example of categories	Example of tags

As an example, TripAdvisor uses categories to get more relevant traffic by creating content resonating with users’ needs. On top, most of the users would click on the article because the title in the first place matches their search intent. 

8. Use SEO-Friendly Permalinks 

The URL should explain what’s on the page or the post so they’re easy to read by users and search engine bots. 

To define the best SEO-friendly URL structure for your permalinks and archives, go to Settings > Permalinks > Post name.

Simple and easy-to-understand URLs are the best SEO-friendly ones.

9. Take Advantage of WordPress Comments

Genuine (spam-free) comments are a great indication of user engagement on your WordPress site. An engaged community means that there is traffic coming to your site, many links pointing to it, and as a result, an improved SEO.

Tip: If you have a post with a long thread of comments, we recommend you split them into several pages to avoid performance (and SEO) issues.Â

10. Enable Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a powerful way to let users understand where they are on a website. They also help search engines crawl the content, and understand the information architecture and the hierarchy of your WordPress site. 

Here’s an example of breadcrumbs:

Use a plugin like Yoast SEO to set up breadcrumbs. All you need to do is add the block to the post or the page of your choice by going to Yoast SEO > Settings > Breadcrumbs.

11. Improve Internal Linking

Internal linking means linking one page from another on your WordPress site. Google navigates through those links to understand the structure of your website and how pages are connected to each other, and then display the most accurate search results. In other words, links are a key part of your site architecture. 

When adding links, ensure the anchor texts look natural in your copy. Don’t use the same keywords every time.

Audit internal links with the Google Search Console and use a WordPress plugin like Internal Link Juicer to improve your internal linking strategy. The plugin enhances your user experience (UX) by highlighting the right content for the context.

A crawling tool will also help to understand the internal linking profile and improve the link juice between pages.

Tip: If you just publish a new post or page: Use Semrush (for example) to check your best-performing page SEO-wiseTry to naturally add internal links from those high-authority pages to the new post.

12. Have an SEO Content Strategy

An SEO strategy is the process of organizing a website’s content by relevant topics to improve the ranking position in the search results. The ultimate goal is to optimize your WordPress site content-wise to gain organic traffic from search engines. You can base the strategy on three major axes:

I. Information architecture

It means creating an easy and clear structure that includes a straightforward hierarchy and navigation through categories and pages so that both users and search engines can understand what the website is about and find the relevant information according to their needs.  

II. Keyword research

It’s the process of finding search terms that match with user search intents (e.g., “red maxi dress”). It helps you find better content ideas and match users’ wants and needs. As a result, you get to create highly engaging content and drive more qualified traffic to your site. 

Recommended tools to conduct keyword research:

• Semrush – to uncover the best national and local keywords and analyze how your competitors rank for a specific request.

• Ahrefs – another powerful tool that shows you how a specific domain is performing. For instance, this includes the total number of backlinks, referring domains,  content review, and organic keywords.

By researching the most appropriate target keywords, you increase your chance to rank well in search engines for a specific topic.

III. The pillar page strategy

The main idea of the pillar topic strategy is to have a pillar page that focuses on a specific topic and then cluster articles around it, linking to the main page and the other way around. Below, you can see an example of a Pillar Page (Core Web Vitals) and several cluster pages that are linked together: 

13. On-Page Optimization With an SEO WordPress Plugin (Bonus: 2 Examples)

On-page optimization (or on-page SEO) refers to all the techniques that can be applied directly to your WordPress site to improve its position in search engine rankings. As mentioned in this article, this includes improving the content of an article, the meta description, the title tags, the post excerpts, and having a better internal linking strategy. 

An SEO WordPress plugin audits your site, but it also allows you to apply the necessary changes to reach a better on-page SEO.

The easiest way to perform on-page SEO is to use a WordPress plugin like Yoast, AIO SEO, or RankMath. They offer similar features when optimizing your page. Let’s see a few examples below. 

With take RankMath, you need to go to the General tab, where you can see some basic SEO recommendations, such as the focus keyword, the title tag, the meta description, and so on. Let’s focus on the title tags (it’s crucial to optimize them as they play an essential role in improving organic ranking).RankMath highlights the main keyword that you need to include in the title tag. In our example, the keyword is “hotels”:

Once you are done with the Basic SEO tab, you can continue to fix the audit and go through each recommendation about the content readability and the more advanced suggestions.

Similarly, you can optimize your title tag with Yoast SEO. Navigate to the page or post of your choice, then scroll down to the on-page SEO section and add your title tag as shown below:

Want to start your on-page optimization? We’ve listed the 10 best SEO plugins for your WordPress site.

Wrapping up

You have seen in this article that most SEO optimization tips are easy to implement if you have the right tools. This involves several techniques, from optimizing on-page content to a more technical approach. 

Here are the main highlights you should remember when starting your SEO journey on WordPress:

• Keep auditing your WordPress site with a website craler and an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast SEO
• Check all your important pages can be crawlable and indexed by search engines
• Make your content easy to crawl for search engines (use a sitemap, breadcrumbs, clear URLs, categories, and tags).
• Conduct thorough keywords research
• Create relevant and original content
• Optimize your images with a plugin like Imagify
• Improve website speed and performance with a plugin like WP Rocket

We hope this article helped you to understand the efforts to put into your SEO strategy for WordPress. Do you want to rank better on Google? Start optimizing your website today by following our tips!

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