Tag: seo

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. 

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!

The post 13 Ways to Improve SEO on Your WordPress Website appeared first on WP Rocket.