When building a website, the temptation to add content right away can be substantial. But, you must have a solid website structure before making a WordPress website or redesigning the current one. A well-planned structure is what turns a messy set of web pages into a site loved by users and search engines. For both, […]
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This is a guest post written by HubSpot. Opinions and recommendations are the author’s own.
Search engine optimization (SEO) has a significant impact on the success of any business. To be frank, it is the most important marketing tool any business can utilize. In fact, 45% of marketers say that organic search has the best ROI of any channel they use.
But with the many changes happening in the SEO world, how do you know which SEO strategies to implement?
Should you just focus on website speed? Or devote your time and efforts to on-page SEO and link building?
We’ll cover the essential SEO tips you need to know to boost your search rankings and drive more organic traffic to your WordPress website.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps your website or a piece of content rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP). The higher you appear in search results, the more likely you’ll attract quality traffic to your website.
One crucial ranking factor is site speed, which Google has used since 2010. In 2018, the tech company introduced The “Speed Update,” which added more focus on the speed of mobile searches.
Google even provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights to help you measure your website loading time, further increasing the importance of page speed.
In short, a fast-loading website can boost your Google rankings.
That said, while speed is a crucial ranking factor, it’s not the end-all-be-all of ranking on Google’s first page. Other metrics like search intent and domain authority are strong ranking signals.
Page SEO matters because it ensures your target audience discovers your website through a relevant search. Internet usage is as high as it’s ever been. Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second.
With such stats, you’ll be pushed to the outskirts of the internet universe if you don’t implement a solid SEO strategy. Even if the search engines index your website, your target audience will never see it.
Also, SEO is more affordable than paid advertising, and its effects are longer lasting.
Once a webpage ranks well, it’ll stay there for a long time. As a result, you can allocate time and resources elsewhere, knowing that the SEO efforts you’ve already put in will continue working without your input.
SEO is among the top priorities for any website today. With over 1.9 million live websites, the competition for the top spot on the SERPs has never been this stiff.
Here are five SEO tips to make your WordPress website stand out from the competition and get higher rankings:
A well-designed, responsive website improves the user experience (UX). It gives visitors a seamless experience regardless of the device they use to access your WordPress website.
User experience and SEO are interlinked since Google values websites that work well for users.
With 61% of the global online traffic coming from mobile in July 2022, Google wants to offer a positive experience for these searchers. So, if your website is mobile responsive, it’ll likely rank higher.
Well-designed websites also have optimized architecture that enables search engine spiders to find and index all the website pages. It also helps users quickly find what they’re looking for on the website.
So, keep your website architecture simple to make it easy for users to pop around your website and find what they need. That’ll improve the user experience, which indirectly helps with your SEO.
Also, when using lead generation forms, ensure the intent is to capture information. Otherwise, it can negatively impact your Google rankings.
For example, if your page is trying to rank for “get renters insurance” and the form is about “sign up for renters insurance,” the form has the right intent.
But if the page’s intent is answering “what is lead generation” and you have a renters insurance form at the top, Google will view the form like an ad, which may negatively impact your rankings.
Something else to consider is creating a sitemap — your website’s blueprint that helps search engine crawlers find and index all the content on your website. It also tells search engines which pages on your website are the most important.
Sitemaps come in handy when your website is new and has a few external backlinks. Or, when you run an e-commerce website with hundreds, thousands, or millions of pages that are hard to internally link perfectly.
You can use a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps to create a sitemap for your WordPress website.
Lastly, optimize your page’s meta description and title tags to help you get more clicks (which is a direct ranking factor).
Even Google recommends creating a meta description for each page on your website. Backlinko also shares that pages with a meta description get 5.8% more clicks than pages without a meta description.
If your WordPress website loads slowly, you’ll lose half of your visitors before they click on anything. According to a Digital.com survey, a whopping 50% of visitors leave a website when it takes more than six seconds to load.
Here are three ways to improve your website speed:
A CDN increases your website speed by caching content in multiple locations worldwide. It figures out where your visitors are physically located and serves your website’s resources from a server close to them — resulting in a massive decrease in page load times.
Minifying your files removes unnecessary whitespace, formatting, and code that increases the page size and slows down your WordPress website.
Optimizing your CSS and JS files eliminates render-blocking resources and optimizes the Core Web Vitals – three key performance metrics.
One effective way to minify and optimize your files is with a plugin like WP Rocket — it makes the process relatively simple. It ensures your pages are as lean as possible, making the load time faster.
Optimizing images involves compressing files and reducing the resolution and dimensions to make them lighter.
You can use a plugin like Imagify. It easily compresses the images and converts them to WebP – the next-gen format recommended by Google. If you have many images, you can take advantage of the Bulk Optimization option.
Optimizing for speed reduces your bounce rate and increases visitor engagement. As a result, it improves the user experience and boosts your search engine rankings and conversions.
Consistently creating quality, relevant content should be at the core of your SEO strategy. Exposure Ninja backs that up with a survey, showing that 69% of the 149 businesses surveyed believe high-quality content is vital for gaining search engine traffic.
An excellent way to maintain consistency is to focus on topic clusters, which comes down to strategy and planning. Instead of looking at posts as individual elements, look at them as parts of a more prominent structure.
Organize high-quality content around specific topics and create supporting content to explore related themes further. Also, use internal links to help search engines understand the relationship between pages.
That way, you’ll be able to build authority and rank higher in more search queries.
You can also create new content around shoulder niches to help you reach more people outside your industry. For instance, gardening is an excellent example of a shoulder niche for pest control content. You can create content based on common garden pests to increase your reach into the gardening industry.
Another important aspect is improving existing content and adding missing subtopics to help your content remain relevant.
In the process, you’ll incorporate more relevant keywords and carve your content to serve the search intent better. As a result, you’ll get more organic traffic and increase your click-through rate (CTR).
Also, consider formatting your content for featured snippets. A featured snippet is an opportunity to get more clicks from the organic search results without necessarily having higher Google rankings.
To appear in the featured snippet:
Creating amazing content is only the first step. Consider shouting out your content in a custom newsletter, where you can create positive experiences for your potential and current customers and compel them to come back for more, further boosting SEO. You can also shout your content out on social media.
The first step in an SEO campaign is keyword research. It impacts every other SEO task — finding content topics, email outreach, on-page SEO, and content promotion.
There are two types of keywords you can rank for:
While short-tail keywords have a large search volume, they’re super competitive for SEO and pay-per-click (PPC). In contrast, long-tail keywords don’t have a large search volume but can help you rank quickly without many backlinks.
When doing your keyword research, use keywords that aren’t too competitive to rank for. Super competitive keywords might give you trouble getting past Google’s third page. If you can find a keyword without much competition, you’ll have a good chance of making the top three.
Also, target branded keywords that searchers use to know more about a brand’s products or services. They can include the brand name and product, such as WP Rocket for WordPress or WP Rocket Caching.
Branded keywords help visitors find your website directly. And since there’s very little competition on the SERP for these keywords, you can control the messaging behind the keywords your brand is linked to.
Backlinks are like votes from other websites, which tell search engines, “This content is credible, useful, and valuable.”
Having more backlinks means your website will rank higher in search engines. Backlinko shares that the top Google result has 3.8x more backlinks than results in positions 2–10.
Backlinks remain one of Google’s three most important search engine ranking factors. That’s why pages with many backlinks rank better than pages with fewer backlinks.
That said, not all backlinks are the same. Focus on quality backlinks if you want to rank higher in the SERPs. One high-quality backlink would be more effective than 1,000 low-quality backlinks.
Here are some characteristics of relevant, high-quality links:
An excellent way to manage your SEO backlinks strategy is by guest posting. It helps you exchange free content for backlinks from a page that links to your website through the byline.
Use Google search operators, such as Your Keyword “write for us” or Keyword “guest post,” to find guest posting opportunities. You can also backtrack competitor backlinks to find any recent guest post links, then ask the website to guest post for them.
Another way to get quality links is to create linkable assets such as surveys, infographics, a piece of software, or videos. Your linkable asset needs to be remarkable — something people would want to add external links to without you asking.
As mentioned, good SEO and relevant content go hand in hand. So here are two tips to help you stay ahead in your content marketing game:
Even if you rank at the top of Google, it’s people who follow or subscribe to your WordPress website. Not Google.
Google’s algorithm and search spiders find and rank content that offers the most value to the reader. So, Google bots don’t need you to write for them. They’re getting better at understanding good content every day.
A good rule of thumb is to draft your content with your audience in mind, then optimize it for search engine crawlers after. That way, you’ll help human readers understand your content easily — increasing dwell time, reducing bounce rates, and improving the overall user experience.
Google makes one or two algorithm changes daily, but most of these changes aren’t noticeable.
However, Google officially announces a “core update†a few times yearly. These updates are changes to Google’s systems and algorithms that cause significant fluctuations in search results.
For example, Google implemented a “broad core update†to its algorithm in May 2022.
Google’s broad core updates impact all search engine ranking factors without addressing any one component in depth. But past updates like Penguin and Panda focused on the quality of backlinks and content.
So, paying attention to Google’s algorithm updates is crucial to understanding how those changes impact your website.
We hope you’ve found these SEO tips helpful. If you follow them, you’ll be well on your way to more traffic and higher rankings.
Which SEO tips do you consider the best for optimizing your WordPress website to rank higher? Share the post with your answers.
The post 5 Best SEO Tips for a Fast and Optimized Website appeared first on WP Rocket.
Getting assistance to maintain your WordPress site is one of the smartest moves you can make. If you believe that time is money, you are throwing money away by fitting WordPress site maintenance into your schedule.
The post “Why You Need WordPress Support” first appeared on WP Mayor.
Helping your content rank in the SERPs is one of your primary objectives as a website or business owner. A major piece of this puzzle is making sure you incorporate SEO copywriting into your site, as well as any relevant content and marketing materials.
If you’re new to SEO copywriting, then you’ll need to learn how to incorporate SEO keywords into your overall content strategy. In this post, we’ll walk you through the basics of SEO copywriting, show you what the process looks like, then share some best practices to get you started on the right foot.
Copywriting is the process of writing sales-driven copy that prompts your audience to take an action that results in conversions, revenue, or both. You encounter copywriting every day, whether you’re browsing a website, opening an email, or scrolling past a Facebook Ad. Its primary aim is to drive conversions and sales, which means you’ll see a call-to-action (CTA) with a clear next step, such as clicking a button, signing up for a newsletter, or purchasing a product.
You’ll see copywriting in places such as:
Copywriting is commonly confused with content writing, which also factors heavily into the marketing materials we see both online and off. However, the goals of each writing style aren’t the same. Let’s take a look at the differences between copywriting and content writing.
While copywriting is more sales-driven, content writing aims to educate the reader with high quality content. Furthermore, content writing is about warming leads rather than asking them to make a purchase immediately. Content writing is more likely to take its time leading you to an eventual sale or conversion of some kind.
An article like this one is a good example of content writing. In this article, the primary goal is to educate you about SEO copywriting. The main call to action at the end of this article is to leave a comment, not make a purchase. There’s not a hard sales pitch at the end of the blog post. Instead, you’ve got a few different options depending on what you want to do next.
If you’re familiar with Elegant Themes and your interest is piqued, you can go ahead and check out Divi when you’re done reading. If not, you can move on to another educational post and learn a bit more. Later, you might choose to make Divi part of your WordPress website because of the expertise you’ve gleaned from our content.
In a nutshell, content writing seeks to add value (first) which can eventually lead to sales (second). Copywriting on the other hand, is sales-driven from the start.
For a more in-depth explanation, read our post on copywriting vs. content writing.
SEO copywriting uses targeted keywords and phrases to help your content rank higher on search engines. Because it’s primarily sales-driven, SEO copywriting uses the power of SEO keyword optimization to create high-converting sales copy that also ranks higher in search results. All in all, it’s a powerful strategy for leveling up your sales copy.
Both SEO copywriting and SEO content writing use the same basic SEO techniques, although the writing style and overall goals differ. While SEO-optimized copywriting drives conversions, such as on a sales page, it makes appearances in pieces of content writing, too.
Blog posts, for instance, contain CTAs that drive readers directly to a product or service offer. Other places where your SEO copywriting and content writing might overlap include your email marketing, long-form sales pages (which often educate the reader before the sales pitch), social media content, and more.
Wondering what the SEO copywriting process looks like? It can be subjective based on your business, the client, deliverables, and your objectives. Still, there are some basic parts of the process that should be pretty much the same no matter what. Let’s take a look at those.
When it comes to SEO copywriting, the ideation process may look different from one situation to the next. If you’re writing for yourself, you may come up with your own ideas using keyword research tools. If you’re working for a client, you might pitch your own topics. On the other hand, the client might provide assignments to you. Regardless, for SEO copywriting, you’ll want to make sure those topics topics have the necessary keywords to grow help grow rankings as well as sales.
Pre-writing involves taking your sales content ideas and prepping them for drafting. This process usually involves SEO keyword research (including search intent), topic research, and outlining
Here are some of the different scenarios I’ve experienced over the years as a copywriter:
After you have your topic and keywords in hand, you’ll need to do some additional research on your topic. You can take a look at competitors’ posts to get a feel for what’s already ranking in the SERPs. Additionally, you’ll want to search and compile source materials to help you build your post. Always cite your sources. Make sure to use SEO links including external and internal links. Linking to other websites with domain authority, as well as linking to content within your site, will also help to boost your SEO ranking.
Once you’ve got your topic, SEO keywords, and research, you can build your title and your outline. If possible, make sure you put your main SEO key phrase into your title and the first paragraph of your post. Then, use an SEO plugin such as Yoast as you write to help you distribute the key phrase at the optimal level.
Oftentimes, you’ll have more than one SEO keyword you want to target. You should have one primary key phrase, along with some related secondary phrases. Try to include some of those secondary phrases as long-tail keywords into the text, but only where they naturally flow. Avoid keyword-stuffing and strategically place your selected phrases here and there when appropriate.
Now, it’s time to start drafting your article. If you’re writing for your own website, you likely have a good idea of how long you want your content to be. However, if you’re not sure, we’ve created a guide on the best word count for SEO.
SEO copywriting should tell a story that compels your readers to take action. Storytelling is one of the most important aspects of marketing, particularly if you want your audience to feel a profound connection with your brand. As a general rule, marketing content works well when it’s open, approachable, and conversational.
Your SEO copywriting story should have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Depending on the kind of content and its purpose, you might want to explore different sales copy frameworks to help you determine structure. Ray Edwards’ P.A.S.T.O.R. formula is one of my favorites for sales pages and email sequences. There are many examples out there, so test a few to find out what works best for you.
One way to make sure your content is easy to read is by paying attention to the readability score in your Yoast SEO plugin. This tool will help you keep your writing clear and understandable. Additionally, you’ll get tips on how to improve it further. Sometimes, I’ll run my articles through Hemingway if I’m struggling to simplify complex sentences.
As you write, you’ll want to make sure you break your content down into sections with H2 and H3 subheads. Breaking content down into bullet lists can also improve readability. Making your SEO copywriting as accessible and easily digestible as possible can help your overall SEO ranking. If you’d like, we have a more in-depth guide to using heading tags for SEO.
While we’re talking about plugins, it’s important to note that you’ll need a strong meta description for each piece of content. If you’re using Yoast, there’s a plugin right inside your WordPress interface. We’ve written a more in-depth guide on how to write the perfect meta description.
Once you’ve drafted your content, broken it up into sections that flow well and make sense, and incorporated your internal and external links, it’s time to add a CTA. Where does your reader need to go next? What do you want them to do? Here are some possibilities:
Once you’ve drafted your content, make another pass to clean up any straggling issues (such as grammar or rambling sentences). You’ll also want to make sure to compress image sizes (Page speed does affect SEO). Then, submit it to your client, if applicable. They might come back to you with editorial requests, at which point you’ll need to make final edits and re-submit.
Finally, it’s time to publish. That might mean publishing via a content management system (CMS) like WordPress or taking a sales page live on your website. Don’t forget to upload a featured image and include any other relevant images in your content. Then, schedule or publish your post.
Now that you understand the basics of SEO copywriting, let’s jump into a few best practices.
If you want your content to rank well in the SERPs, then learning the basics of SEO copywriting is an absolute must. Your copy comes into play in a big way when people use search engines to look for the topics you write about. As a result, you want your content to be easy to find.
Do you leverage SEO copywriting for your website or business? Thinking about getting started? Leave us a comment and let us know.
Featured image via Julia Lazebnaya / shutterstock.com
The post A Beginner’s Guide to SEO Copywriting appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.
Interested in joining a popular affiliate program in the SEO niche? Look no further than Semrush. A high-ticket affiliate program that pays up to $200/sale. This is one of the highest in the SEO industry. In this guide, we will learn everything about the Semrush affiliate program, and I will help you join it. What …
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The longer your content’s SEO word count is, the better its ranking potential. Right? The average first page Google result contains 1,447 words. Some writers use this number as a strict goal, while others strive to produce more. However, achieving an ‘optimal’ word count for SEO rankings is much more complex than you might think. […]
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Google’s Helpful Content Update Could Be A Game Changer is a post from ShoutMeLoud – Shouters Who Inspires
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One of the essential elements of SEO is picking the right keyword via Keyword research, making them rank & track the keyword position in the search. It is absolutely necessary for a blogger or SEO professional to check their Google keyword ranking for target keywords. One of the most common mistakes bloggers and website administrators make is that …
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