If you have limited time to improve the SEO of your WordPress website, with the aim of increasing targeted traffic to your web pages, then here’s some actionable SEO tips to give your site a boost. Even if you only have 15 minutes per day to apply these changes. They can be worthwhile in implementing for noticeable results.
- Content gap analysis – take a particular web page on your website and check which keywords it’s ranking for against which keywords similarly targeted pages from competitors are ranking for. The chances are that the competition will each rank for different keywords in the same topics and that you’ll have missed some sub topics. Check which content you’re missing and add this. You’ll then start to rank for extra keywords. You’ll often find you have ranked above your competition for all related keywords, so can you move onto a different page and optimise that.
- Share your content – there’s a few ways of sharing content that you produce on your website and it all comes down to making sure that your content is great. Provide social sharing buttons on your blog posts to make this easy but also outreach to contacts to let them know you have new content as and when you publish it. You can use formal link building solutions or we can build this into a SEO campaign for you. Basically, you need to reach out to others, build relationships, let them know about your content. Don’t just email off asking for links though. Build relationships first.
- Internal link building – Lots of people forget this part and it’s a shame because it’s a very powerful technique. Linking blog posts to relevant product or service pages which then link with calls to action to your contact page, is one example of this. Also, a blog post which covers a topic very broadly can link off to more specific pages which dig deeper into a subject. Your home page is also a surprisingly often overlooked part of yuor website where tere should be plenty of inner links. For example, keep your home page fresh with a recent blog post section which dynamically pulls snippets of the latest posts through to the home page.
- Check your content regularly – it’s no lie that a website which more pages will generally rank better. But you should really check if content is still relevant. For example, a SEO agency like ours needs to update it’s content quite regularly to keep it up-to-date. Don’t leave pages on there which should be deleted and don’t be afraid of taking these pages off the site if they’re no longer useful or relevant to your website’s visitors. Add fresh new content but don’t forget to take off content that is no longer needed and could even be misleading. Rather than deleting some old pages, you may be better updating them with new, fresh content to revitalise them and make them relevant again.
- Check for backlinks coming into deleted pages – Following on from ‘Check your content regularly’, once you’ve deleted pages you’ll want to check if any valuable backlinks were hitting that pages and redirect these old pages to new equivalents. Only do this for backlinks that are valuable.
- Create multipurpose content – repurposing content such as turning blog posts into videos, presentations, audio content and other content for different mediums, is a powerful way of reaching a larger proportion of your audience. When many people think of web content, they automatically think blog posts. There’s lots more to content than just blog posts and web pages. Multipurpose content or repurposing content can be a very economical way of creating content and getting the most out of your content marketing efforts.
- Embedding YouTube videos – embedding videos in blog posts is a great way to engage your audience and improve your SEO by generating targets visits from the Videos section of Google.
- Check site speed and take steps to fix speed issues – use a free website speed checker such as GTmetrix to check your website’s site speed and make improvements by changing web hosting provider and adding caching. If your website runs on WordPress, the W3 Total Cache plugin is the one we recommend. Don’t obsess about getting these website speed scores to 100% though as even top websites don’t always achieve these results.
- Attribution of images – check that images are being linked back to on your website and properly referenced by right-clicking on the image on your website and clicking “Search Google for Image”. We design a lot of custom images for clients including Infographics. We encourage others to embed certain graphics in their websites but always link back to the source. Reach out to anyone who isn’t correctly referencing your website’s images.
- Regular competition research – competitor research covers many aspects of SEO and one particular area we regularly look at are why certain pages aren’t ranking against competition. This is often because of lack of backlinks to that particular page. Lots of emphasis is given to backlink building to the homepage when individual web pages also need backlinks. Sure, valuable “link juice” will still filter from your home page to these inner pages but it’s often worthwhile to have backlinks pointing to inner pages too. For example, if you have a blog post about a really interesting topic, you may want to reach out to influencers and people in marketing positions to let them know about this content. They may decide to link back to it, if it’s a valuable source of information for their target audience. If you’ve added all relevant content to a page or blog post, used images, done the usual technical SEO and on-page SEO, then the likely cause of poor ranking results is usually lack of backlinks in comparison to competition for those keywords.
- Use rich snippets – rich snippets can really help your search engine listing results stand out from the competition. So if you aren’t using these yet then now’s the time to start. This will help you rank in the Featured Snippets.
- Revisit your keyword research – if you’re ranking for keywords but still aren’t getting the targeted traffic you’d expect then you may be ranking for incorrect or unprofitable keywords. Revisit your keyword research and consider commercial intent of keywords that you’d like to rank for.
- Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) – if you appear to be ranking for the right keywords and the targeted traffic is hitting your website but the phone isn’t ringing or your contact forms aren’t pinging, then there may be something wrong with your conversions. Use a heatmapping and click tracking service to check what the drop off points are on your website and why the website journey isn’t working for your website’s visitors.
- Content marketing strategy – to keep website visitors coming back for more, you need to keep fresh content coming. You may be blogging and just create new blog posts in an adhoc way with no real plan. But you need to have a content marketing plan and start with the end in mind, having clear goals and traffic targets. Measure everything. Draw up a content marketing calendar to help you create content and time your content more effectively.
- Collect emails, retargeting and push notifications – if you’re driving traffic to your website, whether you’re using organic SEO, Google My Business or paid advertising, you’ll want to try to collect information that first time your visitors hit your website. Research shows that website visitors tend to visit a website around seven times before they purchase from you. Keep your brand at the forefront of their mind using retargeting, email marketing and push notifications.
If you need help with any of this get in touch.
