Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of building a business online. It’s a low cost, high reward business strategy for increasing brand recognition and a company’s customer base.
However, SEO is dominated by big brands, as SEO company CanIRank found in its market study. Collecting data from 30,000 high ranking URLs in Google they found that Wikipedia, Amazon, Google and WebMD were always in the top three Google rankings. This happened even when their content was less relevant than smaller sites. Ayima Kickstart which focuses helping startups get off the ground explain how Google’s algorithms “tend to reward large brands that have already accumulated large amounts of link equity”. As Google’s SEO algorithm Rankbrain embeds consumer’s biases towards big brands, it also favours big names most of the time.
Fortunately, there are ways you can beat brand giants in organic clicks by boosting relevance and optimising your website. WordPress remains the best tool for anyone who wants to start a website. Its easy to use, and it is an SEO friendly platform as it’s an open source CMS. So, if you’re planning to compete in search marketing with your new WordPress site, here’s what you need to do:
Value-adding content
While some think of SEO as a set of technical strategies you need to abide, search marketing, in essence, is content marketing. Among other things, Google search relies on keywords that users input to determine your site’s relevance to the query. Naturally, your content should include those keywords, right? Well, today it’s more complicated.
As Google’s ranking becomes more complex, user experience in interacting with your content is the better determinant for rank. Your content should solve your audiences’ problems, be organised for skimmers (think bullet points), and conversational. Additionally, good content gives you better chances to get backlinks.
Linking Strategy
Link building is where you grow your site’s relevance. Backlinks are links to your content being referenced on other sites. Google considers them as votes of confidence and lends credence to your sites’ content. On the other hand, optimal internal linking helps the users (and Google) navigate your site and easily browse them by context, relevance, and value.
Quality Web Hosting
User experience is key in the SEO world. Your uptime callout is a crucial determinant for your site’s accessibility. The faster your site loads, the happier your customer gets – and Google incentivises this with better rankings.
TechRadar highlights that using a clean code, rid of unnecessary extra CSS or JavaScript code, can increase your page load times. Additionally, find hosting services that provide better security and local IP hosting as these affect your SEO ranking as well.
Maximize Plugins
WordPress isn’t just the best because of it’s out of the box CMS, it’s also because of the plugins you can use. With tens of thousands to choose from, using good plugins can make your SEO life as a small business much easier.
Plugins that manage your permalink structure must be at the top of your list. Permalinks with descriptors are more SEO friendly than using numbers and dates. Another is XML sitemap plugins. These map out your site content through organisation, navigation, and labelling – which as mentioned above is favoured by Google. Lastly, plugins for image optimisation are critical like WPSmush helps ensure photos are the right size – for optimal loading speeds.
You are not alone in this Seo world. There are tons of Seo Tools out there. IsItWP for example has listed 9 Best SEO Tools to Grow Your Website Traffic.
