One of the reasons, you might choose WordPress as the CMS for your website is because you read that it is SEO-friendly. In fact, all you have to do is check out their own ‘list of powerful features of WordPress on their homepage to see if they are proud of the platform being SEO friendly. But do you know about WordPress eCommerce SEO?
However, this does not mean that just launching a WordPress website is enough to rank at the top of the search engines. You still need to understand how to use the right SEO techniques. How to apply them as well. But the good news is WordPress makes it easy to do SEO. And makes it easy for newcomers to Google to increase their traffic.
The platform has many features that align with SEO best practices to make your life easier, which means you can focus your efforts on real differences between your rankings and organic visibility.
A quick question for you before driving the main tutorial, do you know 10 minutes is fine to create a blog or news site? Comment your answer below.
What is WordPress SEO?
WordPress itself is not a substitute for a tough SEO strategy. CMS saves your time and there is no reason to deny you to adhere to best practices without experience. You need to understand that you need to keep trying to rank your website on Google.
The choice of your CMS does not indicate if you can rank well if your site does not suffer from a wide range of technical issues that prevent it from crawling and indexing. You shouldn’t think that WordPress is a magic weapon without any effort; It requires time and effort. SEO can get technical very quickly but the beauty of WordPress makes it easily accessible to those who are not experienced or even to those who do not classify themselves as technical.
Just because you’re using WordPress doesn’t mean that the SEO strategies you’re using will change. You still need to create great content, get great links, and make sure your site is well-optimized and free of technical issues that can keep it stuck.
But WordPress helps you take care of the many basics that help you rank your site out of the box, and below you will find tips and tricks that will help you implement growth-driving strategies, especially on platforms. Getting Started: The basics of WordPress SEO.
Before you start optimizing how to optimize your WordPress site properly and increase your organic traffic, there are a few basic things you need to do to make sure you are working with a strong build.
Best Practices for WordPress eCommerce SEO
Choose a Faithful Hosting Provider
You need to make sure you are hosting your site with a trusted provider – the speed, uptime, and security of the site are the main reasons to think carefully about who you will use as your host.
Site speed has a direct impact on the SEO performance of your WordPress site and both poor uptime and security vulnerabilities can cause site quality problems. Don’t be tempted to go for the maximum option, because you’re suffering from performance issues.
WordPress itself recommends three hosting providers and it is wise to consider these options if you are not sure where to start.
Install an SEO friendly WordPress Theme
When you first install WordPress, you’ll almost certainly see the platform’s default ‘Twenty’ theme. However, chances are it is not, but you will want to use it for your own site.
There are literally thousands of free themes available directly from the dashboard and there are many more premium themes, you need to choose carefully, or you can end up using one that is not SEO friendly.
Although many themes claim to be SEO-friendly, themes do not use scripts and plugins that you do not use. It is not uncommon and it will reduce the effectiveness of your site. Before installing any theme, run a demo of it through Google’s Web.deb tool to get insights into possible performance and SEO issues.
It gives you at least the confidence that you are choosing a theme that will not leave you behind.
Install a Free WordPress SEO Plugin
You need to install the SEO plugin before you can start optimizing your site. Fortunately, there are several main options that are usually offered. For getting the plugin, you check here.
Please note, a plugin will not optimize your site for you; It simply makes it easier for you to do it and follow best practices.
One way to install plugins in WordPress is to log in to the admin panel and navigate to the ‘Add New’ plugin page in the left-hand menu: Plugins> Add New.
Once you’re present, search for the plugin you want to install and hit ‘Install Now’.
Once this is installed you need to activate the plugin. We will install additional plugins with our top WordPress SEO tips. To see other ways to install the WP plugin, check out this guide.
Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings
WordPress gives you the ability to ‘discourage search engines from indexing your site which basically means it won’t rank. This is usually used by developers when developing a site to prevent it from being indexed because pages and content are incomplete.
It’s more common than you might think to think that this launch has been left after launch. You need to check your site’s visibility settings below: Settings> Reading.
Enable SEO Friendly Permalinks
WordPress gives you a variety of options for how URLs are structured and you need to make sure you use the most SEO-friendly option.
By default, WordPress uses URLs like: https: //domain.com/? P = 123. These URLs are not search engine friendly and there is no way to start identifying what the page is from the URL alone.
Fortunately, you can choose a custom URL structure here: Settings> Permalinks
For most sites, you’ll want to choose a ‘post name’ for your permalink.
Continue keyword research
Without keyword research you may not know which search terms to optimize for your site content. In fact, keyword research should come at the beginning of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.
You can use the Keyword Overview tool to identify your keywords that need to be used and optimized.
Whether you’re starting to optimize your site from scratch or creating new content, it’s important to know the keywords you’re trying to rank for the page.
Review Ranking Content
It’s important that you spend some time analyzing content that already exists in terms of what you’re trying to notice. You start blindly creating content without understanding what is already ranking – why create content that won’t work?
There are a number of great guides that give you more insight into creating content for SEO that will help you gain skills and improve your writing skills while helping you rank better. You can do a Google search for this.
Use Optimized Page Headings
The H1 title of a page is meant to refer to both the user and the search engine in terms of what your page is about. Think of it as the title of a book.
Best practices usually call for the use of an H1 title (page title), but you should also use the H2 – H6 title; They don’t structure your content, making the text easier to break down and read.
If your H1 is the title of the book, the next tags are H2 chapters, acting as subtitles. Page titles are a great place to include keywords and variants of your page, but don’t overdo it and insist on including any keywords that don’t fit naturally.
Use Internal Linking
You need to use internal linking to your content in order to establish consistent relevance across different pages of your site, pass authority gained from external links, and help users navigate efficiently.
It is very easy to add internal links to other WordPress pages. All you have to do is highlight what you want to link (this will be the anchor text of your link) and click the ‘Link’ button in the toolbar, which will allow you to paste the URL or search the pages inside your site.
Install a cache plugin to improve site speed
While WordPress undoubtedly provides strong performance out of the box, site speed improvements can be made by almost all sites, especially when we consider that a site’s speed is a powerful ranking factor.
You can get very technical to improve the speed of your site, but one of the most effective ways to increase it is to use caching plugins to cache your posts and pages as static files. These static files are served to your users instead of being created dynamically every time and can significantly improve performance.
Recommend to use WordPress W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache or Cache Enabler.
Use ‘Last Updated’ Dates
You should update regularly to make sure your evergreen content is always current and relevant, but one question you are often asked is to change the original publication date of your pages and posts, delete them altogether or do something else.
One suggestion is to use ‘Last Modified’ or ‘Update On’ to show users and search engines when your content has been last updated, giving them confidence that the information is current and relevant at the moment. Thanks, you can easily add the latest updated / updated information to your WordPress pages and use the WP Last Modified Inform plugin.
Bad Practices
Get your keywords from Google Advertising Keyword Planner
Google Advertising Keyword Planner is one of the most used tools in the SEO industry.
It is the only source capable of providing monthly search estimates for a given keyword; All other keyword tools that provide search estimates get their data from them.
No SEO pro should use keyword techniques that do not include this tool.
So why am I telling you not to get keywords for your ecommerce site from Keyword Planner?
Well, like the other parts of bad advice here, it’s not always bad advice.
Of course, there are cases where you should get a keyword from a keyword planner.
The reason this turns out to be bad advice is that the advice you get from Keyword Planner for your industry is that every one of your competitors will return to Keyword Planner.
Keyword planners are useful for testing whether an idea has an existing search audience. You should use it for that purpose.
But testing ideas and getting ideas is not the same thing and most of your keyword idea sources should come from somewhere else.
Here are some sources for keyword ideas you should consider:
See which searches are already bringing you traffic using SEMrush or similar tools, as well as the Google Search Console. Identify that you already have a relatively good ranking without identifying keywords and start targeting those keywords more clearly.
Use Keyword.io or similar tools to extract auto suggest keywords from seed keywords. These tools provide hundreds of long-tailed keywords that you won’t discover using Keyword Planner, and are especially useful for decorating content written on your landing pages and blog posts.
Brainstorm brand-specific keywords that people can search for and check for in the Keyword Planner.
For new markets and brands that are just hitting the market, look for keywords for similar products and the types of phrases and queries often associated with them.
Content Is King
Looking at this subtitle some of you are possibly already drafting your heated response, so explain to me why “content king” can be bad advice.
If “Content is King” means that what is on the page should be specially developed with your target audience in mind, which was created specifically to meet their needs based on the type of search queries they use to reach your page. I agree. Content is really king.
But if “content is king” means that any content marketing-centric strategy is the best fit for every eCommerce site’s SEO, it can often be bad advice.
The problem is that “content is king” often leads to a boilerplate SEO strategy based on keyword identification and writing blog posts about them.
But it is rarely the top priority of any eCommerce site that features thousands of product pages, each with dozens of technical SEO errors, the opportunity to capitalize keywords for those product pages, duplicate content, and more.
Preferring more SEO-friendly platforms, in many cases improved investment.
“Content King,” misinterpreted, offers a business model that doesn’t just describe a typical eCommerce site.
Of course, Amazon has a blog, but how many of you have seen it?
People visit eCommerce sites to shop.
Your SEO strategy needs to be built on that understanding.
Capturing top-of-the-funnel leads and using a blog to push them to your market can be a successful strategy, but by no means should it be considered the best approach for your business and certainly should not be taken as your top SEO priority.
Delete user-generated content
Returning to the worst interpretation of “content king” for a moment, some SEO professionals believe that user-generated content was not created by the creators of expert content, so user-generated content is always bad and it always needs to be removed, undexisted, or integrated. Will be done.
While there are some cases when user-generated content can hit your site, there are many cases where it is incredibly effective.
User reviews are a very important example when it comes to ecommerce sites.
Most ecommerce site users should be allowed to leave reviews of their products and as a result most of them will see free benefits for their SEO.
Google’s own quality rating guidelines note that user-generated content may be considered the core content and user-generated content is the purpose of the page and the user’s efficiency, authority, and credibility (EAT).
Assuming user reviews have been tested and published using a trusted platform, user reviews by those who have purchased the product will match the bill for having a “high EAT” and the page can achieve higher scores from map raters, which is an algorithm used. Informed.
The guide further states that a large number of positive user reviews can be considered as a sign of good reputation.
In general, sites that allow user reviews will see an increase in search traffic, and 80% of people trust user reviews as much as friends.
Imitate your competitors
Despite the general knowledge of a unique sales proposition for businesses to succeed, SEO professionals often advise clients to identify keywords by targeting keywords to their competitors or by finding links by adding links to their competitor’s backlink sources.
Researching your competitors is an intelligent part of any marketing strategy and SEO is no exception.
But strategies to lose rely too much on your competitors for SEO information like keywords and backlink sources.
You will not be able to duplicate every link your competitors have achieved or to be able to rank for every keyword they are ranking for.
Copying what they did can earn you a little bit of traffic, but usually, they will stay there if they get their first.
If you want to find businesses to emulate, this is usually a better strategy to look outside of your industry, or at least outside of your direct competitors, and take a look at how other businesses are able to achieve similar audience targets.
Look at similar industries and identify how they differ from each other. Perhaps there is a business in another industry that has distinguished itself in ways that can give you an idea of how to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
If you want to emulate other brands’ link-building and keyword strategies, go back to businesses that have gained a similar audience but sell a wide variety of products.
Conclusion
There’s no arguing that WordPress is the most SEO-friendly CMS, and one of the reasons it’s so popular is that it’s not just user-friendly, it’s easy to apply a whole host of SEO techniques using just a handful of fantastic plugins.
SEO is a field of expertise that relies on a wide range of skill sets.
Applying a piece of SEO advice indiscriminately can be dangerous without understanding how fair that advice is.
There is no business SEO strategy that works for every business. Most SEO tips in existence are not written with eCommerce sites in mind.
Consider why each of the above advice pieces can often fire up and develop your SEO strategy with these considerations in mind.
Happy SEO.