Skip to content What is SEO? Normally, the competitive environment
is so tough that it may not be enough for online businesses to stop after
having implemented the basic SEO for their WordPress sites. You must know what
your competitors are up to and to beat them in drawing more traffic to your
website. You do this by lifting your WordPress SEO to achieve better search
engine rankings.
It
is very important to conduct thorough competitor research regarding everything
they are doing on-site as well as off-site. Once you have completed the basic
SEO implementation involving content quality, keyword research, competitor and
keyword gap analysis, and other on-page optimization activities.
These
are like optimization of the title tags, Meta description, images, internal
links, information architecture, coding, and more. You need to hunker down and
get going on the job of more advanced SEO implementation. Some tips:
Use
UTM Parameters to Track Conversions
Correct
and impactful marketing decisions depend on accurate data. There is nothing
perhaps as bad as not having the data you want except for having incorrect
data. When you want to be certain that you do not have data that is wrong, you
should use UTM parameters in the advertising links on social media or an
advertising campaign that you are running.
As
you know, Google Analytics does not track the traffic sources, which means that
you have no other option but to rely on your general assessment of the sources
of organic traffic. This can be quite hazardous when making recommendations
based on SEO data.
By
using Google’s Campaign URL builder, you can get a better hold on your data.
All you need to do is to enter one by one, vital information like the website
URL, campaign source, and medium, name of the campaign, terms or keywords that
need to be tracked, and the campaign content. The approach can be very granular
and you can experiment freely for assessing what works the best for keeping
tabs on your target audience.
Fix
Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate
content can confuse search engines and signal them to downgrade the web pages.
Even though everyone recognizes the need to address the concern of duplicate
content, it is easier said than done when a website can easily have a few
thousand pages, and it can be a real job to identify and locate the duplicate
content.
Regardless
of whether you have extensive SEO experience or not, you should undertake a
content audit to locate the duplicate content and a technical audit to
understand what issues the duplicate content is resulting in. You can use the
Screaming Frog tool to scan your website and extract the site data.
Then
you can use the “Hash” column to identify the web pages with duplicate content.
What could have taken many hours of backbreaking effort can be achieved very
easily and quickly.
Schema.org
Structured Data Optimization
You
are at a disadvantage if you are not using structured data from Schema.org to
target better SERP rankings. While there is no guarantee that you will achieve
the coveted position, it can be a big mistake not to target SERPs with this
fundamental feature.
There
are three ways you can use to optimize for WordPress schema; you can use the
standard structured data markup of Schema.org, use Schema.org plugins or the
Google Tag Manager. In their own ways, all of them are effective but have their
pros and cons depending on your objectives.
You
can optimize individual pages or products on the website by using standard
Schema.org microdata; however, it is a very long process that needs to be done
manually. While if you are an expert, you can always develop a Schema
optimization program that will run automatically, however, you need to be alert
to location-specific information and also ensure that you do not end up
violating Google’s rules regarding spam structured data and get penalized.
Manually writing Schema can be well worth the effort because then you know everything that the markup is doing on the site, however, if your website has lots of pages; the task of manually coding Schema can be daunting. Using one of the many available plugins can make the job far easier.
Some of the plugins have the capability of implementing Schema across a large variety of data types so irrespective of what kind of site you have; you can be assured that there will be a proper implementation of your Schema.
You
may wish to think again about using Google Tag Manager because if it ceases to
work, the rankings and the rich snippets that you worked so hard to get is not
available for the period it is not operative.
Optimize
for Speedy Loading of Website
While
speed has been considered a ranking factor by Google since 2010, it also
included it for mobiles in 2018 largely because of the huge shift in browsing
habits. Today more than half the internet traffic is being generated by users
on mobile devices and it will not be soon before desktops are completely eclipsed.
According
to Google studies, 2 seconds is the maximum that people are likely to wait for
sites to load, which is a clear indicator that this is the threshold e-commerce
sites will have to deal with to cater to user demands acceptably. The study
went on to observe that while two seconds is the maximum for e-commerce sites,
Google is looking at sites that load under a half-second.
This is a clear signal that if you can get your site to load that quickly, you could have a real competitive edge for generating traffic. While it is anything but easy to achieve that sort of lightning performance by a WordPress site, you can do with investing time and effort.
According to https://techcrunch.com, using Google’s Page Speed Online feature is a very good way of measuring your site speed directly from the web.
The
bottom line
To
make your website SEO competitive, you need to understand that you cannot
remain restricted to specific optimization methods and known best practices.
The real world, however, is extremely dynamic; there are constant changes in
the industry, the competition, and search engine technologies.
It
is important to always update your thinking, find out what is working and what
is not, and experiment to overcome the challenges of change.