Improve Your WordPress SEO With These 8 Advanced Tactics
Are you aware that implementing basic SEO on your website may not be enough?
How do you know that you are implementing every tactic that your competitors are and more?
There are many ways to ensure this. The first and probably the most primary one being competitor research.
In this blog, we will discuss the advanced tactics that you can use to improve your WordPress SEO.
- Tracking Conversions Using UTM Parameters
When it comes to improving your SEO strategy, nothing can be worse than having wrong or incomplete data or no data at all!
The best way to avoid a situation like this is by using UTM Parameters in your links used solely for marketing.
You should start using UTM Parameters in links you are using on social media or URLs you are using elsewhere with marketing or SEO campaigns.
Google Analytics does not record your traffic source by default, which means you are left with only a general analysis of your organic traffic. Now, this can be considered as an incomplete data when it comes to making assumptions on the basis of SEO data.
But by using Google’s Campaign URL builder, you can change this.
Step 1: Enter the website URL.
Step 2: Then, enter the campaign source (like Google, Newsletter)
Step 3: Enter the campaign medium.
Step 4: Next, enter the campaign name (like example_campaign).
Step 5: Enter your campaign term. You can enter the keywords here that you are tracking as part of your campaign.
Step 6: Proceed by entering the campaign content, which helps you differentiate the ads that you are running alongside.
Once you add all these UTM parameters, your URL will probably get too lengthy. You can use a link shortener to shorten it.
With these parameters, you will be able to go in-depth. From monitoring CTA to tags in content that are converting best, you can get as granular as you want with this.
This data will help you find out what works best for you, and eventually, you can use it to make adjustments and improve your SEO strategy.
Keeping tabs on your target audience also becomes easy and effortless with this extraordinary tool.
- Fix Indexing & Crawling Issues with Duplicate Content
While this might come across as a very basic issue, it is really not that basic.
Especially when you have a thousand webpages, and your website is hammered with duplicate content issues, finding all of them can be a challenging task itself. So until and unless you are an SEO expert with years of experience, this is a big issue for you.
If you speculate that your website is getting overburdened with duplicate content issues, you need to carry out:
⦁ A content audit to identify duplicate content on-site as well as off-site.
⦁ A technical audit to find out how the content is making your website suffer.
- Optimizing Noindex Categories, Tags & Archive Pages in WordPress
If not optimized properly, these pages can be a major issue for WordPress websites.
By simply searching on Google using the site: operator and domain name (for example – site: abc.com), you will get a good idea of what is happening there, by seeing the indexed pages.
Compare this with the pages that Google Search Console recognizes. If these numbers do not match the physical webpages indexed on Google, you have a serious duplicate content and indexing issue.
Find out which webpages have these issues and optimize them properly.
- Optimizing for Schema Markup
Are you familiar with Schema Markup and its importance for SEO?
In case you’re not using Schema.org structured data to target Search Engine Result Page (SERP) marketing efforts, you are missing out on a lot!
Although it does not guarantee instant position zero rankings, not targeting SERPs with this feature is a mistake.
Not doing Schema.org microdata optimization means you are losing out on competitive SERPs with rich snippets and other snippets.
There are three ways to optimize for Schema.org in WordPress:
- Using standard Schema.org structured data markup.
- Using Schema.org plugins.
- Using Google Tag Manager.
- Speed Optimization
As Google updates rolled out over the years, speed became a ranking factor for both desktops and mobiles.
If we talk about e-commerce sites, then we can imagine how crucial speed is for them considering how little time the audience is willing to invest in waiting for a site to load.
Google likes to see a minimum page speed to ensure that the particular e-commerce website is capable of serving user demand and satisfying their needs.
The faster your website loads, the better it is.
According to research, 2 seconds is the actual threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. That means this is the type of speed users love to shop with and want. However, Google aims for under a half-second!
Meaning, if you can optimize your website well enough to load in under a half-second, you are going to wipe out all your competitors from your way.
No doubt, it is a challenge to get WordPress to load in under a half-second, but if you are willing to put in the required effort and time, it can be done.
When it comes to optimizing your page speed on the advanced level, there are several things you need to do starting from optimizing your images (a basic page speed optimization bottleneck.)
- Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Implementing a Content Delivery Network must be a requirement for larger websites.
CDN helps you reach a wider audience in more locations faster instead of just serving one location.
Plus, this can significantly decrease your page speed.
- Watch Your Permalinks Settings
People who are not much familiar with WordPress can often skip this.
Once your website goes live, you need to be extremely careful of your Permalinks settings. Failing to do so, your permalinks will start showing 404 errors suddenly, causing you to face some significant rankings drops.
If you have a larger team that lacks management, you will likely encounter a situation like this. Even one team member can create chaos by changing these settings, leading to a ranking drop so severe as if you have a penalty.
So in case you have a WordPress site and ever get into a scenario like this, Permalinks settings are the first thing you need to check.
Google clearly states in its guidelines that your URL structure needs to be organized and user-friendly. But unfortunately, the default WordPress URL structure options given under Permalinks doesn’t make an ideal URL structure for Google.
Post name and categories is a great structure to follow to make sure your URLs are optimized and Google-friendly for your audience as well as niche.
But WordPress does not have this option. What do we do then?
Let’s see!
- Go to your WordPress backend and click on Settings> Permalinks.
- Next, select custom structure, category, and then post name.
Note:
Provided that you have a plugin that is configured to do this specifically, you might end up causing severe harm to your search engine rankings as one of the side effects of doing this is introducing 404 errors on your website in places where there weren’t any before.
This is why it is critical to keep an eye out for your Permalinks settings all the time.
- Experiment and Research
We know there are a few people who feel that experiment and research are a no-no and that with some SEO basics and best practices, we can do everything.
However, the real world hardly ever works out like that.
From competition to industries to SERPs, everything changes, but this isn’t new.
Without experimenting and researching, you can’t upgrade your strategy and adapt to the latest best practices when the old ones stop doing the trick for you, and without doing all these, you simply cannot succeed.
Sticking to the same things you have always been doing can only get you the results you have always got. To gain better results, you must employ better tactics and experimentation and research are the only ways to do that.
Do not hesitate to experiment. Learn to go beyond your comfort zone, discover new things, and see how it works out for you.
Conclusion
SEO is all about changes and how fast you adapt to the trend to stay in the competition. It is essential first to get your basics done before you get on to the advanced SEO. Research your competition to see what and how they are employing both on-site as well as off-site. Doing things beyond the basics will reap you better rewards. With these eight advanced tactics, you will be able to give your SEO strategy the wings it needs to take off!