Spring Clean your Website

Website Design

Jul 28

Tips to improve your WordPress site performance and SEO

Spring is here and it’s a great time to clean up your WP site! We suggest cleaning up your site at least 3 times a year. We get a ton of questions about SEO, so Spring is a great time to put some website cleaning tips out (this is for WordPress.org sites).

So is your website and content SEO ready and will it be read by search engines? Maybe you’re wondering if your site will show up in a search result. Or maybe you want to improve how your site performs and how site visitors interact with your site. We’ve got a few tips to help you get on the right SEO path.

SEO is complex but it doesn’t have to be. So what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization is the long way of saying SEO but what does it mean? SEO is the practices and relationship between your site, the content on your site, and how that content is read by search engines. SEO can be thought of in a few ways:

1) Technical SEO
2) User Experience
3) For fun, we like to throw in a common sense approach as well. Common sense SEO or good content that people can relate to, come back to, is authentic and shared with a strategy.

The technical side of SEO is based on how search engines read your site and the user experience side of SEO is based on how site visitors interact with your site. The common-sense approach is your job, that’s the content you put out to the viewer. Each piece is important so we’re going to talk briefly about each part.

First things first, don’t assume because your site is visually appealing it’s SEO ready. Many sites are visual stunners but they aren’t technical SEO ready. It’s highly likely that your site designer did not include SEO work in the site design. If you or your site designer hasn’t put SEO work into your site, there are a couple of baseline things you can do to make your site and content search engine friendly.

Install the Yoast Plugin

Start at home plate, inside your WordPress site, and install the Yoast plugin. Yoast has a free and a premium version. The free version is fine for most sites but we like the premium version the most because of the extra features and information it provides.

Yoast allows you to set a focus keyword for your pages and posts as well as the option to edit page titles and page descriptions which are the snips of information you see in search results. Yoast can be a bit overwhelming but once you familiarize yourself with it, you’ll catch on. We suggest using the suggested page and post options as a checklist to improve how you optimize your content but each suggestion may not be the best fit for your content. Remember, people, come first so never forget to choose user experience over suggestions. You want your content flow naturally.

This is where the common sense approach and user experience pieces come into play, don’t make your content read unnaturally or use any advice that would negatively affect your user experience. Always treat your site with common sense and think about the people you know interact with your site. The number one piece of advice we can give about SEO is to think of your site and the content on your site as an outsider looking in.

Clean your site up

Make sure you remove old themes you’re no longer using, delete inactive plugins and declutter your image gallery. These simple steps help increase page speed and page-speed affects your user experience. We also suggest using a plugin that optimizes your images such as Hummingbird. Pagespeed and SEO are related because they affect how users interact with your site. If users can’t view your content or site quickly, then they’ll likely leave it. Pagespeed also needs to be viewed with a sensible approach. Aim for a site that loads quickly to the untrained eye. (check your page speed).

Make great content

You need to give people a reason to stay on your site and come back to your site. Make sure people know how to navigate your site by sharing your site and content on your social media. Sharing on social media is a great way to direct site visitors back to your website an establish yourself as a content source, assuming your content is of value. Site traffic is important but authentic site traffic is always the best choice. We don’t suggest using inauthentic ways to drive people to your site. Remember, authenticity is always the best choice.

Learn your site data

Another valuable tool is to use Google analytics to learn how users interact with your site. Learning your site audience is a great way to see how people interact with your site and social. Learning user behavior will help you make decisions about what content to add or remove from your site. Also, you should set up your Google Search Console and submit your sitemap to Google. (Bonus: Yoast creates a sitemap for you).

Google Reviews

Bonus tip, if you’re looking to improve your local search, you need to know the importance of Google reviews. Google reviews, both good and bad matter. Bad? Yeah, no one is perfect. We suggest making sure you have authentic and relatable google reviews and practicing only review generation methods that are considered authentic. Establishing a brand reputation, having a site that is free of clutter, great content, and knowing your audience are all ways to improve your site performance.

Want us to Spring clean your site or give you an SEO audit? Let’s chat –> click it.

Regina Jacobs

We put a bunch of thought into so many aspects of our business, but the most important is our personal voice. I believe in being authentic and relatable. Give people a person and the story behind your local brand. Sprinkle some heart into what you do.

I'm a creative with a passion for bringing business dreams to life. I help business owners create and establish their online presence and coach others in bringing their creative projects to life.

My team and I help entrepreneurs and brands create authentic social media content and launch beautiful websites to display their brands. We’ll work together to beautifully capture your brand.

https://sociallyup.com