Fine-Tune Your WordPress Site’s SEO with These Actionable Tips

(Image Source)

 

WordPress and SEO go hand in hand.

 

In fact,  you’ll find that monetizing your website might be more challenging if you don’t use them in tandem.

 

Don’t worry — there are times in every digital marketer’s life when the results of your WordPress SEO efforts fall short of your expectations. It happens to the best of us.

 

In such cases, it’s imperative that you give your SEO strategies a shot in the arm. You need to accept that you’ve made mistakes, hunker down, and do some fine-tuning.

 

In this article, we’re going to discuss the most powerful SEO strategies that will help you generate more qualified traffic and conversions on your WordPress site.

 

Let’s start.

 

1. Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC) Websites

 

Q&A websites such as Quora or Reddit provide untapped link building opportunities that could give your website the boost it needs to generate more leads and close conversions.

 

Quora is like a more robust version of Yahoo Answers. As a popular source of community insights, the website can also serve as a goldmine of in-demand content ideas.

 

What’s more, you can showcase your expertise and build your reputation as an authority in your industry by answering questions yourself.

 

Below are tried-and-tested ways to leverage Quora’s marketing potential as a driver of qualified traffic to your website.

 

Build your user profile

Before you can build your reputation on the website, you need to make sure your profile is complete and looks genuine.

 

Upload your most professional-looking photo, write an impressive and unique description, and provide links to your website.

 

Participate in threads relevant to your niche

Type your seed keywords in the search field and then find discussions relevant to your industry.

 

Apart from the content ideas you can mine, you can also tune in and provide your take on topics that matter to your target audience.

 

 

Every time you participate in discussions is a golden opportunity to refer or link to your own content in your responses.

 

This, of course, reinforces your backlink profile, which in turn improves your rank worthiness in the eyes of search engines like Google.

 

Needless to say, you need to deliver insightful and valuable contributions in order to get a ton of upvotes from fellow members.

 

By earning a lot of votes, your profile and link will appear more prominently in the ‘Answers’ section, thus, increasing your brand’s visibility and generating more traffic to your website.

 

 

2. Speed Up Your Website

 

Loading speed plays a crucial role in determining your website’s search engine rankings.

 

Not only is it a ranking signal for SEO, Google also reports that 53% of mobile users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

 

That’s right — three seconds. That’s about as long as reaching for your phone right now and trying to unlock the screen.

 

Let’s face it, people have such a short attention span these days.

 

Which is why it’s in your best interest to optimize your website’s loading speed. Do that and you’re giving your visitors time to appreciate your content and eventually convert.

 

Here are some of the tips to get you started on website speed optimization:

 

Run your website through PageSpeed Insights

 

Before optimizing your site’s loading speed, the first order of business is to do a speed test. Thankfully, Google PageSpeed Insights can help you with that for free.

 

 

PageSpeed Insights work by detecting issues that affect loading speed as well as the necessary optimization procedures to solve them. A good strategy is to work your way from top to bottom under the “Optimization Suggestions” section and running another analysis each time you apply a fix.

 

Compress images on your website

 

Incorporating visual content into your WordPress articles is an excellent way to keep your visitors’ attention while reading your content.

 

Images, however, can take up a lot of bandwidth when unoptimized — potentially crippling your website’s loading speed if you pack a lot of images on one page.

 

With a free tool like Compressor.io, you can easily solve all your problems by applying one of two different types of compression on your images. For websites, the “lossless” option is recommended since it compresses image files without any perceivable changes in quality.

 

 

Use a CDN

 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of proxy servers distributed across different locations to cache and transfer certain website files whenever needed.

 

In other words, CDN servers function as terminals that provide local users faster access to website content. If a user tries to load a CDN-powered website, the nearest network or “Point of Presence” is leveraged to ensure optimal page loading times.

 

(Image Source: Incapsula)

 

3. Optimize your website for Mobile

 

If you’re not optimizing your website for mobile use, you’re missing out big time on conversion opportunities.

 

We can have an entire article that stresses the importance of mobile-friendliness, but for now, here are a handful of statistics to drive the point home:

 

• Google reports that nearly 60 percent of search queries now come from mobile devices.
• 80 percent of internet users own a mobile phone.
• Average mobile conversion rates are up 64 percent.

 

To top it off, Google announced that mobile page speed will be a ranking factor in mobile search results starting July 2018. That gives you only a few months left to make preparations for the new update — better get cracking!

 

One way to drastically improve your website’s loading speed is through AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which is an open-source Google initiative. It’s consists of web design principles that can help website owners publish content that loads almost instantaneously on mobile devices.

 

Enabling AMP on your WordPress site can be an arduous process, but why go through all the trouble if you can let a plugin like AMP for WP do the heavy lifting?

 

Installing the plugin is easy. Just search for it from the WordPress plugin library, click “Install Now,” and then click “Activate.”

 

 

You will then be able to access an “Installation Wizard” that can walk you through the steps necessary to create AMP-ready pages.

 

 

Final Word

 

If there’s one key takeaway from this post, it’s this:

 

You can never fine-tune your WordPress SEO strategies enough.

 

There are simply too many cogs involved in running a successful website to be complacent. Keeping yourself updated with the latest developments in the digital marketing space will help you stay ahead of the curve. Cheers!