WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems on the web with nearly 35% of all websites being WP-based, and for good reason. WordPress is one of the simplest systems to use in building a site for your business, whether it’s a local store or an ecommerce hub. But like any CMS, some SEO snafus are more likely to happen with WordPress than on another site-builder. Here’s the most common SEO mistakes we’ve seen on WordPress.
Not Updating Your Theme/Plug-Ins
The most common WordPress mistake that can affect SEO is also one of the easiest to fix. As a highly customizable platform, you can install a ton of different plugins to supercharge your site as well as different themes to make it look and feel the way you’d like.
Most people think these tools are set-it-and-forget-it but this isn’t the case! Old themes and plugins that aren’t updated can create a bunch of extra, thin content URLs that can drag down the SEO value of the rest of your site. Old themes/plugins also can leave it vulnerable to cyberattacks and code hacks, but most of all they can slow your site down to a crawl.
Site speed influences SEO rankings and has a big part to play in user experience/engagement – no one likes waiting for a site to load – which Google also likes to take a look at when determining your place in the algorithm, so update those plugins regularly!
Unoptimized Permalinks
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual webpages on WordPress, such as a blog, homepage, category or product page. When creating new pages and posts, most people tend to trust the default URL that WordPress gives you, but that’s highly unoptimized and can leave valuable SEO real estate on the table.
Luckily, WordPress gives you the option of customizing these permalinks, which is great for SEO, as URL structure is a ranking factor with Google. Edit your permalink to feature SEO keywords as well as the optimized title of your page/blog to get in good with the search engines.
Unoptimized Metadata
All the way down on your post page in WordPress you can find the “edit snippet” button where you can enter a custom page title, meta description, and even edit the URL for SEO relevance. Optimizing your metadata is probably one of the simplest things you can do to make sure each of your pages is SEO-friendly and targeting your audience, but a lot of people miss it because its so far down the page. Scroll down, write unique metadata, and see your page gain traction in organic searches.
Blog Tags Upon Blog Tags
Since WordPress is so friendly for blogging, you can add blog tags whenever you see fit. However, again and again, we’ve seen sites with tons of blog tags suffer in organic rankings due to an excess of thin and potentially duplicate pages.
Remember that each time you create a blog tag, it creates a page for the search engines to crawl that often features just the posts and not much else. At best, these pages represent thin content and at worst they could be considered duplicate content, especially if the tag pages feature a lot of the same blogs as each other. Either way, it can affect your organic rankings.
A good rule of thumb is to count the total number of pages on your site and consider adding 10% of that amount in blog tags, making sure that each tag is unique and serves a purpose. This will make these pages innocuous as Google pays attention to your more important pages but more impactful to the user experience since there are fewer of them.
Relying Solely on Yoast for SEO Success
Yoast is a great tool to check up on the basics of your site and make sure your title tags and meta descriptions are within the right length with your focus keywords are being used properly on the page but it’s a huge mistake to feel like it’ll guarantee your site’s SEO success.
Real SEO progress can only come through putting in the work of nailing down your target audiences, the content/keywords that will drive them to the site, and near-constant optimization with the help of an SEO expert. Consider Yoast to be an “SEO checker” and focus on the real work of foundational SEO to help your WordPress site rank.
Also, although Yoast offers a helpful XML sitemap tool, it can sometimes create duplicate sitemaps that, when the search engines read them, can cause certain duplicate pages to have more importance than your primary ones and generally communicate a different picture of your site to the search engines than you’d like to present so keep an eye on your sitemap as well when using Yoast.
SEO for WordPress
These are some of the most common mistakes we see on WordPress that can affect your site’s SEO. While avoiding all these pitfalls will keep your site healthy and in a good position to rank, hiring an SEO expert to audit your site can help take your traffic to the next level. Contact us today.