WordPress SEO Consultant

Running a WordPress website or WooCommerce online store is no easy feat, nor is it cheap to set up. You don’t want to pay a web developer for what you believe to be a fully-optimized SEO site that promises boosted sales and top Google rankings but does not deliver. WordPress is an incredibly SEO-friendly open-source web content management system (CMC), jam-packed with many powerful features that adhere to Google’s best practices. WordPress’s intuitive backend, text editor, and overall design lend themselves well to SEO.

However, you can do more to help your WordPress website or WooCommerce online store index and rank better for a competitive edge. A personalized campaign from a WordPress SEO expert ensures the site is well-optimized with rich content that earns converting backlinks. You also need a website free of technical issues that limit your visibility across search results.

Despite having the most aesthetically-pleasing website or eCommerce store, your competitors are still outranking you. WordPress SEO consultants can help get hit those often elusive search engine top spots that, when done right, can be a gift that keeps on giving.

Boost Crawlability SEO for Your WordPress Site

An SEO Speaker is an experienced and skilled expert in digital marketing and a presenter who teaches digital marketers how they can improve their visibility on the internet organically.

  • Yoast evaluates your site content and suggests ideal keyword density, title length, metatags, etc. The plugin helps improve your site’s on-page SEO and optimizes its content readability, internal linking, image alt attributes, and more.
  • Rank Math reviews your sites’ written content to rank how well-optimized articles for selected keywords are from an SEO score of 100.
  • Complete Analytics Optimization Suite allows your eCommerce or WordPress site to rank higher on speed metrics as it syncs with programs like Google Optimize.
  • SEMrush more so, Ahrefs plugin uses the Google Search Console to categorize well-performing, underperforming, deadweight posts, and keywords.
  • Jetpack is an all-encompassing plugin that helps with social media sharing, blocking spam comments, and providing key statistical insights about your WordPress site.
  • Schema and structured data is a plugin that allows you to customize and add multiple schemas to a page on your WordPress site.
  • There are various sitemap plugins, including redirect tools for building link equity, MailChimp email marketing plugins, caches to prevent slow loading, and more.

SEO plugins may help customize what search engines can crawl in terms of keywords, titles, and metadata, but they’re not enough. You need help from a professional WordPress consultant to drive strong ranking growth to a failing WordPress website. It’s easy to overlook design clarity when designing your WordPress site and focus all your efforts on content and keywords.

Search engines like Google will likely penalize your website if it is slow and hard to use. WordPress-SEO services also include optimizing user content and choosing high-quality, responsive themes designed with a mobile-first mentality. An expert SEO on WordPress matters will also consider your website speed, URL structure, sitemaps, and HTML tags.

Here are standard WordPress SEO services you can expect when you onboard a full-service WordPress SEO agency to optimize your eCommerce or WordPress site.

Different Types of WordPress SEO Services

An SEO Speaker is an experienced and skilled expert in digital marketing and a presenter who teaches digital marketers how they can improve their visibility on the internet organically.

Local SEO

If your business has a brick-and-mortar store offering local products or services to a specific geographic location, it can benefit from local SEO. The SEO strategy uses your address and keyword phrases related to your business to help boost your visibility on local search results. A location-based SEO campaign also factors listing your business in Google My Business, including review signals. It also considers reviews and citations from data aggregators that help optimize your site’s digital footprint.

Keyword Research and Integration

Keyword research for WordPress is the best way to understand your user’s search intent. Once you know what your audience is looking for, you can improve and provide targeted content that gets you ranked high by Google. Tools like Google Keyword Planner display the most competitive keywords. You can find out how many people have bid for related searches in Google AdWords.

Content Optimization

As a WooCommerce online store or WordPress website owner, you want to ensure your content reaches the right and largest possible target audience. Content optimization involves matching search intent, creating quality articles, establishing niche authority, converting Calls-to-action, and more. Content optimization revolves around customizing the following on and off-page parameters;

  • URL optimization
  • Optimizing images and alt attributes
  • Link building with optimized web copy
  • Email, video, and social media marketing
  • Boosting user experience with optimized page load time

When done right, your site pages will rank for competitive keywords that convert more visitors into leads.

Plugins! – The Secret Weapon of SEO for WordPress Websites

Plugins can be the key to unlocking the full potential of your website, especially if you’re using WordPress. You don’t need to be a coding genius or a development pro to use them, either. These plugins make it easy to add all kinds of functionality to your site.

There are all kinds of SEO plugins available for WordPress, and they can help you out with everything from keyword optimization to XML sitemaps to bulk editing meta tags. There are plenty of free plugins, the more complex ones can be paid depending on what they add to the site.

Yoast SEO, All in One SEO Pack, RankMath to name a few. Paid options include SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz, and SERPstat.

But, here’s the thing, installing one of these plugins isn’t going to make your website grow instantly. You need to know how to use it, configure it, and keep it optimized. And that’s where the pros come in – the SEO consultants. They’ll make sure you’re using these amazing plugins to the fullest.

Here’s a breakdown of WordPress Plugins that I use:

Optimizing WordPress Website for Speed

Nothing annoys site visitors more than slow-loading pages. Issues such as broken internal links, 404-page errors, or wrong redirects can affect crawlability. If your WordPress site is sluggish, even by a few seconds, expect to experience increased bounce rates that result in poor search rankings and conversions. Fortunately, the right WordPress SEO specialist can employ several methods to diagnose speed issues to optimize your site for speed and performance.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console Setup

Setting up Google Analytics is advisable if you’re running an eCommerce site. You can learn the channels (social media, search, paid ads, email, etc.) that drive more traffic and those that are hemorrhaging money. With Google Search Console, you can track the progress of your existing content, including your site’s presence on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Generally, the free service helps you monitor, maintain, troubleshoot any issues, and improve how Google sees your eCommerce website.

Identifying and Fixing Content Cannibalization Issues

As you scale your WordPress or eCommerce site, you’ll most likely have different posts discussing similar topics. That’s when content or keyword cannibalization happens. When your website has multiple articles with similar content competing for the same keyword;

  • It diminishes page authority
  • Interferes with ranking relevant pages
  • It affects your link structure and ends up leading site users to several irrelevant pages

Ideally, you want your most competitive keyword or articles to rank top because they’ll result in higher click-through rates and conversions. An expert on WordPress optimization can conduct a ‘site: search’ to identify and fix potential keyword cannibalization.

Setting Up WordPress Robots.Txt and XML Sitemaps

Most sites have a robots.txt file, but not all webmasters understand it. Bots crawl websites to help search engines index and rank billions of available pages on the internet. A well-structured robots.txt file optimizes various search engines’ crawl resources to determine the pages that don’t need to be indexed. In turn, search engines can focus on crawling pages that are most relevant to you.

A robots.txt file is placed on your site’s root directory to help optimize your server usage. It blocks resource-wasting web crawlers, ensuring Google doesn’t index or rank marked areas from within your site. Like robots.txt, an XML sitemap is a must-have, as it contains a list of all your site’s URLs and relevant web pages. A sitemap provides directives that help search engines and users better understand your web pages when navigating your entire website.

Website Maintenance: Monthly Competitor Analysis, Monitoring, and Reporting

A WordPress competitor analysis lets you see how similar niche sites attract organic visitors. Once you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can build a successful SEO strategy by using high-performing keywords to increase traffic. Competitor analysis, monitoring, and reporting are among the most crucial website maintenance tasks a WordPress SEO specialist will carry out.

Some tasks may require a more hands-on approach. Others can be completed using a maintenance plugin like WP Plugin to ensure your site functions efficiently. A maintenance plugin provides complete autonomy for your website as you keep track of everything from updates via staging sites to malware security scanning, reporting, etc., from a single dashboard.

When you hire a WordPress SEO agency, the team will handle various website management services, including the following;

  • Creating a WordPress site firewall protection plan using a security plugin such as MalCare to scan your site and give alerts of suspicious activities
  • Scheduling site backups to reduce downtime and minimize losses in case your website server is hacked, your web host suspends your account, or the site data gets deleted
  • Removing junk data, optimizing images, videos, web content, and site speed, upgrading WordPress versions, and fixing broken links to improve your site’s performance
  • Periodically checking your site device and browser performance to ensure the overall user experience is uniform across the board
  • Reviewing your WordPress site statistics on Google Analytics and Search Console to get insights on high-performing areas and those needing improvement

Like any system, your WordPress website can experience various operational problems ranging from hacking, data loss, legal issues, spam, and broken links, to mention a few. An SEO WordPress expert can keep the site in good shape on a regular basis to reduce these risks before they get worse. To give you the best chances for ranking high in SERPs, your WordPress SEO consultant will rely on WordPress best practices to create an optimized site structure.

Step-by-Step WordPress Search Engine Optimization Process

This is how a full-service digital marketing company that specializes in WordPress SEO will help you drive organic traffic growth to your site.

  1. Conduct a comprehensive on-site audit to check how your site functions across critical criteria. An audit highlights and resolves technical SEO issues on your website’s landing pages, WP configuration, WooCommerce setup, etc.
  2. Brainstorm competitive keywords with considerable organic search traffic potential. When prioritizing keywords, a WordPress SEO specialist will also factor in search intent, including keywords with high business potential and low ranking difficulty.
  3. Launch on-page optimization, which may involve content revamping, header restructuring, improving SEO scores in Rank Math, and internal linking. All titles, descriptions, URLs, and content must be optimized to provide a highly relevant user experience for targeted site visitors.
  4. Start an off-page optimization campaign to strengthen your site’s domain profile. The process will involve internal and backlink building to pass “link juice” or equity from authority pages.
  5. Set up a WordPress analytics dashboard and use a tool like Google Analytics to monitor various metrics. With the web traffic analysis suite, you can determine your visitor’s point of origin to optimize your traffic sources, improve content strategy, track marketing campaigns, and fix pages with high bounce rates.
  6. Perform ongoing WordPress optimization to ensure your site operates as efficiently as possible. WordPress optimization may involve cleaning your WP database, caching, boosting page speeds, revising old posts, and website hosting.

Whether you want to solve page loading problems, generate sitemaps, or troubleshoot Core Web Vitals and backend issues, there’s a service that will meet your unique needs. It starts with hiring a professional SEO in WordPress to provide the maintenance, monitoring, and support services for your website.

Are you ready to start your WordPress optimization journey?

The best way to maximize your SEO return on investment on such a versatile and robust WordPress website is to engage a WordPress SEO Consultant to guide your SEO strategy. The customization capabilities and range of available WordPress plugins can help enhance your website’s performance and boost user experience. Working with a seasoned SEO consultant gives you access to a team honed invaluable skills, knowledge, and expertise in working with WordPress and Woocommerce sites. The good news is most WordPress or eCommerce store sites can be optimized without breaking the bank.

Why Work with Lawrence Hitches?

With over eight years of experience working with a range of WordPress websites, I have the expertise and knowledge to get you results through organic search.

I am recognized as the Young Search Professional of the Year by the Semrush Awards in 2021 and as General Manager of StudioHawk we won Best Marketing Agency 2019, Best Large SEO Agency in the Global Search Awards in 2021, and Best Large SEO Agency in APAC Search Awards in 2022 and 2023!

Let’s Level Up Your SEO

Transform your website’s visibility and drive more organic traffic!

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