Mastering the art of local SEO is an uphill battle for many business owners. With so many algorithms, best practices, and new techniques, it can be hard to keep track of what will be effective for your company website.
One surefire method of enhancing your efforts for local SEO is using the WordPress platform. WordPress isn’t new to web design and digital marketing, but it can be very effective in terms of implementing your SEO strategy and beyond.
But what makes WordPress so great for local SEO, and is it really worth it to the average business owner to learn the platform?
WordPress Trumps Other DIY Websites For Local SEO
Wix is a DIY small business web design platform that makes it easy for business owners to publish their own website. However, there are a lot of technical reasons why business owners should avoid Wix at all costs.
In October 2015, Wix websites dropped of the SERPs for Google. It’s speculated that the culprit was its heavy use of AJAX and JavaScript coding. Its URL format is also served through JavaScript and may affect bots that crawl your company website from Google.
Furthermore, there is no meta tag management system for Wix users. They’re unable to include good keywords and write descriptions that can increase click-through rate.
Wix websites also have noticeably slow load times, which is also bad for SEO.
For business owners who are serious about SEO, choosing WordPress is essentially a no-brainer.
Why is WordPress The Best Option For Local SEO?
WordPress is an extremely user-friendly CMS system that nearly any business owner can learn. There are endless opportunities for design and customize your website to look exactly as you want it.
Furthermore, WordPress allows you to customize every page with a URL containing your keywords. The URL structure of Wix includes hashbangs (#!) due to its AJAX coding, but WordPress provides a clean and hassle-free URL for business websites.
With the flexibility of WordPress, business owners can easily move forward with their SEO strategy on both a content and technical basis. Best of all, there is a highly popular WordPress SEO plugin to help with the cause.
WordPress SEO Plugin: Yoast SEO
Yoast is possibly the most popular and dependable SEO plugin option available. It’s extremely easy to use and implement and can help business owners achieve higher rankings in the search engines.
The first step to understanding why Yoast is so helpful for SEO is to take a look at its anatomy. The Yoast interface is embedded into every WordPress blog post or page on your website. You’ll find it below the text box and it contains multiple forms to fill out to help improve your search engine rankings.
Snippet Editor
Snippet Editor is a tab within the plugin that contains the field you need to customize your keyword and metadata. This is the place where you can edit your title tag and meta description, as well as assign a relevant keyword to your post.
Your content analysis is included underneath the snippet editor, which gives an overview of your content in terms of a technical and user-friendly standpoint. The analysis will display notes and action items with a red, orange, or yellow light. You’ll find information in this analysis such as:
- Alt tag information
- Keyword density
- Keyword included in the page title and meta description
- Word count
- Outbound links
- Subheading information
- And more
The best part about Yoast SEO is that it will give you specific direction in terms of what you can do to improve your local SEO. As long as you have good content and focus keyword in mind, Yoast can help guide you through the process.
Yoast SEO also has a local SEO plugin that is specifically designed to help small businesses rank better on Google. It allows you to add features such as a Google map, store locator, operating hours, and more.
Choosing Your Keywords For Local SEO
In order to get the most out of WordPress and the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll need to have a few keywords in mind. However, you don’t want to choose just any random keyword. You’ll need to do a bit of research ahead of time to ensure that your chosen keyword has a good search volume and low to average competition.
To find the keywords for your company website, you’ll need to step outside of Yoast and use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner. Keep in mind that you’ll want to add a geo-modified term to your keyword to optimize it for local search. For example, instead of choosing the word “plumber,” use “plumber Greenville SC.”
Once you’re set up with your small business website on WordPress, you’re ready to put your local SEO strategy in place with this powerful platform.
How is Your Business Performing Online?
Whether you’re using WordPress or another CMS platform, knowing how your website is performing is crucial to your SEO success. Bigfoot Media specializes in helping small businesses achieve higher search engine rankings and get the most out of their company website.
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