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WordPress is an open-source platform and a flexible content management system (CMS). It’s the most popular CMS platform with over 40 million downloads on record. More than 25% of the world’s websites use WordPress and this number is still growing.
WordPress is an essential tool in today’s search engine optimization (SEO) processes, especially for local startup businesses because of its ability to improvea business’ scaling prowess. Another great thing about WordPress is that it’s easy to use even without extensive knowledge on the platform.
If you’re on a journey to improve your local SEO WordPress rankings, read through this seven-point game plan and start scaling right away. These steps, along with the information you can get from https://www.journalreview.org/, can help you improve your SEO rankings.
- Enhance the content.
Your content has the highest importance on your website. You may have a well-structured, fast-loading, and highly secure website, but none of these matter if you don’t have quality content. Before optimizing your content, be sure that what you’re going to put out gives value to your audience. Here’s what you can do:
- Identify the pain points or the specific problem that your prospective customers are experiencing.
- Determine if your product can solve their dilemmas.
- Once you’ve identified your solutions, turn them into convincing content that includes blogs, infographics, videos, and pictures.
- Implement on-page optimization.
On-page optimization mainly matches and configures the structural factors of a website to increase its reach and search engine visibility. In this method, you should practice the following activities:
- Updating the page title and description with relevant keywords and including a brief description of the website
- Adding descriptions and attributes to images and videos
- Removing all errors from HTML code and enhancing it for different browsers, speed, and devices
- Maintaining a balanced number of targeted keywords in all content, descriptions, and tags
- Review your website’s link profile.
Links are the primary ranking factor that you should pay attention to. Your site’s local ranking is dependent on the number of domains linked to your website. This factor also includes the quality of the backlinks and the optimization of the anchor texts. Understand that it takes a while for your link building to stabilize, but here are some tips that you can apply:
- Look for quality over quantity – Domain numbers do matter, but it’s better to have a quality backlink from a trustworthy industry leader than a dozen poor-quality and irrelevant backlinks.
- Locate and fix broken links – Broken links affect your website’s ranking. You can use a plugin that can check broken links and repair them for you. Use a plugin that can monitor your pages, posts, and comments.
- Enhance the anchor text – Research to determine the typically accepted anchor text within your niche, specifically for local searches. Never over-optimize, such as having too many exact matches. One trick that you can do so your website shows up in a local search is to include your city name in the anchor text.
- Search for link-building opportunities – Look for relevant industry websites that have links to your competitors. A competitive analysis tool is a great help for you to determine these opportunities.
- Improve your website speed.
Your website’s speed is highly essential. If you want to have the edge over yourcompetitors in every local search, your site must meet the necessary speed requirement. Try these tricks:
- Large images can slow down the loading process of a page. Optimize the images by compressing them. You can do this by selecting the picture that you want to edit, click the Picture Tools Format tab, and click Compress Pictures. Many websites also offer image optimization for free.
- Clean your WordPress theme. There are many WordPress themes full of old page elements, such as JavaScript, database calls, and functions. If you have an old WordPress theme, make sure to delete it. Sometimes, hackers use these themes to infiltrate your website and steal valuable information. Other hackers use these themes and link them on suspicious ads on social media platforms.
- Don’t get too many plug-ins. There are plenty of WordPress plugins with different functions that you can use. However, too many plug-ins affect the speed of yourwebsite. Only use plugins that are important to your website’s utilization.
- Optimize for mobile.
Today, mobile devices are used by many people to look for local businesses and listings. Your focus should be towards the page speed and image compression to make sure that your website is mobile enhanced. Here are some tips to optimize your site for mobile:
- You must have a WordPress theme that fits your content to the different screen sizes of mobile devices.
- Your website must be capable of detecting various devices at the server level. You can use WordPress’ built-in function: wp_is_mobile().
- Think of having a mobile app. Most people on mobile devices spend most of their media browsing time using apps.
- Create accelerated mobile pages (AMPs). AMPs are fast pages designed for mobile devices. WordPress has an AMP plug-in that you can use. These quick pages are at the top of the search engine results when viewers search from their mobile devices.
- Add your WordPress website to Google My Business.
Google My Business has a significant influence on your site’s local ranking. Business description, physical proximity, user reviews, and business categories affect your website’s position on search engine results pages (SERPs). So, it’s vital for you to integrate your WordPress site to Google My Business. This platform can make your business profile stand out with each customer search.
- Add structured data.
Some business listings have excellent descriptions, ratings, and reviews. Some are just too bland to be interesting. The gap between these sites is the structured data.
Some WordPress plugins allow you to send Google different information about your business listing. This information provides customers with additional data whenever they search. This information includes the physical location, hours of operation, and price range of your business.
Improving your local SEO is more about customer satisfaction. There are many factors that you need to consider for your business to rank high in customer searches, and these tips can improve your website’s status. However, doing plenty of hard work to keep your customers happy and satisfied will give you the additional boost. The more people like your business and the more they search your brand online, the higher your website gets in the ranking.
