WordPress SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Traffic

If you are a business or individual with a website, chances are that you’ve opted for WordPress as your platform. After all, according to w3techs.com, 31% of all websites use some version of WordPress. WordPress makes SEO mistakes avoidable through both the platform itself and the many free plugins that are available for SEO purposes. You can leverage WordPress to leave competitors behind, and doing this is not rocket science. Yet, bloggers, even experienced ones, make mistakes that hold their blog back.

Read on, and if you’re making these SEO mistakes with your WordPress blog then you can rectify them and you will see results.

Here are 7 common SEO mistakes people make with WordPress

1. Not connecting the blog to Google Analytics. It takes less than five minutes to do this, and once connected you have a wealth of information at your disposal. You learn about traffic that converts. You can focus energies on sources that send converting traffic. You can apportion ad spend accordingly.
2. Having a country-specific domain is only the beginning of targeting a local populace. Do not neglect to work on SEO factors that influence local search. Use location-specific keywords in titles, meta descriptions, alt tags, and content. If you’re using a plugin for local search, ensure that it’s compatible with your version of WordPress. WordPress Local SEO and Local Business SEO are two popular plugins for local SEO.
3. Not updating content to ensure that it stays current is a big SEO mistake. If your blog addresses topical issues and developing stories then you need to update copy to reflect the latest developments. If you don’t, then visitors will come and leave. A high bounce rate reflects poorly on the site. The same holds true for ecommerce sites you run on WordPress.
4. Don’t ignore social signals. Social signals serve as citations similar to backlinks. If you’re doing well on social media, it has a beneficial effect on your organic search rankings. Many bloggers treat strong social signals very casually. Use the Yoast plugin to activate open graph data activated for Facebook and Twitter Cards for Twitter.
5. It’s hard to believe that bloggers can ignore something as critical as XML sitemaps, and yet there are people who make this mistake. With an XML sitemap, you inform Google about the pages and posts you want indexed. A sitemap provides information on frequency of updating and the relation of a URL with respect to other URLs. Sitemaps boost a site’s ranking in the SERPs. Sitemaps are easy to configure. Use them.
6. Don’t assume that your visitor will be able to navigate the website with the same ease that you can. Make navigation easier. It will keep people on the site for longer and time spent on site is a powerful ranking signal. Breadcrumbs, Categories, Related Articles, Popular Articles, and Post Tags are features with WordPress that will boost SEO.
7. Keep the site clean. This means you don’t want people to follow broken links. Use redirects to send traffic to live pages. Check periodically for broken links. Broken links impact internal navigation. Useful anchor keywords are rendered useless. Broken outbound links can affect link building measures. Pointing bots to dead ends, internal or external, is bad for SEO.

There are some really good WordPress plugins that will help you avoid SEO Mistakes:

• Yoast SEO– Yoast is one of the most popular and reliable WP SEO tools. Most websites will see results using the free version.
• All In One SEO Pack– Very versatile and effective. Its interface is not as user friendly as Yoast, especially for beginners.
• Google XML Sitemaps– This plugin will create a sitemap for you and better yet, update it when you make adds or deletions to your site.

Another option to avoiding SEO mistakes with your WordPress website is to ask a professional for help. If you have questions about SEO for any website, reach out to us. We’re here to help.