WordPress SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners
If you’re new to WordPress and search engine optimization (SEO), you’ve come to the right place.
I’m going to walk you through getting the most out of your WordPress site so that it can rank at the top of Google searches and generate traffic for your website.
This is a very in-depth guide so let’s get into it.
What is WordPress SEO?
WordPress is arguably the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. According to statistics, approximately 43% of websites worldwide use the platform, which also has a 62.8% market share in the CMS market.
One of the main reasons for its popularity is its customization options. You can create different websites using WordPress for various purposes. Personal blog? Easy peasy. Complex ecommerce website? No problem. Enterprise SaaS platform? You betcha.
And herein lies the next problem (which goes for all website builders in general): You must find a way to increase your online reach.
It doesn’t matter how good your WordPress site looks or how great your content, products, and services are if your target audience doesn’t have any clue that it exists!
Enter SEO.
Its effectiveness as a traffic-generating strategy has changed over the years due to Google’s various algorithm changes. Nonetheless, SEO remains one of the best and most cost-effective ways to get people to find your website.
In a nutshell, optimizing for Google, Bing, and other search engines means ranking on top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords. By observing its best practices, your placement will be higher on search rankings, enabling you to generate more clicks in the process!
To give you an idea, as of September 2024 according to Advanced Web Ranking, the first three places in organic search generated 38.16%, 16%, and 8.98% of total clicks (63.14% in total).
Suppose a page on your site ranks first in Google search for a keyword that is searched 1,000 times monthly. That means the page gets around 381 monthly visitors (1,000 x 0.3816) from Google alone. Not too shabby, right?
Now, think of the same page ranking for other keywords with even greater search volume. Or how about other pages on your site for different search terms?
Your organic website traffic compounds to generate thousands of traffic in a month without constant and time-consuming promotional campaigns!
Optimizing your WordPress site
The power of SEO can’t be overstated. However, reaching the top of Google search with your WordPress site is easier said than done.
Below, I’ll lay out the blueprint for what you should do to make your website more SEO-friendly so that Google can take notice of your site and improve its search engine visibility.
Install an SEO plugin
WordPress is popular for its plugins, which are like power-ups for your site. They offer additional functionality on top of your base WordPress CMS to achieve your goals, like generating more sign-ups for your email list, designing your website without touching code, and more.
But for SEO purposes, you need a dedicated SEO plugin to set up your WordPress site’s technical and on-page foundations, which will help search engine’s spiders crawl and index your site more easily.
A quick search on WordPress’s plugin repository would reveal many great SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO Premium, Rank Math SEO, and more. But for this guide, we’ll stick with SEOPress.
It’s the same plugin we use for Search Endurance. It’s easy to use, doesn’t skimp on features, and they aren’t changing their UI in every update.
Install and activate the plugin and click “Here we go!” to initiate the setup process.
The next step is where you can migrate data from the Yoast SEO plugin, Rankmath, or any other WordPress SEO plugin you were using before SEOPress. In most cases, you can skip this to move on to the next step.
The plugin will then ask you to provide additional information about your site.
You must indicate whether the website is about a person or organization. You also need to establish the site’s name and logo for branding purposes. Organizations should fill out the phone number and VAT ID before continuing.
The next page will ask for links to your social profiles.
Pointing to your social media links from the site and vice versa strengthens your branding across various online channels, which is important nowadays, considering that Google prioritizes online businesses with strong brand authority.
Customize site visibility
Part of SEOPress’s setup progress is identifying which pages, posts, tags, and categories you should prevent search engines from indexing.
By default, Google can crawl and index all your site URLs. This isn’t an issue initially, but it could become one if you have thousands of published URLs on your website.
There’s a thing called crawl budget, which means that Google allots each site a specific number of pages to crawl over time. Once it meets the crawl budget, Google will wait a while before it resumes crawling your website.
In this case, you don’t want to exceed your crawl budget even from the beginning. It’s important to identify what you want Google to prioritize crawling and which URLs you want it to ignore.
The third step in SEOPress’s setup configuration addresses this.
On this page, you can control the visibility of three types of URLs: Post Types, Archives, and Taxonomy.
The rule of thumb is to enable Google to crawl and index pages and posts. This means you don’t click on any of the boxes on this page.
However, you may want to consider setting the other types to “noindex.”
Under “Archives,” you can toggle the visibility of date, search, and author archives. Thankfully, SEOPress has all of them checked by default.
The reason SEOPress defaults to noindexing certain archives is to help avoid issues with duplicate content. In addition, it will stop Google from wasting its crawl budget on meaningless archive pages that don’t need to be indexed.
The Taxonomies, however, is where things get a bit complicated.
Normally, it’s good practice to set tags to “no index” because they don’t add value to your site, and they can cause duplicate content and confuse Google.
But categories can go either way. It’s possible to keep them indexed to effectively create your topical maps (more on that later). However, setting them to “noindex” is also fine while creating a page optimized for your category keyword instead.
My suggestion? Check whether you can create content in your site’s categories. If possible, leave the box unchecked and proceed to the next step.
You’ll be brought to the Advanced Options page, where you can redirect links pointing to the image file to the actual file instead of the page where the image is embedded. Another option is to remove “/category/” from the URL for blog posts.
I would personally suggest leaving the first box unchecked and checking the second box, which helps improve how your URLs read to users and search engines. Speaking of which…
Optimize URL structure
URL (or uniform resource locator if you want the long version) refers to the string of words that you enter to visit a site or page.
By default, WordPress URLs look something like this:
https://example.com/?p=123
The “?p” string indicates a page on your site; the number at the end is the ID attached to a specific post.
This unique URL string allows search engine bots to crawl the page and index it in search results.
However, it doesn’t particularly describe what the post is about. Search engines then have to work double-time by browsing through the page’s content to know what the article is about.
SEO is about making things easier for search spiders. One way to do this is by changing the URL structure to make it SEO-friendly.
To do this, go to Settings > Permalinks on the left sidebar menu.
The next page will show you different URL structures for you to choose from.
There are no right or wrong answers on how you want to structure your URLs. But for best SEO results, select the Post name option.
This simplifies the URL by allowing you to edit the URL string after the domain name with the post or page’s target keyword.
This helps not only search engines to better understand what your page is about but also people easily remember the page’s URL so they can just type it out on their browsers!
Once you’ve saved this option, try creating a post or page. From the editor, you should be able to click on the blue link in the right sidebar and edit it to the page’s target keyword.
This means that the settings are saved.
However, keep in mind that once you choose a URL structure and published pages on the site, you can’t just choose a different structure again. This could cause all the published posts to no longer work and will have a 404 status code (“Not Found.”)
In this case, you’ll be forced to fix the URLs of each page and change the links pointing to those pages across your site, which is an extremely time-consuming process.
So, make sure to think hard about the permalink you want to use for your WordPress site and stick with that.
Optimize content
Continuing off the Advanced Options page, after removing the “/category” from the permalinks, SEOPress will ask you to enable the Universal SEO Metabox.
Enabling the Metabox allows you to generate SEO titles and meta descriptions for each of your site pages, helping you improve its search engine rankings.
On the next step, SEOPress will ask you to upgrade to its premium plugins, especially the SEOPress Pro version, considered one of the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market.
If you’re not ready to take the plunge, feel free to skip this step and stick with the free version.
You can learn more about SEOPress Pro here.
Once the plugin is enabled, you can see this by going to the page and post editor and scrolling down at the end of the content.
From here, you can edit the page’s SEO title (the one that’ll appear on search results) and meta description. The goal is to generate meta tag that’ll encourage more clicks from people who will see your page on SERPs.
You can also edit the page’s appearance when shared on socials. Edit the featured image and brainstorm for new titles and descriptions to make the page more click-worthy.
Scrolling down even deeper is the Content Analysis feature. Enter the page’s target keyword in the text box.
After clicking “Refresh analysis,” you will receive action items to make the page more optimized.
This eliminates the guesswork from your on-page efforts, so you can focus on checking the list one at a time!
Of course, this is just one way to make Google love your content. The other is to include natural language processing (NLP) keywords to help search engines better understand the context of your content and rank it for its appropriate target keywords on SERPs.
For this purpose, use Frase.
It’s a SaaS app that will help you extract words and phrases to make the content more topically relevant to search spiders.
First, sign up for a free trial so you can get started.
Then, log in to your account and create a new document. You’ll be asked to enter your target keyword.
If you want to update existing content on your site, toggle the “Import content from URL” switch and paste the link to the page to include the content on the editor.
On the next page, go to the right sidebar and click “Start” to initiate the research.
Once done, click the “Optimize” tab to see which keywords you need to include or reduce (from your existing content).
Using this helps you cover the most relevant topics about the keywords to increase the page’s chances of generating more website visitors from search engines.
Note: You can optimize content directly within Frase’s editor, or you can use one of their integrations. They have a WordPress plugin, Google Docs add-on, and Chrome Extension. For new posts, it’s easier to use their editor. It’s like an SEO-focused version of Google Docs.
Set XML sitemap
At the end of the setup process, you can create your site’s XML sitemaps.
This file lists the crawlable posts and pages on your site, which helps search spiders identify the URLs (posts, pages, files, images) they can analyze and index for their respective keywords.
Going back to SEOPress, click “Configure your XML sitemaps.”
SEOPress will generate the file and show you the link on the next page.
Now that you have the link to your XML sitemap, you’ll need to take the most important step: adding the site map to your Google Search Console (GSC).
To improve your site’s indexability, you must let Google know which pages are available for crawling. Here’s how we do this:
Log in to your GSC account, choose your domain from the drop-down menu, and go to Indexing > Sitemaps.
Then, paste the URL of the sitemap on the text bar and submit.
Wait for Google Search Console to analyze your sitemap. Over time, you’ll see the pages successfully indexed by Google.
The great thing about a sitemap is that it automatically adds new pages and posts for GSC to crawl and index, so you don’t have to!
Note: If you haven’t verified your website on Google Search Console, keep reading until the end!
Add schema markup
If you’re searching for recipes on Google, you will see something like this:
The same goes for product and service reviews (well, not all of them):
The extra information that appears with your page’s title and meta description is called rich snippets. They help your pages stand out (or at least appear similar to your competitors on SERPs).
To display rich snippets on search results for your pages, you must add schema markup for each. It is a standard language developed by Schema.org and used by search engines to classify information on the pages it indexes.
Schema markup can easily be added with SEOPress Pro. It’s the most efficient option to get started. There are other plugins that can do this though.
However, if you don’t have one of those and you’re comfortable with coding, you can start by generating a template for your site’s specific schema markup using ChatGPT.
Edit the schema markup for each page to contain accurate information. Then post the markup within the page’s <head> section.
The safest way to do this is by installing the Header & Footer Code plugin.
Go to the plugin settings to show this option on posts and pages.
When set up correctly, you should see this section in the lower part of the editor.
Organizing posts into categories
In SEO, there’s a thing called topical mapping, where you organize subtopics on your website into different maps of clusters that interlink with each other.
Here’s an example of a topical map developed by Kyle Roof called the Reverse Silo structure.
In the diagram above, the pages must link to pages within its cluster.
Doing so enables you to confine the clusters according to their subtopic and not dilute their topical integrity.
Creating various maps about different subtopics allows you to build topical authority for your site. This means Google sees that you’re covering the topic by classifying it into subtopics and breaking it down into expertly written articles.
As a result, Google has no choice but to increase your keyword rankings and organic traffic!
So, how do you do this on your WordPress site?
First, determine the categories you want to create for your site.
There are many ways to do this. The manual approach would require you to check forums and discussion boards related to your site’s topic to identify potential categories to use.
If you have a ChatGPT account, you can also ask it for category suggestions.
Next, find the suitable target keyword for these categories because you’ll create a page for each. Use SE Ranking’s keyword research feature to brainstorm keyword ideas by typing in your niche plus category.
From here, research long-tail keywords for the articles you’ll create for the topical map.
Remember that just because a keyword doesn’t have a monthly search volume doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize it for your site. As long as the keyword is highly relevant to your category, it would be best to always consider it part of the topical map.
You may not have to create content for them now because search queries with lots of monthly searches are your priority. But you should leave space so you can cover them later.
The next step is to create the categories on your site. To do so, go to Pages > Categories on the left sidebar of your WordPress dashboard to create them one by one.
Once the category is created, edit it to input your content in the description.
Depending on the intent of your target keyword, treat this as if you’re writing a blog post or guide.
From here, you can create posts for this category using the long-tail keywords you’ve researched.
Make sure to link the pages on the same topical map, including the category page.
And be sure to link to the categories in your site’s navigation menu to increase its visibility. This will make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl them.
Note: You can gain more control over the content on your category pages by using a page builder or a theme like Kadence. For example, on some of our sites we use Kadence’s “Elements” feature to create blocks of content and add them to specific parts of our category pages.
Improve page speed
Your WordPress site can become bulky over time, especially if you have many elements and plugins appearing on your pages. This may cause them to load slowly and drive people away from your site.
To prevent this from happening, you need to lay the groundwork for your site using lightweight themes.
As tempting as it is to use feature-rich themes like the ones on ThemeForest, your site is better off using Astra, GeneratePress, or Kadence.
All three have optimized code that meets quality standards, allowing for quick and efficient site loading. They also offer excellent customer service to address any issues you encounter with using them.
Also, installing a caching plugin is of utmost importance.
You can use many free plugins to make your site load faster, but I highly suggest WP Rocket.
This plugin caches your pages on the visitor’s browser. Whenever they revisit a page on your website, the files will load in the browser, making the site load much faster.
In addition to this feature, WP Rocket can compress files on the server and decompress them on browsers, lazy-load media files on the page, and optimize your site images.
All this results in your site pages loading entirely in seconds and retaining your website visitors!
Another tool you can use is NitroPack.
Unlike WP Rocket, this tool can automatically improve your site’s overall speed and performance, guaranteeing it to pass Google’s Core Web Vitals scores. You don’t need to set up the software to know which settings and options work best on your site!
Both are premium tools but are worth every penny. WP Rocket is generally more cost efficient but NitroPack includes a content delivery network which further improves performance.
Compress images
If you have an ecommerce site or any website where you showcase tons of images, you must ensure they have optimized file sizes. If not, your page will load longer than expected, even if you have a caching plugin set up correctly.
At the same time, you can reduce image file sizes manually using third-party software, but that would be incredibly time-consuming, as you would have to do this individually.
To save you time and effort, download the ShortPixel plugin instead.
It compresses the images automatically into their next-gen format (WEBP) as you upload them to WordPress. The images have reduced file sizes while retaining their quality.
Another cool feature of this plugin is that you can compress existing images that weren’t compressed before.
This ensures that all images will load efficiently and help improve overall site speed.
Create internal links
Internal links refer to links pointing from a page to your site to another page.
This benefits your site in two ways: you direct site visitors to pages about the same topic (topical maps) and you help Google find pages on your site much more easily.
Without internal links, Google might not crawl your pages and won’t index them.
You can add these manually but that’s time consuming. The most efficient way is to use a premium plugin called Link Whisper to prepare an internal link report for your site.
It tells you orphaned posts that you need to find links on your site, broken links you need to fix by replacing them, and 404 errors that you must recover.
The best thing about Link Whisper is it makes building internal links much easier.
On the page editor, you’ll find inbound link suggestions that you can link to from the page. These include the anchor text (which you can edit) and which pages it’ll link to in your site.
You can also build links to orphaned links using this process. Choose the best and most relevant link placements from the suggestions, edit if necessary, and save once done!
This plugin will save you a lot of time with your internal linking efforts so you can impact your search rankings much sooner!
Secure your website
While not necessarily part of SEO, no one can deny security’s role in your website.
You don’t want hackers and online threats to destroy all the hard work you’ve put into building your website that’s generating tons of organic traffic.
This is why you need a plugin like Wordfence to protect your site from elements that can potentially damage your site and destroy your reputation.
The free version is good enough to protect your site from online attacks using its firewall and security features. On the downside, the plugin is a bit sluggish and can hamper your site’s speed and performance.
A much better alternative is BlogVault. It has a built-in firewall, malware scans, and one-click malware removals to ensure your site’s safety.
More importantly, it automatically creates backups for your site. When the worst happens, you can recover your site by regenerating its files from the backups in a few minutes. This enables you to reduce downtime and continue business and operations as usual!
Unlike Wordfence, BlogVault runs on its own servers, so it won’t disrupt your website’s loading speed when you scan and execute commands from it.
Other essential WordPress SEO tips
Whew – that was a mouthful!
At this point, you should have extensive knowledge on how to observe and execute the best WordPress SEO practices for your site.
However (or thankfully), there’s more for you to learn when it comes to optimizing your WordPress site, most of which requires you to go outside your site’s dashboard.
Here are a few important ones.
Choose WordPress hosting
Hosting is a critical component of site speed.
A non-reputable hosting provider can tank your site’s performance despite having the best content around, simply because it’s not loading up to par.
In this case, it’s important to host your website (or migrate it) with a hosting company specializing in WordPress CMS.
One of them is WPX Hosting, which is ideal for beginners and small to medium sites.
Setting up your site here is very easy, as they have dedicated customer support who will guide you every step of the way.
WPX Hosting is also one of the best-rated hosting providers by users, not only for its support but also for its speed and reliability. It normally tops best-of lists when it comes to WordPress hosting.
Another is Cloudways. They offer a managed server. You can choose which cloud hosting you use on their platform and how much server resources you need.
This means you can scale your hosting needs depending on how your sites perform, and pay for the resources you use from their available servers and infrastructure.
While its dashboard takes time to learn to use correctly, it is a very powerful and popular hosting choice, especially for intermediate and advanced users.
Integrate Google Search Console to WordPress
We talked about Google Search Console earlier. If you haven’t verified your website yet, now is the time. You need to do this if you want to succeed with your WordPress SEO efforts.
To do this, add a property on your GSC dashboard and enter your website URL under Domain.
Next, you need to verify yourself as the website owner by following the additional instructions.
Finally, go to SEOPress’s advanced settings and enter your meta value site verification.
Aside from submitting your XML sitemap, you get access to a lot of useful data once your site is verified by GSC.
You can track your site’s organic traffic over time. Check the number of clicks and impressions the site and its pages receive.
It’s best to compare data from a previous period to see how much higher (or lower) your site’s traffic has gotten. From there, you’ll be able to get an understanding of which pages need some work.
You’ll also get a bunch of error reports. You can use these to find 404 errors and uncover a bunch of other issues that could be stopping your site from ranking.
Audit your site
As comprehensive as this ultimate WordPress SEO guide is, there might be some that slipped through the cracks.
To know for sure which areas of your SEO you need to address and work on, you must run a website audit.
This checks your site for technical SEO issues as well as on-page factors to see if the pages truly observe the best practices that’ll put your site at the top of SERPs.
SE Ranking will help you here. Its Site Audit feature is comprehensive enough to provide you with valuable and actionable insights to optimize your site’s SEO further.
The report gives the site’s Health Score and compares it to past scores. More importantly, the Top Issues provide a glimpse of the site’s issues.
Clicking on each gives you an explanation of the problem and how you can fix it.
Take action on the top issues to help improve your website’s visibility moving forward.
Conclusion
That concludes our WordPress website optimization guide. It’s a long one, but it should give you plenty of insights into how to level-up your SEO.
As you’ll probably have guessed, it’s a process that takes some effort. Even after doing everything here to a tee, you need to monitor your site for problems that could impact your site’s SEO negatively.
But staying on top of everything is key to sustaining your WordPress site’s upward growth. Use the recommended tools here to make things much easier for you. Best of luck!