SEO tutorial for WordPress

I’ve got to say, after more than 20 years doing digital marketing, I still love SEO. Yes, it’s been challenging – Google has oftentimes changed the goalposts and made it difficult for websites to rank – but I still love the process of building websites and creating great content that naturally attracts visitors and links. With that in mind, I’ve put together the ultimate SEO tutorial for WordPress to help you.

HOT TIP: Ultimately, if you make your audience happy and give them value, Google will reward you with good rankings

So what you’re getting below is basically a brain dump of what I’ve learned and experienced by doing SEO in the gaming industry (online casinos, poker and sports betting), insurance (life insurance, short term insurance) and education (secondary and tertiary).

NOTE: about 30% of the below was written by the ChatGPT AI tool as part of an experiment and I am HUGELY impressed by the content it delivers.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the art and science of becoming more visible in the search engines (ranking better) so that your site gets free traffic from people searching for solutions to their problems. This free traffic is called organic traffic. Who doesn’t want free traffic from Google, right?

Paid traffic is when you pay for the traffic by buying advertising – and if you’re a small business or an entrepreneur just starting out this is a scary prospect. The risk is that you spend money on advertising but don’t see an increase in revenue or profit. Remember, advertising, in an accounting sense, is an expense – although it’s a necessary expense.

Does this mean SEO doesn’t cost you anything? Sadly, SEO can have significant cost associated with it – especially from creating great content.

SEO is the practice of doing SEO. An SEO is someone who does SEO. Confused? Don’t worry Neo, the answers are coming.

What are the costs associated with SEO?

Time: SEO requires a great deal of time. Either you spend your time doing SEO or you pay someone else (or an agency) to do SEO on your behalf
Content: great content doesn’t come cheap, and Google certainly loves great content. Whether you’re creating 2,000 word blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts or Facebook Live sessions as part of your content marketing, it all takes time and requires budget
Links: link building is a vital part of SEO. I’m not advocating buying links but the practice of link building through more legitimate means does require time and money
Technical expertise: the technical changes that need to be made to your website for SEO requires the involvement of your web development team (or you if you’re building your own website) and a technical SEO expert. This requires time and money.

Why do SEO?

Now that I’ve told you about the costs of SEO, I’d like to sing its praises. I love SEO because it’s the only way to get:

Free traffic from Google
Targeted traffic from people who are actively looking for solutions to their problems

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE BEFORE I SEE RESULTS FROM SEO?

In my experience it takes 3 or 4 months of consistent SEO effort before you start seeing an increase in organic search from Google. This may be longer or shorter depending on your industry and competitors in your niche.

WHY DO SEO PEOPLE SAY “IT DEPENDS” SO OFTEN?

There are more than 200 factors that can influence how well your site ranks in Google. Google is extremely secretive about how their algorithms work. Google doesn’t want this information to be available for a number of reasons:

If we knew how Google worked it would be easy to create a competitor to Google
If we knew how Google worked it would become easier to manipulate the search results
If SEO was easy people would spend less on advertising through Google Ads (Google’s advertising platform)

Google doesn’t like it when the search results are manipulated. Imagine you were searching for something and your search results showed a bunch of unrelated porn sites, gambling sites and sites who want to sell you viagra. Google needs its search results to be the most relevant to its users so that people keep on using Google.

In the past it was easy to manipulate the search results. In the dizzy heydays of SEO 10 years ago you simply had to buy a bunch of links from dodgy link brokers and your site would rank for whatever keyword you wanted. Google quickly picked up on this and have been rolling out an ongoing stream of updates to its algorithms making it difficult to do SEO. It’s hiding data from Google Analytics as well so you don’t know which keywords are bringing you organic traffic from your SEO efforts (thereby making SEO difficult to measure). Remember, Google is a BUSINESS and wants you to spend money on paid advertising.

So, why do people in SEO say “it depends”? SEO is super-complex and requires a bit of trial and error. Anyone who tells you they can guarantee you better rankings in Google is lying to you. Yes, SEO does work but it requires time, patience, experimentation and hard work.

BLACK HAT SEO VS WHITE HAT SEO

You may have heard people talking about black hat SEO and white hat SEO.

Very simply, white hat SEO follows Google’s guidelines and black hat SEO rejects these guidelines and tries to outplay Google.

Black hat SEO can include:

Buying links from link brokers
Hiding or clicking links
Loads of other dodginess Google doesn’t approve of

If you’re caught doing black hat SEO, Google will penalize the site you’re trying to do SEO on and you will lose rankings or even be removed from Google altogether. Once your site is penalised you can be sure it will take years before your reputation with Google improves.

NEGATIVE SEO

Black hat SEOs quickly realised they could build links to their competitor’s sites to make it look as if though their competitors were doing black hat SEO. The hope was that Google would penalise the competitor, so at one point negative SEO was even a strategy that black hat SEOs spent time and money on. Google released a tool called the disavow tool that allowed webmasters to “disavow” links that shouldn’t be pointing to their sites and report these to Google.

It’s important to keep track of the links pointing to your site so that you can quickly disavow any that might hurt your good reputation with Google.

You can find the disavow tool, and a whole bunch of other useful SEO tools, within Google’s Search Console platform – something everyone who owns a website should be familiar with and using regularly.

Let’s go! Step by step guide for doing WordPress SEO

A QUICK TOP 10 WORDPRESS SEO CHECKLIST

Use a fast WordPress hosting company e.g. Siteground, Bluehost and WPEngine for WordPress hosting
Learn basic HTML at https://www.w3schools.com/ – it’s not essential but highly recommended and will earn you a gold star and much love
Join the Let’s Get Digital Facebook Group and ask questions about SEO (or all things digital)
Install the Yoast SEO plugin (the free version is fine) or the RankMath plugin
Make sure your website isn’t blocking search engines (duh)
1. Log in to your WordPress site admin
2. Go to Settings -> Reading
3. Make sure the box next to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is NOT TICKED
Make sure your Permalinks are SEO friendly
1. Log in to your WordPress site admin
2. Go to Settings -> Permalinks
3. Select the Post name option and hit the Save Changes button to make sure your URL structure is nice and SEO friendly
Remember that all content must be 100% unique! Don’t copy and paste content from other websites. Don’t use content scrapers. Don’t use content spinners that rewrite other people’s content. Your content must be 100% organic, home-grown, Farmer Brown approved useful awesomeness
For the love of all things holy, please optimise your images for web. Too often people use 2MB images on their home page and wonder why the site is so slow. Image optimisation is a topic unto its own which I will cover in more depth, but please remember this principle – smaller file size means faster load time which means happy Google = more traffic for you
Page titles and meta descriptions must be written for humans, must be unique per page, must exist (i.e. don’t leave them out) and must include the primary keyword you want that page to rank for
Attract links with MARVELLOUS content that will make your momma proud. Buying links is for blackhat SEOs and you can find plenty of places that still recommend this ancient practice. Don’t buy links.

BONUS TIP!!

Set up an account with Google Search Console, validate your WordPress site and then submit your XML sitemap/s to Google Search Console so that Google will be more acutely aware of when you publish new content to your site. (Old timers, Google Search Console used to be called Google Webmaster Tools. Change is the only constant). You can get your XML sitemap from the Yoast SEO plugin as follows:

Log in to your WordPress admin
Go to Yoast -> General -> Features tab
Click on the question mark next to XML sitemaps to reveal the links to the XML sitemap you should submit to Google Search Console

Next, log in to Google Search Console and go to Sitemaps in the left hand navigation.

Copy the link to your XML sitemap/s, paste it into the Add a new sitemap section and hit Submit. Boomtastico!

That’s it, kiddo! You’re now set up with the absolute basics of WordPress SEO.

HERE’S A CHEAT SHEET FOR DOING SEO

HIGH LEVEL SEO ACTIONS

Initial SEO audit
Keyword strategy
Technical SEO
On-page optimization
Content growth strategy
Fresh content strategy
Link development strategy
Blogging and social media
Mobile SEO
Measurement, analysis and reporting

INITIAL SEO AUDIT

Establish the current situation – what has been done in the past?
Highlight critical factors and quick-win fixes
Technical SEO audit
Content audit
Link profile audit
Interlinking audit

KEYWORD STRATEGY

Identify 5-10 primary keywords per site
Identify related secondary keywords
Build keywords into content strategies and linking strategies

TECHNICAL SEO

Broken links monitoring
Page load speeds: page compression and caching
Canonicalization
URL structure
Use of 301 redirects
Robots.txt file usage
Handling of banner tags/affiliate IDs
Custom 404 page implementation
Use of nofollow meta tags
Redirecting to www. or without www
Use of favicon
Verification in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing and Yahoo webmaster tools
Sitemap submission (XML sitemap)
Use of RSS feeds if relevant
Search function added to sites
Avoiding use of frames
W3C compliancy

ON-PAGE OPTIMIZATION

Use of H1/H2/H3 headings
Use of keywords within headings and paragraphs
RELEVANT user-focused content – writing for people and not for search engines (no keyword stuffing)
Call to action within HTML text AND graphically (buttons or banners)
Links to related pages with relevant anchor text using primary keyword of target page
Use of embedded multimedia (video and imagery)
Easy navigation and usability
Enough index-able HTML text (guideline is 250 – 300 words per page)
Content is 100% unique
Correct and unique meta titles and meta descriptions

CONTENT GROWTH STRATEGY

Google likes to see websites that grow with new pages every month
Needs to add value to customer experience and be RELEVANT
Could be implemented as a BLOG or articles section if part of main site e.g. sub folder for the blog
Use of copywriter-friendly content management system (CMS) e.g. WordPress
Add quality, relevant content to optimize for long-tail keywords (without becoming a content farm and getting slapped by the Google Panda update)
Fresh content strategy
Update existing content on core pages
Not entire page but about 25% e.g. a testimonial that changes every 2 weeks

LINK DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY

Integration with overall keyword strategy for each brand
Important to use VARIED anchor text for inbound links and to also deep link (link to secondary pages and not only home page)
Get clean links from affiliates
Links on banners served by media planners (alt text on images) and text links
Relationship links (links from sites as a result of having a good business relationship with partners)
Electronic press releases
Links from blogosphere
Directory submissions
Submitting content with links to article sites

BLOGGING AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Blogging increases online profile visibility (especially WordPress with built in SEO plugins and feed submissions)
Interaction with customers and potential customers increases visibility in search engines

MOBILE SEO

Compliance with best practices for mobile recommended by Google
Development and promotion of mobile apps
Tie in with overall mobile strategy

MEASUREMENT, ANALYSIS AND REPORTING

How do we measure ROI on the above actions?
What are the key metrics to monitor (click through rates, conversion rates, funnel analysis etc)
What allocation of budget (time, resources and money) for the above?
What are the targets for growth?
What reporting tools are in place or need to be developed?

Next, we get into the real nitty gritty.

The Real Nitty Gritty of WordPress SEO

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

Getting Started

Domain registration
Domain hosting
www. vs non-www
WordPress SEO plugins
Installing an SEO friendly WordPress theme
Permalinks and SEO-friendly URLs
Breadcrumbs
Robots.txt and search engine visibility

Yoast SEO plugin configuration

Useless junk you don’t need in Yoast
General settings
Search Appearance
Search Console
Social
Tools
Free or Premium?

Building your SEO-optimised WordPress site

SEO objectives and key performance indicators
Keyword research
- Why keyword research is the cornerstone of SEO
- Short and long-tail keywords
- Research vs buyer keywords
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEMRush and Ahrefs
- Google autocomplete
Content architecture and sitemaps
Types of content:
- Basic content
- Blogs and articles
- Link bait articles
Optimising content
- The Ideal SEO-optimised Web Page
- Rich snippets and featured snippets
- Headlines that sell
- SEO titles
- Meta descriptions
- Keyword use in body content
- Body content formatting
Image optimisation
- Image file size
- Image names
- Image formats
- Image titles and alt tag
Interlinking
- Types of page interlinking
- Anchor text
- Number of links

WordPress site speed optimisation

Measuring site speed: PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom and GTmetrix
Hosting as a site speed factor
Using a lightweight WordPress theme
Using lightweight WordPress plugins
Speed optimisation plugins
Plugins to avoid

YouTube SEO

Ranking factors
YouTube keyword research
YouTube clickthrough rate and custom thumbnails
Video duration
Video file name
Video title and description
Audience retention: how much of your video people watch
Subscribes after watching
Video shares
Playlists
Promoting your video
Embedding your video in blog posts
Optimising your channel page

Voice Search

How voice search works
Characteristics of voice search
How to optimise for voice search

Link Building

What is link building?
Types of links and those that make a difference
- Article links
- Directory links
- Blog comments
- Spintax and link tiers
- Forum links
- Guest post links
- Video links
- Social media links
- Broken link
How to build links
Quality and relevance
Anchor text diversity
Link neighbourhood
Link building tools

Local SEO

What is local SEO?
Local search ranking signals
Keyword resarch
Geotargeting pages
Creating local listings
NAP and Local citations
Moz Local
Whitespark
Local link building
Why business reviews are important
Optimising your Google My Business listing
Social Media and Local Business
Local rank tracker

What’s next?

SEO training and further resources
SEO consulting
Final thoughts

DOMAIN REGISTRATION

Like a garage band, it all starts with a name. Having your target keyword in your domain name used to matter. It doesn’t anymore.

Here’s an example:

“car insurance” is the most lucrative keyword in the world of short term insurance. Digital marketers at the world’s big insurance companies yearn for pole position rankings because this keyword brings great traffic volumes and converts well.

So what happens if you search for “car insurance”? Does www.carinsurance.com appear in the first position? What about www.carinsurance.co.za?

Neither of these do.

I finally found www.carinsurance.co.za all the way on page 5 in position 51. Ouch.

So what the hell is going on here? All the official insurance companies are ranking for “car insurance” but none of the “affiliate sites” are ranking anymore. Many affiliates went out of business when Google messed with the rankings, so don’t believe that just having a domain with the right keywords is going to bring you ranking and therefore organic search traffic.

DOES DOMAIN NAME AFFECT SEO?

The reality is that Google values a good user experience and brand authority over keywords.

Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman said:

Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard-wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away.

The best thing to do is not stress about having your primary keyword in the domain name but rather focus on the following:

Is the domain name memorable?
Is the domain name relevant, descriptive or useful to your audience?
Is your domain name specific to your industry?
Go for a .com if available and if you want to target a specific country go for the country domain e.g. .co.za for South Africa

Google looks at reputation, relevance and quality of content as much more important than keywords in a domain, so focus on that.

DOMAIN HOSTING

When you’re looking for a host for your WordPress site, you should look at the following important factors:

Load speed: important SEO ranking factor. SiteGround, WPEngine and BlueHost are considered good in terms of hosting speed
Managed WP hosting features i.e. SSL and HTTPS, Cloudflare CDN, WP autoupdates, Daily and on-demand backup, Dev/Staging/Production environments, Cpanel
Guaranteed uptime: this is critical and you want at least a 99.9% uptime guarantee from your web host
Server location: your server should be as close as possible to your target audience so that your site loads faster for them – the further away your web server is located, the long it will take for your site to load
Content Delivery Network (CDN): your host should support a CDN which further boosts site performance
Responsive support team: your hosting company should give excellent support to help you get set up, keep your site up and running and answer any questions you may have

WWW. VS NON-WWW

It really doesn’t matter whether you have www or not in front of your domain name – it doesn’t affect your WordPress SEO. It’s a legacy thing: people are used to using www (well, at least the first generation to use the Internet are).

NB: make sure that your site redirects to the preferred version e.g. if you visit deepthoughtmarketing.com it should redirect to www.deepthoughtmarketing.com.

And, praise be, if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin (as you should) the plugin adds canonical tags to tell Google which version of your site it should index. No sweat.

WORDPRESS SEO PLUGINS

Historically, this has been a two-dog race: Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO Pack are the plugins that have been most popular over the years. My personal preference (and that of many, many other SEOs) is Yoast.

Adding Yoast to your WordPress site is super-easy:

Log in to your WordPress admin
Go to Plugins -> Add New
Click on Popular
Click on Install Now
Click on Activate

You now have a new section in your WordPress admin called SEO.

Further into this guide I’ll show you how to set up and configure Yoast for your WordPress site.

INSTALLING AN SEO FRIENDLY WORDPRESS THEME

The internet is run on WordPress (for the majority) and there are LOADS of places to get WordPress themes from. My preference is ThemeForest and StudioPress but I always look for features in a theme that make it SEO friendly:

Is it built with valid coding? Your WordPress theme should be built with code that is up to date with the latest coding standards. You can check to see if your theme’s code is valid by using the following tools to check the HTML and CSS of the code:
- W3C Markup Validator
- https://datayze.com/site-validator.php
Is the theme mobile responsive? Your site must render beautifully on all devices. Use these tools to check:
- https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
- https://responsivedesignchecker.com/
Schema Markup support: Schema Markup is a way to present your website code so that it’s understandable to Google – it gives Google more clues as to what your site is about. You can check to see if your WordPress theme has schema markup included by going to your WordPress site, right click, go to “View Source Code” and search the code for “itemscope” or “schema.org”. If you find this in your source code then your theme has Schema Markup
Does my theme load fast? This is probably the most important SEO factor so make sure your site loads fast by checking it at https://tools.pingdom.com/

PERMALINKS AND SEO-FRIENDLY URLS

An SEO-friendly URL structure in WordPress is characterised by the following:

It’s user-friendly i.e. it tells your reader what the page is about
It contains the keywords that you want to rank for
It’s short and to the point
It’s in an SEO friendly format i.e.

NOT SEO-FRIENDLY: https://www.deepthoughtmarketing.com/?p=123

SEO-FRIENDLY: https://www.deepthoughtmarketing.com/sample-post/

As explained in the quickstart guide above, setting up SEO-friendly permalinks is easy but HEADS UP! If you have an established site that’s been running for 6 months or more, don’t change your permalink structure because you will lose all the social media share count and you could drop your SEO rankings. The only exception is if you’re using the plain permalink structure (not SEO-friendly) structure shown above. You should definitely move away from this permalink structure no matter what.

BREADCRUMBS AND WORDPRESS SEO

Breadcrumbs are navigational elements on your site that show people where they are. Similar to the bread crumbs Hansel and Gretel used for navigating into the deep, dark forest…

Your WordPress theme may have the option to enable breadcrumbs and if you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin there’s a section that let’s you enable breadcrumbs.

You should.

Breadcrumbs help with site navigation
Breadcrumbs may appear in the search results page
Breadcrumbs help the Googlebot understand your site structure and content hierarchy

You can enable breadcrumbs in Yoast by going to Search Appearance and then clicking on the Breadcrumbs tab:

OPTIMISING ROBOTS.TXT FOR WORDPRESS SEO

So you want to optimise your robots.txt file to help improve your SEO and rank better in Google? Let’s go!

WHAT ON EARTH IS A ROBOTS.TXT FILE?

You use a robots.txt file to tell Google how to crawl and index your site. It’s a set of instructions telling Google to go here, go there, ignore this, focus on that.

Your robots.txt file lives in the root directory (main folder) of your website and if you have access you can edit it using File Explorer in Cpanel or even with an FTP client such as Filezilla.

These rules do the following:

Google should indext all WordPress images and files
Google should NOT index WordPress plugin files, the admin area, readme files and affiliate links

HOW TO CREATE A ROBOTS.TXT FILE WITH YOAST

Yoast automatically creates a robots.txt file with the following rules:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /wp-admin/

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

You can edit these rules by going to Tools -> File Editor in the Yoast settings.

REMEMBER:

Use this with caution – adding the wrong rules can severely mess with your rankings. If you’re not sure, just leave the default Yoast robots.txt settings as is and walk away.

Yoast SEO plugin configuration

Now let’s dig deep into how to set up the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.

Yoast is an extremely popular plugin but not many people know how to set it up and use it properly.

What you need to do:

Set Yoast up correctly
Verify the different webmaster tools in Yoast
Focus on the right long-tail keywords
Use Yoast to optimise your content

NOTE: you don’t need to use the Premium version of Yoast – the free version is just fine.

USELESS JUNK YOU DON’T NEED IN YOAST

For starters, log in to your WordPress site admin and head to the Yoast settings area: SEO -> General -> Features.

Here’s how your settings should be configured:

SEO analysis should be ON: this enables the content optimisation checklist on posts and plugsin

Readability analysis should be OFF: if you write well, using well-constructed, concise and customer-friendly sentences you’re good to go.

Cornerstone content should be ON: this lets Yoast categorise your most valuable content.

Text link counter should be OFF: this counts the number of internal links on each post. You don’t need this.

XML sitemaps should be ON: this cerates a sitemap you can submit to the search engines.

Ryte integration should be OFF: this detects whether the site is indexed by search engines. There are better ways of doing this.

Admin bar menu should be OFF: This adds a Yoast dropdown menu in the WordPress dashboard. Not necessary.

Security: no advanced settings for authors should be ON: this prevents authors from removing posts and changing canonical URLs and only lets editors and admins do this.

GENERAL SETTINGS

VERIFY THE DIFFERENT WEBMASTER TOOLS IN YOAST

You should create webmaster accounts for Google, Bing and Yandex (Russia’s largest search engine) and get the verification code for each. If you can do Baidu as well, go for it (good luck, unless you have a Chinese phone number…)

Connect Yoast to Google Search Console:

Create an account and log in at Google Search Console
Verify your site by following the steps in Google Search Console
Log in to your WordPress site admin and go to Yoast -> Search Console -> Settings
Click the Get Google Authorisation Code button
Copy and paste the Google Authorisation Code into Yoast and click Save Profile

SEARCH APPEARANCE

GENERAL

Leave your Title Separator as default. For your Knowledge Graph and Schema.org setting, select if your website represents a person or an organisation. If an organisation, enter the name of the organisation and upload a clear, web-optimised logo.

HOWEVER,

When it comes to editing the SEO titles on individual pages, don’t use the snippet variable option. These act as templates for when you are too lazy to write out the title and meta description for a site BUT you shouldn’t be lazy – just write out proper titles and meta descriptions and don’t use snippet variables. The End.

CONTENT TYPES

This section lets you specify what the default search appearance should be for any particular type of content on your site. Leave the settings to the default settings.

MEDIA

Leave the setting on this page on Yes i.e. you do want to redirect attachment URLs to the attachment itself.

In plain English, this means that when you upload an image or video file to WordPress, WordPress doesn’t just save the file but also creates an attachment URL for the file. Since you don’t ever use these URLs, it’s better to simply redirect the attachment URLs to the media file itself.

TAXONOMIES, ARCHIVES, BREADCRUMBS AND RSS

Leave everything as it comes out the box on default settings.

BUT you do want to disable Author archives from being indexed. You want to make sure that Google indexes the pages and posts of your WordPress site but not things like author archives, date archives, tags, sliders, affiliate URLs and other nonsense that shouldn’t appear in Google.

SOCIAL

In the Accounts section of Yoast, enter all the relevant social media profile info for your WordPress site’s brand or organisation.

On the Facebook tab, enable Open Graph meta data and then upload an image you want to appear when your site is shared to Facebook. This image should be 1,200 x 630 pixels in dimension.

On the Twitter tab, enable Twitter card meta data and then select the default card type to use.

Remember to click on the Pinterest tab and confirm your site with Pinterest. You should have a Pinterest social media strategy since this is a good source of traffic.

TOOLS

The most useful tool Yoast offers is the Bulk Editor which allows you to easily and quickly update the SEO titles and meta descriptions for your posts and pages. You can use this tool to easily spot any issues at a glance – like missing or duplicate meta data.

YOAST FREE OR YOAST PREMIUM?

In my experience you don’t need to use Yoast Premium – it has some additional bells and whistles but not anything you can’t live without.

Building your SEO-optimised WordPress site

SEO OBJECTIVES AND KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Before you even start with an SEO plan, you need to set SEO objectives and develop a framework for how you’re going to measure your performance.

SEO objectives could include:

Get more qualified leads from organic search
Increase traffic from organic search
Increase rankings for high volume keywords

Key performance indicators related to these objectives are:

Lead to qualified lead ratio from organic search
Number of unique visitors from organic search over a certain period of time
Search engine results page (SERP) position for a specific keyword

Many lead-driven businesses need customers to have at least one personal contact with a salesperson in your company, especially if the product is highly priced or requires a bunch of decision making. This is where Conversion Rate Optimisation is super important! If your conversion rate is good, your lead generation SEO campaign will perform well.

When you set out a comprehensive measurement framework and set performance benchmarks, you will be able to show yourself and all your stakeholders how your SEO efforts are paying off.

The bottom line (Return on Investment) is key: how much revenue did we make from the SEO investment we made?

Remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results don’t come overnight. You should put in a good 3 or 4 months of SEO effort before you even start seeing the needle shifting.

Keyword research

WHY KEYWORD RESEARCH IS THE CORNERSTONE OF SEO

You’re going to have to identify the keywords you want to target and rank for. What will people type into Google in order to find your website?

Which of these search phrases (keywords) will result in the type of traffic that converts into leads and sales on your site to meet your business objectives?

The very first step in doing SEO is answering this question.

Keyword research involves:

Using keyword search tools such as the Google Keyword Tool and Keyword Explorer in AHREFS (among many others)
Brainstorming keywords related to your industry, products and services
Understanding how difficult it will be to rank for each specific keyword
Understanding which keywords your competitors are ranking for
Understanding the search demand for each keyword
Choosing the keywords with high demand but low competition

Once you’ve got a keyword master list you can use that as a foundation for your SEO efforts and track how well you’re doing in Google for those keywords.

SHORT-TAIL AND LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS

Short tail keywords are keywords (search phrases) that have only one or two words. These keywords are usually not very high-converting: someone searching for “insurance” is probably in the research phase and not ready to buy.

Long-tail keywords are where you will find the GOLD – these are much longer phrases and usually indicate that people have completed their research and are ready to convert to a paying customer e.g. “outsurance boat insurance low excess”

RESEARCH VS BUYER KEYWORDS

Research keywords are the keywords people use when they are just starting out on their problem solving journey. Someone wanting to buy a second hand car may start off with “buy used cars” and land up on a bunch of car sites and blogs.

Once they’ve explored the different cars available they will keep on refining their searches to be more and more specific.

The more specific a search, the more likely someone is to buy!

The specific search keywords are longer and really hone in a topic. To go back to the used car example, if someone searches “2016 british racing green jaguar f type johannesburg” you can be pretty darn sure they know what they want and just need to find something with low mileage and a good price and the sale is in the bag.

GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

You can start your keyword research and get some interesting info by using the Google Keyword Planner in Google Ads.

Here’s how to use it:

Sign in to your Google Ads account
Go to Tools -> Keyword Planner
Select the Get search volume and forecasts tile
Enter your keyword and hit submit
Click on the Historical Metrics tab and view search volumes to see if there is any search demand for your keyword

You can also click on “Keyword ideas” in the left navigation and enter your primary keyword to get some related keywords.

NB note how expensive it is to bid on “car insurance” – don’t you wish your site ranked on page 1 for this lucrative keyword???

You can also use Google Trends and https://answerthepublic.com/ for some additional keyword ideas.

SEMRUSH AND AHREFS

My favourite keyword research tools (and SEO tools in general) are:

SEMRush

Ahrefs

Both are premium products i.e. not free, but the monthly subscription is well worth it if you’re planning on doing any type of SEO work in the next few months or years.

GOOGLE AUTOCOMPLETE

Google itself can give you some great keyword ideas.

Here’s how:

Go to Google and start to type in the keyword you want to research
Marvel at the ideas Google shows you
You can keep going by using synonyms and changing up the word order

Did you notice the short-term keyword that you started with (highly competitive) and how Google suggested some nice long-tail, low competition keywords? You should focus on the long-tail keywords.

Content architecture and sitemaps

The web pages on your site are the gateways to your site. If you have only one page with little useful content your website won’t get a lot of traffic. You might only rank for your brand name but little else.

It’s better to have more pages so that you can rank for a variety of keywords in Google. This doesn’t mean you need to create 200 web pages if you want to rank for 200 different keywords. It simply means you need to spend time planning a site that is rich in content, easy to navigate and provides useful info to your visitors in a logical and user-friendly manner. If you build your site with the user in mind (optimised for mobile of course) you have a better chance that your site will get more organic traffic from Google.

Types of Content

I love content. It’s the juice that boosts your SEO rankings and gives much joy to your customers – assuming your content is great quality, written with love and attention and utter generosity. And content isn’t only writing of course: video and podcasts are the way of the future.

For now, let’s look at web content (the typed out stuff) and what forms this can and should take on your website.

BASIC CONTENT

This is the core, structural stuff you need on your website:

Home page content
About page
Product pages
Terms and conditions/privacy policy
Contact page

Your home page and your product pages are going to be the main pages you want to have ranking in Google since they are very specific to the products and services you offer. Your Ts and Cs page is of no SEO benefit so don’t optimise that for search – duh.

Without being a broken record about it, make sure your basic content pages have enough content for Google to index and figure out what your site is about – at least 500 words per page would be a good start. Remember that your content needs to be written to be useful to humans first, so focus on that.

BLOGS AND ARTICLES

Here’s where you start having some fun. Your blogs and articles must:

Be well-researched and well-written
Be in-depth
Deliver on the promise you make in your headline
Solve a problem, evoke emotion, persuade or inform, entertain i.e. the blog post or article must add value
Be so good that people will want to immediately share it
Be 1,500 to 2,000 words long (or more)
Include links to other useful places on the web

The art of writing a good blog post is a subject for an entire other tutorial but please keep the above basic principles in mind.

LINK BAIT ARTICLES

These are beyond merely articles but enter the realm of high-value assets. This type of content is:

3,000+ words
Incredibly useful and well researched
So good that you just know a unicorn cried when it read the article
Magnetic: people just can’t help sharing and linking to it
Shared like crazy all over social media
The best article on the topic you will find anywhere on the web

Tough order, right. Well, the rewards are not immediate but if you invest in a great, really damn great piece of content you can be sure that you will attract links, traffic, rankings and even fame.

Have a look at this post by Steve Kamb over at Nerd Fitness:

It’s ridiculously well researched and a real treat to read as well. That’s why it’s STILL ranking for “paleo diet” years after it was written.

Optimising Content

THE IDEAL SEO-OPTIMISED WEB PAGE

Here’s what I request demand of my SEO copywriters when I brief in web content. You can use the same framework and be as demanding.

One primary keyword per page: focus on the primary keyword as the main topic of the article or blog post
Specify the page URL: this URL should be a couple of words max and should include the primary keyword in the URL
Title: specify the title (SEO title that appears on the search engine results page) and make sure it’s about 66 characters long including spaces
Meta description: write a compelling, inviting and informative description of what the page is about and make sure it contains the main keyword of the page and is about 166 characters long including spaces
H1 heading: this page title is usually the H1 heading. There must only be one H1 heading per page
Body content: start with an introduction that includes the primary keyword. Write a brilliant piece of informative/entertaining/persuasive content and divide it up into sections using H2 and H3 headings
Sprinkle with bullet points, italics, bold and quotes to make the content feel light, easy to scan and digestible
Link to related, useful content. If linking to a 3rd party website, open the link in a new tab
Include relevant imagery or embedded video to make the content more interesting
Spelling and grammar are essential!
Make the content at least 500 words long but don’t waffle – the content should be exactly as long as it needs to be, no longer and no shorter
Absolutely no plagiarism or duplicate content or I will have you killed badly like in Game of Thrones

If you can write or get someone to write all of your web pages with the above guidelines in place, you are off to a good start.

RICH SNIPPETS AND FEATURED SNIPPETS

These are the useful little bits and pieces Google adds to your search results to make them more relevant and informative. An example of rich snippets are reviews stars.

Google has specified the types of content that can earn rich and featured snippets and some of these include

Articles: top stories carousel
Local business listings
Recipes
Reviews

If you write the above type of content you may be able to get rich snippets on your search results.

How to get rich snippets:

Write content types that will earn rich snippets
Install a rich snippet plugin e.g. https://mythemeshop.com/plugins/wordpress-review/ for reviews or All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Set up your rich snippet plugin
Use your plugin to mark up your content
Test your content using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool

Go for it and let me know in the comments below how your Rich Snippet experience worked out and which plugin you recommend.

HEADLINES THAT SELL

I assure you that entire words have been written about how to write headlines. You need to spend a ton of time crafting your headline since it’s the very first thing people see.

Your headline makes a promise that you better be damn sure your article or blog post delivers on.

For example, if I see a headline that says:

13 Potatoes that look like Channing Tatum

I sure as hell want to see 13 potatoes that look like Channing Tatum. Thankfully, the internet delivers.

Your headline should contain the main keyword you want to rank for but above all else it must be compelling and attract attention.

And that leads me straight into…

SEO TITLES

Your page title tag appears in the search result and should contain the main keyword you want to rank for so that people know the link is relevant to their search query.

For example, I searched for “canada is the best country in the world” and the titles in the Google search results leap out to me and show that they are RELEVANT:

Ideally your primary keyword should appear near the beginning of the page title. Your page title should be about 66 characters long so that it fits within the search results.

META DESCRIPTIONS

Your meta description acts like the salesperson to bring someone to your site from the Google search results page. If your title is the attraction, the meta description closes the deal.

Make sure each page of your site has a unique meta description and ensure that the primary keyword of the page is included in the first few words of the meta description.

Your meta description should be about 166 characters in length, including spaces. This ensures that the full meta description is shown in the search results, and not cut off.

KEYWORD USE IN BODY CONTENT

In the past SEOs would worry about how often to use the primary page keyword in the body content. This was known as keyword density. This tactic is now a thing of the past and you should avoid using the primary keyword too often as this doesn’t look natural. When you optimise a page for a keyword, write with the reader in mind and not a search engine.

You should use your primary keyword in the first sentence of the body copy and then a couple more times throughout the page – but do not overdo it. Use variations and synonyms and don’t obsess about it – rather write naturally.

BODY CONTENT FORMATTING

Nobody reads anymore. At the very best they skim through your content, looking for the highlights and the key takeaways. To this end, make sure your content is easy to scan.

Easy to scan content uses:

Subheadings
Paragraph breaks
Bullet points
Italics
Bold
Images and embedded videos
Quotes

Your content should feel light and enjoyable, not heavy and intimidating. Always write with the reader in mind (and remember the reader doesn’t read).

Image optimisation

There is nothing worse than a massive image that slows down your load speed. This is a sure-fire way to slow down your page and lose out on ranking. Let’s dive into image optimisation.

IMAGE FILE SIZE

The file size is the most critical aspect of image optimisation. Keep your image file size to as low as possible while maintaining quality of image. If you use Photoshop or Gimp or similar, save images for web.

Remember to optimise your images BEFORE you upload them – you don’t want to start off with a slow page and then speed it up later.

You can find unoptimised images by using a tool like https://gtmetrix.com/

Click on the PageSpeed and YSlow tabs to explore what you need to optimise.

Follow the recommendations and reupload the relevant images after you have optimised them.

You may also find more optimisation tips in the PageSpeed report referring to:

Serve scaled images: don’t use a plugin to rescale images. Rather manually resize images to the correct dimensions from the get go
Specify image dimensions: this happens automatically with the WordPress visual editor but some images in your code may still require that you specify dimensions in the HTML or CSS e.g. width=”135″ height=”250″
Optimise images using lossless compression: you can use an image compression service such as Imagify
Combining images using CSS sprites i.e. you can combine multiple images into 1 image. You can use https://css.spritegen.com/ to do this
Avoid URL redirects (by ensuring you don’t serve images from the wrong http/https version or www/non www version: you can fix these problems using the Better Search Replace plugin
Use a CDN (content delivery network) such as CloudFlare or StackPath.
- Images will be served from a data centre close to the reader
- The page will load faster for the reader

Cache images using your cache plugin – use a good cache plugin such as WP Rocket
Use a small and cacheable favicon of 16 x 16 pixels

IMAGE NAMES

When you create your image files, give them descriptive names e.g. bloggingtips.png instead of image_123_20190506.png.

This helps Google know what the image is about.

IMAGE FORMATS

I prefer PNG over JPEG and PNGs are generally better for images that don’t have a lot of colours. JPEGs are great for colour photographs with lots of detail.

Make sure your images are saved for web (compressed).

IMAGE TITLES AND ALT TAG

When you upload an image in WordPress, always complete the image title and alt tags:

Your alt tag and title should be similar or the same as your image file name and should describe what the image is about.

Interlinking

In the context of this WordPress SEO tutorial, interlinking refers to how the pages of your site link to each other. This is also referred to as internal links.

Internal links should be included to web copy to make it easy for people to find related info that will help them find out more about a specific topic.

Having links to a page from other pages on your site is also a good way to get sitelinks appearing in the Google search results – it shows Google which pages are important and should be highlighted.

Please note: never use an interlinking plugin to automatically link specific keywords to a specific page on your site – this is spammy and unnatural and will not help your SEO.

Also avoid using related posts plugins which can severely slow down your site – go for manual interlinking in places that make sense.

TYPES OF PAGE INTERLINKING

You can link to other pages on your site through:

Links in the text of the page
Linked images

ANCHOR TEXT

The anchor text of a link is the text that is clickable within a link – in html this would be <a hrefs=”https//www.yourwebpage.com”>ANCHOR TEXT</a>

You should vary the anchor text in links to a page. If you only used the same anchor text when linking to a page this would not be natural and could be seen as over-optimisation.

You should use short and descriptive anchor text that includes the primary keyword of the destination page – but not always. Keep things natural and varied.

NUMBER OF LINKS

Don’t overdo the links! Only add links to a page if you are helping the reader find out more info but don’t go nuts with it.

WordPress site speed optimisation

MEASURING SITE SPEED: PAGESPEED INSIGHTS, PINGDOM AND GTMETRIX

Do you know how fast your WordPress site is actually loading? There are loads of great tools out there that will tell you what your page load speed is. Let’s find out more!

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a great but limited tool that measures how fast the first piece of information on your site loads i.e. Time To First Byte (TTFB). This is a measure of your server speed and ideally this should be less than 200 milliseconds – that’s 0,2 seconds.

Pingdom is super popular and for good reason – it has some great features and makes great recommendations for improving your site speed. The speed test tool is here.

GTMetrix is my favourite speed tool because of the in-depth reports and useful insights it gives. Be sure to click on all the tabs to dig into the info about your page speed.

Last but certainly not least: Gift of Speed go to great lengths and explain exactly what you need to fix.

HOSTING AS A SITE SPEED FACTOR

Your host server speed is super critical for fast load speed. I recommend doing your homework but personally recommend SiteGround which gets great reviews on Facebook polls.

Looking at hosting options:

Free and shared hosting:

Your website is hosted on a shared server with many (tens to hundreds) of other accounts
Your website can load slower especially at peak times
Don’t choose this option if you are serious about speed

VPS hosting:

Still shared but with far fewer accounts
Might include your own IP address
Also not recommended if you are serious about speed

Private cloud hosting:

Multiple servers share the load of hosting your site
If one server goes down, the others act as backup servers
Usually includes a unique IP address
Great for sites with low traffic and a small budget

Dedicated hosting:

Your site is hosted on its own server
Pricey monthly cost
Best option for speed if you have the money for it

USING A LIGHTWEIGHT WORDPRESS THEME

There is a tradeoff between visual appeal and performance.

A website can have all the bells and whistles: fancy animations, rich photo-quality images and embedded tools and calculators.

All these extras add bloat to the code of your site and slow it down.

On the other hand, a site that is text-only and loads super quickly is unlikely to be appealing and won’t serve your audience well.

The key is to find a balance between visual appeal and performance. A good web developer and UX designer will consider performance and create the best of both worlds. Experienced web developers are also able to develop a website without using too many plugins which also add bloat to the code.

This website is created using Genesis Framework and a fairly lightweight StudioPress WordPress theme.

I’ve also opted to limit the use of photo-realistic imagery and keep the visuals to minimal, illustration-style graphics.

When looking at WordPress themes, remember to consider load speed and performance – look for a theme that is optimised for speed!

USING LIGHTWEIGHT WORDPRESS PLUGINS

Few things can slow down your website like plugin bloat.

Plugins are super useful to add functionality to your WordPress website but can seriously mess with performance if you add the wrong plugins or too many plugins.

Again, this is all about balancing speed and functionality.

Choose WordPress plugins that are:

Critical for the functional aspects of your website
Well-supported
Professionally coded
Lightweight

Plugins can provide important functionality to your website, including:

Forms for contact or lead generation
Pop-ups
SEO functionality
Social media sharing
Cookie acceptance and GDPR/POPI privacy compliance
Security
Sliders
Performance optimisation
Tagging and tracking
And more!

Don’t be afraid of using necessary plugins – but do avoid plugins that you don’t really need and that slow down your website speed.

YouTube SEO

YOUTUBE RANKING FACTORS

YouTube uses a variety of factors to rank videos in its search results and recommended videos sections. These factors include:

Relevance: YouTube uses the title, tags, and description of a video to determine its relevance to a search query.
Watch time: Videos that keep viewers engaged for longer periods of time will be ranked higher than those with higher bounce rates.
Audience Retention: YouTube uses audience retention metric to understand how engaging is a video and how much of it people are watching.
Click-through rate (CTR): Videos with higher CTRs (the number of clicks on a video divided by the number of views) will be ranked higher than those with lower CTRs.
Number of views: Videos with more views are generally ranked higher than those with fewer views.
Number of likes and comments: Videos with more likes and comments will be ranked higher than those with fewer.
Channel authority: Videos from channels with a higher authority will be ranked higher than those from less authoritative channels.
Video upload frequency: Channels that consistently upload new videos will be ranked higher than those that do not.
Video age: YouTube tends to favor videos that are more recent.
Video File format and Quality: YouTube prefers videos that are in mp4 format and that have good resolution, frame rate and audio quality.

It’s worth noting that YouTube’s algorithm is constantly changing and evolving, and the specific ranking factors used may change over time.

YOUTUBE KEYWORD RESEARCH

How do you do YouTube keyword research?

YouTube keyword research is the process of identifying and analyzing the words and phrases that people use to search for videos on YouTube. Here are some steps you can take to do YouTube keyword research:

Start with brainstorming: Make a list of words and phrases that are relevant to your video. Consider the topic, the main message and the target audience of your video.
Use YouTube’s Autocomplete: Begin typing a word or phrase into YouTube’s search bar and see what suggestions appear. These suggestions can give you an idea of the most popular related searches.
Use keyword research tools: There are several keyword research tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, that allow you to see the search volume and competition for a particular keyword. You can also use tools like TubeBuddy, VidIQ, which are specifically designed for YouTube, they can also help you with keyword research.
Analyze your competitors: Look at the titles, tags, and descriptions of videos that are similar to yours and rank well. Analyze what keywords they are using and consider incorporating them into your own video.
Use long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are more specific phrases that usually have lower search volume but also less competition. They are more likely to be used by people who are further down the buying cycle and are more likely to convert into a customer.
Optimize your video title, tags, and description: Once you have identified the keywords that you want to target, make sure to include them in your video title, tags, and description.
Monitor your performance: Use YouTube Analytics to monitor your video’s performance and see which keywords are driving the most traffic to your video. Use this information to optimize your video and improve its search ranking.

Keyword research is an ongoing process, you should regularly check and update your keywords to ensure that you are targeting the most relevant ones and that your video is reaching the right audience.

YOUTUBE CLICKTHROUGH RATE AND CUSTOM THUMBNAILS

Do YouTube clickthrough rates matter?

Absolutely they do! Click-through rate (CTR) is one of the factors that YouTube uses to determine how to rank videos in its search results and recommended videos sections.

CTR is a metric that measures the number of clicks a video receives divided by the number of views. A high CTR indicates that a video is relevant to the search query and that it is engaging enough to make people want to click on it. Videos with high CTRs are likely to be ranked higher than those with low CTRs.

However, it’s important to note that CTR is just one of many factors that YouTube uses to rank videos, and a high CTR doesn’t guarantee that a video will rank well. Other important factors include relevance, watch time, audience retention, number of views, likes and comments, channel authority, video upload frequency, video age and video format and quality.

Additionally, a high CTR doesn’t necessarily translate into a high conversion rate, it’s important to track the performance of your video and analyze if the viewers are taking the intended actions.

In conclusion, a high CTR is an indicator of the video’s relevance and engagement and it’s a factor that helps YouTube to rank videos, but it’s not the only one. It’s important to create high-quality and engaging videos, optimized for both YouTube search and the audience, to improve the chances of ranking well and achieving your marketing goals.

What about YouTube custom thumbnails?

Custom thumbnails are images that you can add to your YouTube videos to help them stand out and attract more clicks. They are a powerful way to grab viewer’s attention and increase the click-through