Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
WordPress is the most used Content Management System, hosting over 43% of websites on the internet. Despite users having all the tools available to implement SEO successfully at their fingertips, Ahrefs recently released a study that showed 96.55% of pages get zero organic search traffic from Google. This highlights that while there is a broad knowledge of SEO within the online community, its implementation for most sites leaves something to be desired.
Now you may be wondering, How do I know if my site is SEO-friendly? Well, you’re in luck as this article will cover features to look out for on your site to optimise and tools you can use to help with this.
Tools
Google Search Console
There are many tools you can use to check the SEO effectiveness of your site, some of them free and some of them paid. Google Search Console is one of the most important tools that you can use to track SEO performance. Search Console is a free platform offered by Google which allows users to monitor and adjust their presence in Google’s Search Results. One of Search Console’s most important features is that it allows you to monitor if your pages have been indexed in Google; if not, you can submit them for indexation. It also allows you to submit a sitemap (a map displaying your site structure) so Google can easily crawl and index your site to improve SEO performance.
Page Speed Insights
Page Speed Insights is another free tool offered by Google. With this tool, users can submit specific pages on their site for a speed performance analysis, which will also give actionable insights into specific tasks they can do to improve page speed performance over time. This is a key metric for SEO performance, and understanding if your pages are performing to Google speed requirements helps with understanding the SEO friendliness of your site.
SEMRush | SERanking
SemRush and SERanking are just two examples of many SEO all-around platforms that give you key insights into the SEO Performance of your site. With these SEO tools, you can analyse your keyword rankings, analyse content, run technical SEO audits and more. This allows you to always know if your site is SEO optimised and constantly enables you to make tweaks and improvements.
Content
When making sure your site’s SEO performance is doing well, one of the first and most important aspects you need to look out for is making sure your content is optimised for search engines. This includes making sure your titles, description and headings are concise and include your target keywords, while your images are also the right size, format and accessible.
Most importantly, you need to make sure your content is relevant to your audience and contains insightful, new information for your audience that is both relevant and authoritative to appear higher on search engines.
Technical
The technical aspect of SEO is an important step for a fully optimised website. You can use an SEO tool such as SERanking or SEMRush to crawl your site and identify issues such as broken page links, redirecting pages, site speed and image sizes. These tools will give you tips and recommended fixes to allow you to improve the SEO and UX of your site, increasing performance.
Making sure you understand the different aspects of SEO performance to track and the tools you can use to help you improve performance are both beneficial and worthwhile to your website and overall business strategy in the long run. It is imperative for businesses in the future that they understand the fundamentals of SEO performance and how they can implement them.
