One of the best bases for a business website is WordPress. Today we are going to show you how to set up and optimise SEO for business using WordPress to help get better search engine rankings.
Whether you run an online business, or you have a brick and mortar store or you have both, you are going to have to look at search engine optimisation. SEO is essential to help get your website ranked and get visitors.
Why do you need to optimise SEO locally?
If you have a brick and mortar store local SEO optimisation is very important. It is said that one in three searches on Google are for local businesses. Local SEO is a part of conventional SEO with the main difference being it emphasizes your contact information. It also relates to localised keywords.
People search for local businesses when they want to visit that business and make a purchase. Therefore, you must get your business listed.
Thankfully, WordPress is a great choice for business websites. There are plugins you can install to help with SEO, with one being All in One SEO.
AIOSEO helps with search engine optimisation in numerous ways. It provides information about the keyword, Meta titles, Meta descriptions and more. When used in conjunction with the tools WordPress provides, you have an excellent start in ensuring your website is optimised.
How to setup and optimise SEO for business using WordPress
There are many things you can do in WordPress yourself to help optimise your website to help increase rankings and visitors.
Your permalinks
One thing you should change in your WordPress site is the permalinks.
By changing them you can ensure your site has a URL that is search engine friendly. On installation, the permalink is set to https://www.yourwebsite.com/p=N1. This doesn’t say anything about what the content is about on your site. Therefore, it needs changing so your URL is friendlier.
When your URL is friendly it tells search engines and visitors more about what the content is about. This is because it should contain one of your main keywords. For instance, the URL could be https://www.yourwebsite.com/homemade-cakes-Sheffield/.
This immediately tells Google and readers that your content is about homemade cakes in Sheffield.
How to change your permalink in WordPress
To change your permalink structure in WordPress you should head to Settings – Permalinks in the dashboard. This should be one of the first things you change after the installation of WordPress and before you write any content and upload your sitemap to your Google Search Console.
If you change your permalinks after you have a lot of content on your site that is already indexed it can cause issues with the content that is already indexed.
To make sure your URL is friendly choose either /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/.
This makes sure that your URLs are fully optimised and this is a very important part of your SEO strategy.
Change settings in All in One SEO
All in One SEO help with your search engine optimisation and after installing the plugin you should go to the “search appearance” tab.
Here you can set your Meta title and Meta description for your home page. This is the snippet that is shown on the search result page. When setting these make sure they are short and to the point, using your keyword in them as this is how Google matches sites to searchers. Make sure the description is unique and catches the eye.
You can also change the knowledge graph settings and set up local SEO settings on Google Maps and Google My Business.
Your sitemap
The All in One SEO plugin can also generate a sitemap.xml for your website. This is a list of all your pages and posts and search engines use it when crawling.
You can upload the sitemap to Google Search Console by going to the sitemap tab and typing in sitemap.xml and clicking add.
SEO Analysis of your website
The AIOSEO plugin also offers you an SEO analysis of your website. It provides helpful information on how you can make your website better to optimise SEO for business.
Optimise SEO for business with targeted content
If you want to rise up the rankings and keep people on your website you have to offer targeted content.
This means doing keyword research and including your keywords throughout the content naturally. Your content should be informative and interesting, providing readers with the answers they are looking for.
You can use the AIOSEO plugin to help you with your content. It provides helpful information about the snippet preview, focus keyword, SEO title, Meta description and a great deal more.
In summary
We hope you have found our information on how to optimise SEO for business using WordPress and AIOSEO useful.
Of course, this only gets you started and there is a great deal more to search engine optimisation than just what we have talked about here. When considering SEO there are many aspects, these include on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO and more. If you want to fully optimise SEO for business consider hiring a specialist.
