Getting search engine optimization done on your WordPress site is a must if you're looking to score organic traffic generated by search engines like Google. Let's jump into the steps to get your site optimized as fast as possible.
Step 1: Perform your audits.
To find out how far away your site is from an "optimized" state, an audit must first be performed. While this could be done manually with a web browser and its dev tools, we don't recommend it. There are plenty of tools available that can give you a great picture of what areas can be improved in a matter of minutes with almost no effort. We like to run both Screaming Frog and SEM Rush's Site Audit for this job. Both tools just require your website URL and a button click to spit out a bunch of actionable items.
Step 2: Work through the checklists.
If you ran the tools we recommend, you'll have a couple of checklists in hand. Let's start with SEM Rush which tells you exactly what is wrong and how to fix it. All of the content issues can be fixed right within the native WordPress editor, and we like to use the Yoast plugin for easy access to the each page's meta and title tags. Server related issues are usually more complex and outside of this article's scope, but we are happy to help if you contact us by email at hi@servinda.com!
After everything prescribed by SEM Rush is done, we suggest doing another scan with Screaming Frog. By this point you should be left with little to no work as the tools are redundant in a lot of ways, but we find that it usually goes a bit deeper and illuminates any straggler issues that SEM Rush might have missed.
Step 3: Make sure search engines can see your work.
After working through all of the checklists, you have an accurate sitemap.xml file ready to go and available on your web server. This is the map that search engines use to get an understanding of your site's structure while "crawling" it. Google and Bing both offer a method to manually provide them with your sitemap, and we suggest taking advantage of those methods because it reduces the time it takes for your site to start showing up in search results. You can sign up and submit your sitemap on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools respectively.
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