Why WordPress is the best CMS for SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is critical to your website’s success.

While it’s advisable to strike a healthy balance between pay-per-click (PPC) and SEO, organic traffic accounts for 53% of internet traffic and has a higher conversion rate.

It’s a given that not every visitor who lands on your site will convert. That’s why it’s important to maximise the number of visitors your site gets and improve the quality of those visitors – and SEO is the way to do this.

By implementing a robust SEO strategy your business will benefit from greater visibility, which ensures your offering is seen by qualified prospects who are actively interested in what you sell and are more likely to convert.

Now, all of this is well and good, but won’t you need a skilled developer to execute an SEO strategy? With WordPress, the opposite is true.

WordPress’ user-friendly interface means that just about anyone, whether you’re a seasoned SEO pro or complete novice, can implement best practices in a matter of clicks.

So – what is it that sets WordPress apart from other CMS when it comes to SEO? Allow us to explain…

SEO functionality included as standard

As we’ve already mentioned, WordPress is an intuitive platform that allows beginners to unlock its SEO capability just as easily as developers with years of experience.

In order to improve your website’s organic search ranking, you need to prove to search engines like Google that you are committed to consistently creating optimised content. As a former blogging platform, WordPress makes this incredibly easy to do.

Creating, editing and publishing new content with WordPress is a walk in the park. It does a great job of avoiding overly technical jargon, which means it can be accessed and utilised by anyone with a basic understanding of how to use a computer.

Everything from keyword focus to the meta description is clearly labelled at the bottom of the page, and a traffic light system is deployed to let users know whether what they have written is up to par or not.

All of this, combined with features like permalinks, title tags, headings and HTML pages, are included as standard in the platform’s core offering, all of which help search engines better understand what your content is about so it will rank better.

SEO themes and plugins

Now that we’ve detailed what’s included out-of-the-box in terms of SEO functionality, it’s time to explore the themes and plugins that can take your SEO game to the next level.

One of WordPress’ greatest strengths as a CMS is the emphasis it places on user experience. The themes and plugins available on the platform help to make website design look slick, user-friendly and visually appealing.

How your website looks and how easy it is to navigate will impact various user metrics, from session duration and bounce rate to number of visitors and average pageviews per session.

Because your website will be viewed on a variety of different browsers and devices, you need a theme that will adjust accordingly and look good no matter what. By choosing an SEO-friendly and responsive theme, your website ranks higher with search engines as they reward it for being easy to use and accessible to all users.

Another way to maximise your site’s SEO performance is to use one of the many plugins that WordPress boasts of. Here are a few of our favourites:

  • Yoast SEO: this is one of the most commonly used plugins on the platform and it’s not hard to see why. Using your focus keywords, this plugin will help you optimise your content, as well as suggesting improvements to make your content more readable for humans and search engine bots.
  • Google Search Console: if you want to keep a close eye on how your website is performing month-on-month, this plugin gives you a detailed breakdown so you can monitor and maintain progress. It alerts you when Google is unable to crawl or index a page, and it helps you come up with fresh content ideas so you can continue to boost your ranking.
  • SEMRush: a favourite tool of those skilled in the art of SEO, this plugin arms you with everything you need to grow your traffic. It’s an invaluable tool to find organic keywords and search terms that you can realistically rank for, and it even provides competitor analysis so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Site speed

One of the major factors that influences how Google ranks content is speed – and the reason for this is twofold:

  1. Shorter loading times means a decrease in bounce rate and higher levels of engagement from visitors.
  2. The faster a page can load the easier it is for search engine bots to crawl your page and assess content.

A standout feature of WordPress websites is how quickly they load. As a highly experienced WordPress agency, we can attest to this at 6B.

In the unlikely event that you do encounter poor load speeds and it’s affecting the user experience on your site, there are a number of things you can do. Your first port of call should be to check your PageSpeed score, which will assess page performance on mobile and desktop, before suggesting a number of improvements to implement.

If this doesn’t yield a satisfactory result, there is always the tried and tested WordPress solution for pretty much anything: a plugin.

The beauty of using such a widely used CMS that powers well over a third of websites on the internet is that any issue you encounter will have likely been solved before with a bespoke plugin.

So – if you are suffering from slow speeds and want to remedy this quickly, choose from any number of plugins specifically designed to give your site the boost it needs.

Image and mobile optimisation

SEO is all about optimising the content you create to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic that you receive organically from search engines.

And for many of us, this will constitute written content and written content only. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, WordPress helps target the keywords that you want to rank for and helps you optimise content with this purpose in mind, but it also optimises images in the same way.

Whether you want to resize an image to improve page speed or add alt text for an image, WordPress makes this an effortless task via a number of bespoke plugins which do this automatically for you.

By doing so, it helps give search engine bots the necessary context they need to rank your pages and it ensures your users benefit from varied content that doesn’t affect page speeds.

But it isn’t only images and text that WordPress can help you optimise.

In a time where mobile traffic is increasing year-on-year, neglecting to create a mobile-friendly site can mean losing out on a sizable chunk of business. Today’s users want to be able to flick between desktop and mobile seamlessly without their experience being compromised.

Not only is mobile the preference of your users but it’s also Google’s too. Since the overwhelming majority of Google Search traffic comes from mobile phones, Google now employs a mobile-first indexing policy, meaning it uses the mobile version of your site for its all-important ranking and indexing.

Fortunately, all WordPress sites are automatically optimised for mobile, so you needn’t worry about it.

Are you looking for ways to boost your site’s SEO performance?

If you want to benefit from greater visibility, improve quality and quantity of organic traffic, and boost conversion rates, then you need to have a defined SEO strategy in place – and WordPress is the best CMS to execute this strategy.

Discover more about our WordPress offering today

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