One of the questions our digital marketing team gets regularly is “Which website platform is best for SEO?” There are a ton of different website platform options out there, and what’s best for you will depend on your individual priorities as a business, but our SEO specialists almost always recommend WordPress.But Why? It is easy to use to build a great looking, easy-to-navigate website, and it has shown itself time and again to be the best choice when it comes to SEO.
Here is an in-depth look at why we recommend using WordPress if you are looking for a website platform that will enhance your SEO rankings.
SEO-Friendly Design Themes
There’s more to SEO than just writing optimized content. Design also has a major impact on SEO. WordPress has a wide variety of user-friendly themes that will make your site look great while ensuring that users, and search engine bots, can navigate and find the information they want without any hassle. This will reduce your bounce rate and positively impact your search engine rankings.
Because WordPress has such an extensive catalogue of SEO-informed themes, it’s easy for any type of business to find the right design, whatever industry or look you’re going for. WordPress makes it simple to pick a theme that both looks how you imagined your dream website and simultaneously prioritizes SEO.
Fast Load Time
One of the factors that Google and other search engines take into account when ranking websites is page-load speed. If the pages on your website take a long time to load, search engines consider that poor user experience and will penalize you by ranking you lower.
WordPress has a number of great plugins that can help speed up your page-load time, including WPOptimize, which automatically compresses images to make them load faster, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer, which compresses all PDF files and previously published images on your site in order to improve page-load speed.
Social Media Integration
Even though social media is not a direct part of SEO, it is still an important factor that can boost or bring down your website’s Google ranking. Social media increases your brand’s visibility by posting across various platforms. If you have an active social media presence that users engage with, it will send more traffic to your site and help increase your SEO. WordPress makes it easy to maintain an active social media presence, with many easy-to-use plugins available that allow you to integrate social media posts and buttons right into your website.
Easy Permalink Editing
WordPress automatically gives you clean, attractive links that use the title of your page in the URL. This means that quite often you can just leave the automatically generated URL and it will still look great on your site and make sense to users. However, if you want to change it, WordPress makes it easy to edit your URLs so you can add the SEO keywords you are targeting. This is a quick and simple way to make sure your site is focusing on your keywords.
In addition to targeting specific keywords, WordPress’s tidy, intuitive URLs can help boost your click-through rate (CTR) because they look appealing and entice users to click.
User Experience
Though UX and SEO are often thought of as separate, search engines like Google are incorporating them into their ranking equation. WordPress prioritizes UX, which translates to better SEO. If people enjoy being on your site, they will trust it and want to use it, making your site a trusted resource where people will come looking for answers to their questions. Google will notice this.
Not sure how your website’s UX is? Here are some telltale signs that your site isn’t providing a good user experience:
- High bounce rate (this is often even higher on mobile)
- Users aren’t sharing, commenting, or otherwise engaging with your content
- Low conversion rate
- Users are starting to do things such as fill out a form or make a purchase, but not completing it
Image Optimization
Choosing eye-catching, relevant images for blog posts and website pages is important for user experience because it draws readers in and gives them a visual hint as to what they can expect in the text they are about to read. However, images are also important SEO tools.
Optimizing image size and providing alt text for every image on your site is essential if you want to improve your SEO. WordPress makes it easy to quickly resize your images to the optimal size in order to improve page-load speed. With WordPress, it is also easy to add alt text to images. Alt text is important for SEO because it makes your website more accessible to those with visual impairment by providing a description of the images on each page.
Metadata Management
Metadata is, put simply, data about other data. On a website, metadata is the data on each web page that describes the page’s contents and what Google and visitors see first. This includes the title, keyword tags, and the description of the page that populates on search engine results pages. Metadata is easy to overlook but it actually has a major impact on your website’s performance.
WordPress has the Yoast plugin, which makes it easy to input metadata as you create pages or on pages that you have already published. You simply insert your primary keyword, title, meta title, meta description, and URL into the Yoast plugin and it will automatically tell you how your metadata’s SEO is and what you can do to improve it.
Mobile Friendly
With more and more people doing everything from their phones, tablets, and other mobile devices, mobile usage has risen rapidly over the past few years and continues to grow. From 2011 to 2021, mobile traffic has increased 222% and shows no signs of dropping. If someone goes to purchase a product or book a service on their phone and finds that your website is difficult to navigate from a mobile device, they are much less likely to complete the transaction. That means that having a mobile-responsive website is a must for every business, now more than ever.
WordPress understands the importance of mobile responsiveness, which is why the majority of WordPress themes come automatically optimized for different types of mobile devices. This means that when you choose WordPress, you can just pick a mobile-friendly theme and leave the rest to WordPress.
WordPress is not only great for SEO, it is also an excellent platform choice because it is endlessly customizable, reliable, and easy to use. If you are interested in switching to WordPress or giving your current WordPress site a redesign, get in touch with our digital marketing team today. Our experts will walk you through what we can do for your website and give you professional recommendations on how you can grow your business with SEO.
