Building a website without CMS is very very hard to create and manage. WordPress is a free CMS with a self-hosted open-source software. Well, around 810 million websites are built with WordPress as of 2023. It is almost 43% of all the websites in the internet.  Also, you can develop your website in WordPress by using free add-ons such as plugins and themes available in it. There are plenty of premium options available as well if you want to go beyond what free tools have to offer.

If your website is among these 43% WordPress sites, you can’t be sure to get a Google rank without proper International SEO services. As WordPress is SEO-friendly, you shouldn’t miss the chance to use its full potential.

There are many factors to be considered for Google ranking. For search engine ranking, you have to optimize your WordPress website in certain ways.If you are doing so, you can not ignore these 11 WordPress SEO issues to out-compete your competitors.

Top WordPress SEO issues and tips to avoid.

We have worked with numerous clients from over the world. If any clients worked with other agencies, We would try to figure out what was wrong with the last agency. Moreover, we analyze their website and find the mistakes below which is made by last agencies:

1. Practicing E-E-A-T

E-A-A-T is a set of Google search quality rating guideline by Google which means Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, , and Trustworthiness. This guidelines are important considerations in PQ ( page quality)rating. Among these elements, the most important factor is Trustworthiness. You need to keep it in mind that E-E-A-T is not a search algorithm but quality rating algorithm.

Trustworthy pages are reliable to rank well in the search result. If your content has good E-E-A score but it’s unworthy to Google, it will remain low in E-E-A-T score no matter how much effort you make.

You need to make sure to include as much information about your website as you can. For example, You have to share-

Tips:

• Your company or business location, phone number etc.
• If you have a shopping page, you need to make sure to add enough information regarding your customer support, product and customers.
• Do not share YMYL topics without higher level of expertise because these topics are sensitive in some extends and Google might not give you first page rank even if you do WordPress SEO.
• Do not use AI content since the new E in E-E-A-T means experience.

2. Website Speed

Website speed is an important factor for ranking your WordPress site for seo.  One of the best way to optimize website speed is to compress your website image and choose the right hosting provider. Website tend to load slow if the image size is too big or file type is inappropriate (For example, PNG format). Also for the heavy CSS and JavaScript usage make a website slower.

Tips:

You can optimize your website speed by:

• • Using a CDN (content delivery network) so that it loads faster in several location around the world.
  • Image compression: TinyPNG could be a good source of compression tool to do it manually. However, you may have thousands of images which can not be done like that. In this scenario, you are recommended to use some WordPress plugins like Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images .
  • Reducing the number of JavaScript and CSS file from your website that are not in use can improve your website’s speed. Most of the time those codes stay in the server and make it slow.
  • Moving website to a better hosting provider is the best thing you can do. It reduce the server response time and improve website speed.
  • Reducing the number of plugins.
  • Using consistent website caching.
  • Limiting unnecessary and excessive redirects.
  • Using page speed optimization service from expert team.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

Mobile searches have increased significantly over the years. From all the Google searches happens now 64% are done with mobile phones and other 35% happens on desktops. There are also more than twice as many keywords that are defined by mobile traffic.

So it is really important for ranking your WordPress Seo in mobile as well. You can use mobile friendly test from Google search console  to check your website mobile friendliness for ranking. Website speed in mobile is a major factor when its come to mobile rankings. Your website might load well in desktop but it can be terrible in mobile devices. Make sure you have an eye on this.

4. Permalink  

Another factor need considerations is your website permalinks. Permalinks are the URL of your individual  webpages. Your permalink should reflect the content inside it.

For instance, a medical websites writing a blog about “ 7 reasons to get into medical” and the URL is:

www.webcip/blog/008j96wa76d

Whereas you should make the URL to,

www.webcip/blog/7-reasons-to-get-into-medical

The last one is the more preferable URL for both the user and google. It is Better understanding for the user to read.

5.  Improper Use Of Heading Tags

Heading is a very essential factors when it comes to WordPress SEO. Headings are pinpoints to break your larger content to make it more structural for the user and Google crawling bot to easily read it.

Google use these heading tags to understand the content which helps google to underline the topics in different sections. So heading is very important for your WordPress site SEO. Make sure you are using 6 types of headings watchfully.

Tips:

Things to keep in mind-

• Use only one h1 tag in each page of your website;
• You may use more than one h2 tag but make sure they are properly used in the content. For example, you can add some h3 titled checklists under h2;
• Use h3 as list items, point titles or important contents;
• h4 is less important than h3 use it as per your preference;
• H5,h6 also goes in the same order as h4.

6. Using Internal And External Links

Internal links mean linking your website from one page to another page. Whereas External linking means when a different website links your domain to their site content. When other websites link to your website, Google will see that as a sign of trust in your content. Can you recall the E-E-A-T? As per google, if you or your business engage in somewhere and get shared by users, it is shown as trusted sign to Google Quality rating. As a result, it will rank higher in Google searches.

Building backlinks to your website is an essential SEO step for every WordPress site.

So, make sure you have internal links all around your site. Simply create links from other sites on your website to the relevant pages to do that. The purpose of internal linking is to encourage site visitors to spend more time exploring different sections of your website. Moreover, it provides visitors with more context about a specific words or topics

7.  Broken Link Fixing

WordPress users have one more technical obligation to perform concerning links: they must constantly check for broken links and repair them when they show up. The worst thing you can face while doing your SEO is to have 404 errors. Visitors are less likely to return to your site if they redirect to a nonexistent page.

The solution is to track 404 errors using WordPress plugin called Rankmath SEO and fix them as soon as they appear. These can occur for a number of reasons, including when one page’s URL is changed or removed, but it is still linked to another page or indexed by google.

Preventing 404 errors can be done effectively by changing or erasing links to your removed pages. If you see this error in Google search console, you can use a plugin called 301 Redirect to redirect all non existent pages to a new URL which may be a great way to keep website visitors of that page. Make sure that the page your are redirecting to is highly relevant to the visitors. Otherwise, you may only be increasing Bounce Rate in your website.

8. Creating SiteMap

The setup of your sitemap is impactful for your WordPress website SEO. If you ignored it, it can severely harm your site’s traffic. A sitemap is basically a map that is a layout which shows how all of the pages on your website are connected to one another.

There are 3 types of site map XML,RSS and Text. You need to create your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. It gives the google permission to find, crawl, and rank all of your site’s pages. That means they’ll start to show up much faster in search results and rank higher as Google knows about your site. Without a sitemap, Google won’t know which pages on your site belong to it, so it won’t crawl many of them.

9. Setting Schema Markup

You must use schema markup on your site.

How does schema markup work?

Basically, Schema markup is code in the form of data that communicates the meaning of the content of your page, which is useful for search engine to better understand a regular page, resulting in a rich result in Google.

This is helpful in two ways.

First, it means that Google knows how to rank your pages for the Google searches, which helps you get in front of the right users.

Second, it lets Google put rich snippets of your pages in search results, which are results that have more information about the page and improve your click through rate.

10. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content makes it difficult for Google to determine which of two pages with identical content to prioritize for high search engine rankings. However, Most of the time, with plugins or using some data, webmasters can make Google know that their content is created first and you will never rank on Google with the Copy-Paste contents.

Google prefers not to show results that include duplicate content. Google makes every effort to index and display pages with distinctive and useful information to Google. Search engine rankings may drop as a result of duplicate content on your WordPress site’s pages.

11. Poorly Optimized Title And Description

FInally, when searching a keyword in Google, a user will first see your Title and Meta description. These two things will prompt them to read the rest of the content and lead them to your site. So this is very important factor for both Google ranking and increasing site traffic. We can often improve CTR (Click through Rate) of our clients by just changing Meta information of a website and interesting title in it.

So you should be focusing on giving the title and description according to the content in your page. You need to keep in mind about user intent. This is an important factor for ranking.

You also need to know that SEO and PPC are not the same thing. Learn more about SEO vs PPC.