Local SEO for WordPress – If you’re a local business owner, chances are your website was built with WordPress. Statistics suggest that around 50% of the total internet is made up of WordPress sites. The exact figure varies depending on the source, and others put the WordPress share at 22% of all new, active websites or 58.9% of all websites whose CMS is known. No matter how you look at it, that’s quite a lot of WordPress websites. WordPress isn’t limited to foodie blogs and local businesses though – it’s also used as a platform for well-known brands and large corporations. Additional stats from BuiltWith.com show that WordPress is 40% of the top 100,000’s pick. The number even rises to 50% when we look at the top million websites. Companies like TechCrunch, The New Yorker, BBC America, and even the official Star Wars blog use WordPress.
Why WordPress?
There are good reasons for it. WordPress is a truly flexible platform. A myriad of plug-ins make it easy to expand functions, and the huge variety of themes allows you to easily customize the look to reflect the style of your company. Most importantly, WordPress is easy to use.
In contrast, WordPress represents a significantly shorter learning curve and requires much less customer support (aha moment). Ease of use is paramount here. If you are uncomfortable with your website CMS, you are not going to use it. A neglected website can then soon turn into a weak spot instead of being a strong, digital seller.
Even better: WordPress is a solid SEO platform right off the shelf. It just does so much right. And when you consider that WordPress takes such a huge stake in the web, it stands to reason that Google could see an obligation in it to crawl and index the content of WordPress sites. In the course of the article it will be examined how the suitability of WordPress as an SEO platform for local companies and what can be done with WordPress as a CMS to tune and boost your company results.
WordPress as an SEO platform
WordPress offers a solid SEO platform right off the shelf. However, it is likely that the WordPress default installation differs considerably from that of your company version. When your website was developed, its functionality was likely expanded to include a few plugins and the theme you selected. Content has been added and the site has ideally been categorized into a meaningful hierarchy. The stacking of the CMS, theme, plug-ins and content can generate quite a bit of additional content, so our goal is to filter out anything that shouldn’t “exist” for the user and to ensure that the search engine reliably ignores it.
WordPress taxonomies
“Taxonomy” is one of the words that makes you seem clever. It can also be a little intimidating. In fact, it’s a relatively simple concept of how things are grouped. An illustrated example: animals are a taxonomy within nature. Groupings within a taxonomy are called “terms”. Accordingly, “birds”, “cats” and “dogs” would all be “terms” within the “animals” taxonomy.
In WordPress our standard groupings (taxonomies) are:
- Category
- Link Category
- Post Format (contribution format)
- Post Tag (Post Tag)
Certain taxonomies support a hierarchy: that is, a grouping can support subgroups. By default, only the category is hierarchical, but we can also create custom hierarchical taxonomies. In other words, we can create custom groups that support subgroups.
- Category> Sub-Category> Sub-Sub-Category <Sub-Sub-Sub-Category
- Animals> Dogs> Collies> Border Collies
The dog example is technically incorrect (and would make any biologist’s hair stand on end), but it illustrates the principle that these are really just groups and subgroups. Nothing complicated, right? Understanding this is very important though, because if there’s one thing that can ruin your SEO on a theme-based WordPress website, it’s a realm of pointless taxonomies that can be generated when customizing the website for the company’s style . Usually Google manages to filter out these pages, but it never hurts to help the search engine by making sure that their crawl budget and indexing are directed towards the pages that you really want your prospects and customers to see when they search.
Taxonomy pages with the same keywords as the legitimate landing pages for sliders and other content are a common problem. If there are still common problems such as missing canonical URLs (canonicals) and URL-based duplication of the main pages, we confuse the search engine . This has a negative impact on the search results.
Small business websites have little weight / authority. It is therefore important that your taxonomies are secured and that the main optimization boxes described here are checked. Thus, the focus is placed on the important pages, and not on CMS-created pages that offer little to the interested party. It is very important to keep optimal loading speed of website in desktop, mobile, tab view. Here optimum7 WordPress page speed could be the best way to enhance the loading speed of wordpress websites.
Optimize WordPress for your local business
Now that we’ve got the caveat about taxonomies out of the way, let’s look at how we can actually optimize a WordPress website for a local business. It is necessary to start from a few premises in order to create a solid, realistic example that you can learn from and then adjust according to your needs. To do this, we install some common plug-ins and a theme. We’ll also look at considerations for companies with multiple branches, focusing on best practices for on-page implementation of local search engine optimization.
The WordPress SEO plug-in
A few different SEO plug-ins exist, and each has its advantages and disadvantages. But there is really only one plug-in that is used by SEO professionals and website operators when optimizing WordPress websites: the WordPress SEO plug-in from Yoast.
The WordPress SEO plug-in has every feature necessary to optimize a WordPress website and it can be expanded with modules for news, videos and local SEO. The WordPress SEO plug-in is available in both a free and a premium version, which offer additional features such as redirects and improved keyword targeting.
Optimize your website with the WordPress SEO plug-in
After the WordPress plug-in has been installed, the following basic steps must be followed to optimize a WordPress website for local businesses:
WordPress settings
Settings> General
Under the General tab, it is important to name the website and enter a description. Actually, of course, but in our experience that is exactly what is overlooked. So we’re going to be thorough and make sure everything is filled out correctly. We also want to be sure that our website URLs are correct and match the preferred URL in the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). It is also important to consider not only the URL, but also the subdomain and protocol. Remember that each of the following examples are unique, and that inconsistencies between navigation, indexed pages, and canonicals can create imponderables if they are misordered:
http://example.com
https://example.com
It gets worse when we include pages and trailing slashes:
http: // example.com/test/
https: //
example.com/test https: // example.com/test/
One website, four possible URLs, other variations (if we take the slashes into account) – it becomes quite a mess when the website responds to all of them. Add in taxonomy-based thin content and your rankings can be undermined for all the wrong reasons.
Remember:
Protocol – HTTP or HTTPs.
Subdomain – www or not www, that is the question.
Top-Level Domain – Usually the site category or country-based
(.com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .de, and so on). Your top-level domains must be uniform.
Internal Navigation – Link only to your preferred URL.
XML Sitemap – Make sure it matches your site navigation.
Canonical URLs – Make sure the protocol, subdomain, and URL are consistent.
Trailing Slash – Slash or not Slash, that’s another question here.
Google Search Console – Set your preferred URL here.
If all of these components are perfectly arranged, you have already minimized the likelihood of multiple variations of a single page being indexed.
Settings> Permalinks
First, let’s make sure your URLs are correct. In most cases it is simply a matter of selecting the “Post Name” option under WordPress> Settings> Permalinks.
If your website currently has a different setting, WordPress should be able to redirect the old URLs to the new URLs. Still, I recommend crawling the website using Screaming Frog before making the changes. The crawl should be saved as a list of URLs and then crawled again so that any 301 redirects that were not automatically created can be identified. Note: Optimized URLs are important, but make sure that internal navigation is in order. Otherwise your search volume can be affected by too many internal 301s.
WordPress SEO plug-in settings
Navigate to the plug-in start page with the “SEO” input in the main navigation. On the “Main Settings” page there are five tabs that allow us to set the site name, indicate whether it is a private person or a company, and link webmaster tools. These details should be filled in, but it’s straightforward. Follow the instructions below to optimize the rest of the SEO plug-in:
SEO> Titles & Metas
In this area we can configure all page titles and individualize the indexing of all post types and taxonomies. Sliders and themes can generate a bunch of taxonomies that cannot be indexed, are automatically added to the sitemap, and yet do not represent user-directed content.
As a rule of thumb (for Marcus Miller), the page title should read:
Keyword + Brand SEO Company in bangalore | Bowler Hat SEO Guide for Local Businesses
You understand? WordPress SEO accomplishes this on the basis of the variables “post name”, “separator” and “site name” by customizing the page title templates. You should also think about how everything should look like; take into account the length of the page names, post names and brand to adapt everything to your needs. It is also possible in the WordPress SEO settings box of each page to overwrite this information page by page or by contribution.
The factory settings are usually pretty solid, so use Screaming Frog to crawl your website, check your page titles, and examine your site for any tweaks that need to be made.
To optimize cross-site post types and taxonomies, follow the instructions for the following tabs:
General – Specify the separator to be used between elements in the page title templates.
Homepage – Overwrite homepage title and meta description templates if necessary.
Post Types – Configure the page title templates for posts, pages and media. The page titles of the service pages should be individualized on the individual pages to ensure that the respective service and location appears in the page title on each page.
Taxonomies – Configure the page titles for taxonomies, and check the “no index” box if you don’t think they’re user-specific. This is where your newfound knowledge of taxonomies comes in.
archive – Configure the page titles for the archive (author and date).
SEO> Social
This area won’t directly affect local results, however it is highly recommended that you fill in anything that connects your WordPress site to your brand’s social elements.
SEO> XML Sitemap
Any irrelevant taxonomy or post type should be excluded here, for example media from posts and any theme-related taxonomy (unless it is user-oriented). Use the links in your sitemap for the individual taxonomies: This way you understand exactly what the content is about and whether it should be kept or marked as a “no-index”. Any irrelevant taxonomy or post type should be excluded here, for example media from Posts and any theme-related taxonomy (unless it is user-directed). Use the links in your sitemap for the individual taxonomies: This way you will understand exactly what the content is about and whether it should be kept or marked as a “no-index”.
You can find your site index in /sitemap_index.xml. Follow the links in this directory to examine each sitemap and see what is inside. Often times what we want to include is as simple as posts, pages, and categories. Again, everything has to be customized according to site, goals, theme, etc.
When the individual dots between URLs, page titles, internal navigation and sitemap are connected, a strong signal is sent regarding the importance of the individual pages of the website.
SEO> Tools
The “Bulk Editor” in the Tools tab is ideal for checking and verifying your page titles and meta descriptions for consistency and optimization.
SEO> Search Console
If you link your WordPress site with the Google Search Console, Search Console data is transferred directly to the backend. This doesn’t help the ranking, but it can make you aware of weaknesses that affect your visibility. We therefore recommend linking WordPress with Search Console.
Primary considerations when doing local SEO with WordPress
There are two main considerations when it comes to content that should help rank your company’s target performance and location:
- Locations – These are the physical areas in which you work.
- Services – These are the services you offer.
I believe we should clearly show the relationship between your locations and services. This is done by creating detailed pages for each location and service. These pages are then linked. Actually, that’s just common sense. If I want to have a carpet cleaned, I want to be sure that the carpet cleaning service is also active where I live (Birmingham). Accordingly, the “Birmingham page” of my website should contain a list of the services offered, and each of these pages should be linked to the associated service pages. The service pages should also contain information about the associated locations.
In this way, we clearly show the availability of a service at a specific location. A human can draw some conclusions that a machine cannot, so we need to lay out a breadcrumb trail so that the machine can connect the dots. We want to make it as easy as possible for her to see the connection between location and performance. We want to spell it out to your potential customers as well. Don’t give away a sale because your audience got confused! There is so much you can do with your Location Pages, and in most cases the competition is doing just the bare minimum. Create a really useful resource for your prospects. That’s half the battle.
Local SEO for WordPress
We’ve already done the basics and removed some problem areas that can negatively impact visibility. Now is the time to do specific local SEO tweaks. Fortunately, Yoast offers a local SEO plug-in that extends the WordPress standard SEO plug-in and allows us to incorporate the latest local SEO findings – without any specific specialist knowledge. It’s a premium plug-in, but it’s money well spent for anyone who doesn’t want to lose time (and their wits) just because of schema markup.
The plug-in offers five major enhancements:
- Address output in Schema.org format
- Opening times in Schema.org format
- Google Maps with route planner
- Dealer search (ideal for customers)
- Support for chain stores
The plug-in also offers KML (Keyhole Markup Language) sitemap support. In our experience, there are few benefits to this, and it is not included in Search Console. But it can’t do any harm. After all, it offers some future security.
What’s worth mentioning about this plug-in is that it won’t catapult you into local SEO nirvana, and almost anything can be created manually. Nevertheless, it simplifies the integration of the Schema.org elements and forces the structuring of the location pages. I’m also a big fan of the store location finder.
Our general advice is to create the location pages with the tool and make sure they link to your service pages. It’s both quick and easy, and it guarantees really useful location pages.
WordPress websites for local businesses
Local business websites rarely have much link popularity or authority. Sure, there are some links and some authority, but solid on-page SEO measures, detailed location and service details, and clean, consistent mentions can often produce great results. But everything can fall apart when you are plagued with annoying technical problems. And that happens all too often with cheap WordPress websites that are built on a sometimes shaky theme. By following these instructions and maintaining thin content, mentions and ratings, you have already achieved 90% without any link building measures. When you get to this point, you can build a link profile by recreating relationships with suppliers and other real-world partners.
