4 Unsung Tactics to Boost Your WordPress Site’s SEO

WordPress users often find SEO tricky. With a sea of content available on WordPress SEO, it’s easy to lose track of the most effective ways to optimize websites. But there’s always a scope for improving your WP site’s performance.

Here are four lesser-known strategies for WordPress SEO.

1. Optimizing for People Also Ask (PAA) section

WordPress sites can benefit from several features like image carousels, shopping results and featured snippets. Since its inception, the ‘People Also Ask’ section has paved the way to rank for one million keywords in American desktop results.

Take a look at the position of PAA boxes in US search results:

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Today, ecommerce and affiliate sites built on WordPress are making good use of PAA boxes.

Check out this PAA box that appeared when I searched for ‘WooCommerce’.

Let’s look at the ways to optimize your WordPress site for PAA boxes.

Optimize content for PAA questions

The first step to ranking for PAA snippets is to accumulate a list of questions that people are already asking. Curating content around these topics on WordPress blogs helps get to answer specific queries and target the keywords related to your niche.

Free tools like AlsoAsked and AnswerThePublic help search niche-specific questions and produce relevant content.

Take a look at the list of questions arising from a simple search query like ‘WordPress SEO’ at AnswerThePublic.

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Add Q&A schema

WordPress users can install a free plugin called FAQ schema to add schema markup on their websites. This helps in ranking for PAA questions and adds value to the blog audience.

2. Focusing on image search optimization

We all know the significance of adding images and optimizing them to boost site speed and rankings.

However, using too many or large images can impact WordPress site speed. As a result, you must focus on optimizing imagery to fetch better SEO results.

Here are a few tips for optimizing images on your WP site.

Choose the right file name and format

The file name is an essential aspect of image SEO. Include the target keyword in your image file name for better search engine visibility.

Furthermore, images don’t have a standard format. It depends on the image type and how you’re using it on your WordPress site. Follow these recommendations to display graphics in their best form.

1. Choose JPEG for illustrations or large photos
2. Use PNG to preserve the background transparency in your image
3. Use WebP to fetch high-quality results with smaller file sizes
4. Choose SVG for icons and logos

Reduce the file size

The next step in image SEO is to scale images. Compress them to the smallest possible file size.                  

Alternatively, export images and experiment with their quality percentage. However, with the popularity of retina displays, I recommend using high-quality images based on the number of pixels like Adobe.

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Focus on structured data for your website for better search rankings.

Check out what happens when I search for the term ‘Yoast SEO Premium’. It fetches results from Google images for a structured data setup.

3. Boosting accessibility

In this age when ADA (American with Disabilities Act) compliance lawsuits are prevalent, it’s critical to create accessible websites. Accessible WordPress sites don’t just benefit site visitors with deficiencies but also aid readers with screen fatigue or tired eyes. WordPress is making advancements with tons of plugins that make websites more accessible.

Almost 10% of the global population live with a disability. Accessible websites can offer a wider audience reach, avoid ADA lawsuits, and boost Google rankings.

Let’s look at the ways how accessibility can improve WordPress SEO.

Improved site and page structure

A site structure must accompany a systematic hierarchy of pages. Features like clear navigation, sitemaps and breadcrumbs improve a WordPress site’s UX.

An easy way to improve navigation on a WordPress site is to add breadcrumbs using a free Yoast plugin.

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For page structure, using relevant subheadings and a clickable table of contents helps enhance web accessibility just like this blog post on WPBeginner.

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Better visibility with alt texts

Visitors with visual disabilities find it difficult to see images. This is why the usage of title tags and alt descriptions becomes crucial.

Take a look at this example to know how alt texts are to be used.

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Enhanced readability

A site’s content readability is another aspect of accessibility that affects SEO. Articles on your WordPress site must offer engaging content along with clear typography. This allows easy indexing, benefiting readers and web crawlers alike.

Some good practices to improve your WP site’s readability include:

1. Use clear and descriptive title tags -Title tags offer the first impression to viewers. Focus on a single keyword and write a short description of the content offered in your article.                                   

Look at these title tag examples that are descriptive yet simple.

For online stores built on the WooCommerce platform, title tags are vital for the category and product pages. While category pages can be optimized to rank for broad terms, product pages can help target specific keywords.

This allows shoppers to find desirable products using category pages. If you own a store on WooCommerce, this WooCommerce SEO guide can offer more interesting hacks to boost your site’s rankings.

2. Write short sentences and paragraphs - Break down sentences to fit into small paragraphs. This will improve the readability of WordPress articles and the chances of the content appearing in featured snippets.

Take a look at this Google result for the search term, ‘What are no-follow links?’

The result that appears in the ‘people also ask’ section is from an article on the Backlinko blog. Look at the screenshot from the article.

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4. Content repurposing

Traffic on the internet moves rapidly. Viewers often land on a post without realizing its publish date. If the content is no longer accurate and missing recent statistics, the website’s ranking takes the hit.

When repurposing content, focus on addressing existing search queries and concerns of your audience. Here are a few benefits of repurposing content:

• It’s faster than creating new content
• It leverages evergreen content
• It caters to new audiences on search engines
• You get an opportunity to earn more backlinks

Every article plays a critical role in the overall marketing strategy of a WordPress website. Refreshing content with recent and relevant data makes it more valuable than before. Consider these methods to repurpose WP articles.

Turn old posts into infographics

Combine statistics and ideas from the content of a previous article to create an engaging infographic.

Look at this infographic created from an old blog post.

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Facilitate social media shares

Filter important takeaways or catchy phrases to generate appealing social posts.

Here’s an inspirational post on Pinterest generated from a previous blog post.

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Film a video for an old WordPress blog post

Create Facebook or YouTube videos from an old article. You’ll be surprised how the video content will be devoured by an entirely new audience.